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Liquid Assets 2000: Americans Pay for Dirty Water
Although our lakes, rivers, estuaries, and wetlands
are much cleaner than they were in 1970, headlines like these are all
too common.
The cost of polluted water is significant. Americans
pay for dirty water every year:
- A 1993 outbreak of Cryptosporidium,
a disease-causing microbe, in Milwaukee's drinking water sickened more
than 400,000 people and killed more than 50.
- The toxic microbe Pfiesteria
piscicida has killed millions of fish in North Carolina since
1995 and tens of thousands of fish in Maryland in 1997. Losses to the
U.S. seafood and tourism industries from Pfiesteria are estimated at
$1 billion. Maryland alone suffered $43 million in canning and fishing
losses in a single year. North Carolina is now spending millions of
dollars for watershed restoration in an effort to control potential
outbreaks in the future.
- Harmful
algae blooms, which flourish in nutrient-rich waters, have devastated
the scallop industry on Long Island, killed millions of fish in Texas
coastal bays, and sickened many who have eaten contaminated shellfish
or visited stricken seashores.
- A 1995 study by the Santa
Monica Bay Restoration Project of 15,000 bathers at three Santa
Monica Bay beaches found that approximately 1 in every 25 beachgoers
who swam near a flowing storm drain contracted gastroentestinal illness
or cold- and flu-like symptoms.
- Mining in the western United States has contaminated stream reaches
in the headwaters of more than 40 percent of the watersheds in the West.
EPA is spending $30,000 per day to treat contaminated mine drainage
at the Summitville Mine in Colorado, which will cost an estimated $170
million to clean up. Remediation of the half-million abandoned mines
in 32 states may cost up to $35 billion or more.
Contamination from coal-fired power plants, motor vehicles, or other
air pollution can also cause signifcant water quality problems. Lakes
in the Midwest and the Northeast are contaminated by mercury from distant
utilities' combustion sources. Streams in Appalachia run red with dissolved
iron from acid mine drainage. Salmon populations in the Northwest are
being depleted by sediment runoff and dam impacts.
With clean water, an ounce of prevention is worth much more than a pound
of cure. Every day we must make choices to protect groundwater, control
polluted runoff, improve sewage treatment, and restore the nation's watersheds,
or the costs will continue to mount.
Total Number of Fish
Advisories in Effect in Each State in 1998
(change from 1997)
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