Poisoned Water, Contaminated History

...A new organization, the California Association of Producing Industries (CAPI), was set up to represent business interests in the water pollution debate...

...Congressmember Richard Nixon, then preparing his run for the U.S...

...Coal tar lingers still beneath gasworks closed when natural gas arrived in the twenties...

...The historical debate has foundered on the difficulty of judging whether reports in scientific journals diffused beyond circles of specialists...

...Waste could be discharged only after advance notification of the Water Board and issuance of requirements, in effect returning the state to a permit system...

...Invented Memory As public concern grew through the 1960s and 1970s, environmental protection increasingly became a national issue...

...POISONED WATER, CONTAMINATED HISTORY Dickey called for a repeal of the system of licensing by the health department, whose role was to be limited to emergency action in cases where people were proven to be sickened by polluted water...

...This conventional wisdom is convenient for nearly all concerned...

...As history is now told, the problem of soil and ground water polluted by toxic industrial wastes burst suddenly into the national consciousness in 1978 with the discovery of Love Canal...

...How did it come about that the dumping went on largely unchecked for decades...

...The control system breaks down unless, most of the time at least, the good faith of the people doing the work can be presumed...

...Environmental publicists rush to trumpet the latest horror stories, and journalists who cover them are disinclined to delve into the past...

...The 1949 Debate By the 1940s, ground-water pollution had gained more attention in southern California than almost anywhere else in the country...

...As early as 1924 the American Petroleum Institute had seized control of a federal investigation of seacoast oil pollution and successfully deflected blame away from refineries, leading to passage of narrow legislation that regulated discharge of bilge oil from ocean-going ships...

...Moreover, the Academy report fails to note that Middleton and Walton also describe the 1957 and 1960 reports of the same task force, in which no fewer than thirty-nine states describe ground-water contamination incidents...

...Wastes from a newly opened pesticide plant passed unaltered through sewage treatment...

...Government agencies do not question the good intentions of the lawmakers who created them...

...Although correction is needed, the history of industrial waste should not be rewritten by simply projecting the present into the past...

...Yet the grade is qualified by the statement that "in most cases, we really did not know what we were doing...

...Dickey introduced a series of bills whose fundamental premise was that waste disposal is a legitimate and beneficial use of water resources, to be encouraged in the interest of economic development...

...The Dickey proposals had earlier been changed to allow local governments to license waste discharges if they chose, a power already exercised to good effect in Los Angeles and Orange counties...

...By providing a snapshot of what well-informed policy makers knew in 1949, the Dickey Report and the debates that accompanied it show that information had spread far beyond the scientists...

...The only references cited in support of this account are four papers from the proceedings of a 1961 conference...

...By the late 1980s, ground-water cleanup had grown into a multibillion-dollar enterprise...

...While billions of dollars are spent on cleanup, the Dickey Act is largely forgotten, and when remembered it is described as a great step forward in environmental control...

...That the Porter-Cologne Act, which remains to this day the foundation of water pollution control in California, could be passed by unanimous vote of the legislature with the support of Governor Ronald Reagan is the true measure of the backward step taken twenty years earlier...

...It would have been easy to check the original 1952 source, a five-page article in a widely circulated technical journal...

...With the environmental behavior of corporations now a staple of political argument, it is a story worth recalling...

...It simply wasn't understood, the story goes, that chemicals would move downward to contaminate underground aquifers and spread outward with the flowing water...

...Within two weeks, public wells more than four miles downstream were polluted with foul-smelling toxic wastes that were detectable at concentrations as low as a few parts per billion...

...The cities, he claimed, favored the Dilworth bill's permit system only because it would grant them a license to continue polluting...

...But because the committee understandably focused on how to clean things up, it missed an opportunity to correct the historical record...

...As a first step, the legislature was convinced to appoint an investigative committee under the chairmanship of a pro-business Republican member of the Assembly, Randal 54 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 Dickey...

...Research into the origins of the problem was frequently funded by industry, often in direct support of litigation...

