In July of last year, the new Administrator of the EPA, Lisa P. Jackson tasked the enforcement branch of the EPA with “revamping the clean water enforcement program … to raise the bar of federal and state enforcement performance, to inform the public clearly and fully about serious Clean Water Act violations and actions to address them, and to use 21st Century technology to transform the collection, use, and availability of EPA data.”  The result was the Clean Water Act Action Plan.

The report contains alarming statistics.  According to the most recent state-reported assessment findings from 2004 (sic), only a small proportion of US water bodies have been monitored, which means that there is no water quality information for the “vast majority of the nation’s waters.“

                                          % Monitored           % Impaired

Rivers and streams (miles)           16%                     44%

Lake and reservoir (acres)            39%                     64%

Bay and estuarine (sq mi)            29%                     30%

Based on the limited amount of data that is available, a significant proportion of water bodies were found to be impaired, meaning they were not clean enough to support activities such as swimming or fishing.

But the EPA and the states are seeing even more dangerous impacts.  Drinking water is being impacted in many parts of the country due to contamination of surface waters from many of these same sources.  Since about 66 percent of the U.S. gets its drinking water from surface water sources, polluting rivers and streams means that the drinking water of the majority of the US population is potentially affected.

I blogged earlier about a New York Times article that said in the last three years more than 9,400 of the US’s 25,000 sewage systems dumped untreated or partly treated human waste, chemicals and other hazardous materials into rivers and lakes and elsewhere.

In Canada the Environment Minister has released a draft of proposed municipal wastewater systems effluent regulations, which are designed to set standards for the discharge from all 4,000 wastewater facilities in Canada. Fundamentally it will no longer be permitted to directly release raw sewage into waterways.