...By 1942, city water wells in Los Angeles were known to be polluted by chromium from aircraft manufacturing...

...The new Regional Water Boards were now authorized to impose requirements on the contents of waste water before it was released and became diluted in the environment...

...The idea that no one knew was supported by selective use of evidence, by plain misrepresentation, and by the circular argument that industry and government wouldn't have allowed such things to happen if they had understood what they were doing...

...Corporate innocence also makes life easier for government regulators, because pollution is usually investigated and cleaned up by the company that made the mess...

...Sites of long-forgotten smelters are still surrounded by lead dust...

...it is the outcome of a political conflict won by industry...

...But to scientists and environmentalists, the history was an unimportant preliminary to be passed over quickly before reaching the real question of how to clean things up...

...And claims that the vulnerability of ground water to contamination had not been understood were easy for disinterested observers to accept...

...Working through the Dickey Commission, the CAPI sought to shift the focus of attention away from industrial wastes and toward inadequacies in the treatment of household sewage...

...A reading of the original document leaves no doubt that the historical record has become seriously distorted...

...The director of the state health department adds that the plan would create "a backlog of water pollution over the State that will constitute a plague comparable to the air pollution in Los Angeles...

...Even in the 1940s, this tactic was not new...

...Other research (including that which led to this article) has grown out of lawsuits, giving an argumentative tone to the entire field...

...A simple answer to this troubling question is often stated and widely believed: No one knew...

...0 PPOSITION to Dickey's proposals was led by the California League of Cities, upset by provisions overturning local government controls on industrial waste, and by state and county health departments...

...Peter Skinner and Craig Cotten pioneered this research in The Road to Love Canal, and Anthony Travis's studies of Swiss dye manufacturing have extended our knowledge back into DISSENT / Summer 2000 n 53 POISONED WATER, CONTAMINATED HISTORY the nineteenth century...

...Laws passed between 1907 and 1917 required permits for disposal of wastes of any kind wherever the water percolated into underground drinking-water supplies...

...Board orders could be enforced without proof that an existing use of water would be affected...

...In response to these and other well-publicized cases, the state health department began to implement old but little-used pollution control statutes...

...inID TOXIC WASTE pollution really result from innocent mistakes...

...To be sure, concern about ground water was more acute in California than in most other places...

...With weaknesses in the existing statute— most notably the absence of any sanction short of criminal punishment—universally acknowledged, there was little disagreement that new legislation of some kind was needed...

...And fifty years later, industrial waste dumping has indeed left a plague of water pollution beneath the ground...

...The fact that many states did not report contamination is ascribed to "sparse population, lack of industry, heavy soil types, and absence of productive aquifers...

...Then in 1945, the spectacular "Montebello incident" attracted wide public attention...

...Permit-holders were required to install treatment plants designed and managed to the satisfaction of the state, and the penalties for illegal dumping ran up to one year in prison for each day the disposal continued...

...After the Dickey bills were pushed through the state assembly with little discussion, matters came to a head on June 7. As Governor Warren denounced Dickey's proposals at a press conference, health department director Wilton Halverson testified before a committee hearing that attracted such crowds it had to be moved to the Senate chamber...

...A competing bill, retaining licensing of waste discharges by the state health department while creating new enforcement mechanisms, was drafted by Governor Warren's administration and introduced by State Senator Nelson Dilworth...

...Discharged into a river, the effluent joined a flow that percolated into the ground...

...It instead emphasized two points that justified a permissive approach to industrial waste: (1)the economic importance of industry to California and (2) that direct threats to public health from water pollution almost always came from sewage rather than industrial waste...

...Twenty years later, the work of undoing the poisoning of lands and waters goes on at a cost of billions of dollars per year...

...These words were spoken not in the 1980s or 1990s, but on June 7, 1949, and the governor was Earl Warren, later chief justice of the United States...

...Industry can escape criticism, and sometimes liability, for the effects of its dumping...

...Halverson urged the Senate to retain state licensing powers, issuing a prescient warning that prevention was the key to controlling water pollution...

...And political conservatives could be found on both sides...

...And since the history is usually a mere prologue to more important matters, it was easy to repeat a conventional story without pausing to consider whether it was true...

...The amended bills passed quickly and were signed by Governor Warren a month later...

...Academic historians have been drawn by a focus on household garbage rather than industrial waste, and on federal rather than state regulation, to overlook the Dickey Act and much else that was known early on about ground-water pollution...

...Charges and countercharges flew for another week, until a compromise was brokered by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power...

...the claim that no one knew that industrial wastes could pollute ground water is simply untenable...

...So blatant a mistake could hardly have escaped detection by the careful scientists who wrote the Academy report if history had been their interest...

...Industry-sponsored studies affirm this conclusion, but a few independent-minded investigators have delved into the records and found otherwise...

...What this paper, written by Francis Middleton and Graham Walton of the U.S...

...The state's industries quickly mobilized against the threat of an end to cheap waste disposal...

...When events are seen in this light, everyone did what seemed right at the time and no one is really to blame...

...The next major California water pollution law, the Porter-Cologne Act of 1969, passed an implicit judgment on the Dickey Act by repealing its most controversial provisions...

...Even among environmentalists and scientists, this account enjoys wide acceptance...

...The poisoning was many years in the making...

...In a desert where rivers percolate into the earth rather than flowing to the sea, aquifers are easily endangered by discharge of industrial waste...

...Shortage of water, population growth, and rapid industrial development combined to make any threat to water resources a public concern...

...Different as past environmental battles may have been from today's, there is much to learn from them...

...And when the effects of industry's success in escaping stringent regulation became apparent, a sugar-coated version of environmental history emerged to help the polluters escape the financial consequences of their actions...

...At this point, circumstances favored the spread of a misleading story of how the problem had developed...

...Dickey struck back with an attack on his critics' motives, accusing local governments of causing 85 percent of the problem by inadequately treating sewage...

...A 1999 environmental report card for Southern California, for instance, gives the region an "F" for its past efforts to protect ground water...

...But the Dickey Report drew on knowledge that was not local...

...The California struggle against deregulation of waste disposal was led by progressives with a background in municipal reform...

...How widely, then, was the threat to ground water understood...

...Scientists, who rarely look up references more than a few years old, are prone 56 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 POISONED WATER, CONTAMINATED HISTORY to historical amnesia...

...The concept of waste disposal as a beneficial use of water was explicitly rejected...

...Dischargers of waste were required only to file reports describing their discharges with newly created Regional Water Pollution Control Boards...

...The boards, representing local economic interests and local governments, were authorized merely to specify what conditions had to be maintained in the water bodies that received these discharges...

...the board had the burden of proving in court that existing uses of the water would be curtailed as a direct result of a violation...

...A 1994 report from the National Academy of Sciences entitled Alternatives for Ground Water Cleanup is one of many examples that show how historical error can persist in these circumstances...

...BENJAMIN Ross and STEVEN AMTER are hydrogeologists with Disposal Safety Incorporated in Washington, D.C...

...Public Health Service, actually says about the 1952 report is that few states had detected ground-water contamination, not that few were aware of the possibility...

...Dumping would be restricted only after it was shown to interfere with existing uses of the water, such as drinking, irrigation, or recreation...

...Only in the late seventies were these insidious properties of toxic wastes suddenly "discovered...

...And the manufacture of synthetic organic chemicals, from its first flowering in the 1910s right up to the late 1970s, put a rich variety of hazardous chemicals into the ground...

...But enforcement of these requirements was made difficult...

...Today's ground-water pollution doesn't stem from ignorance or from the inevitable workings of technology...

...In a brief historical introduction, this book says flatly, Ground water [unlike streams] was long believed to be naturally protected by the layers between the earth's surface and the water table, which people believed would filter out contaminants...

...This was a transparent falsehood: the League of Cities had recently won state funding of sewage treatment over opposition that included Warren himself...

...A few weeks afterward, the Dickey Act, a diluted version of the deregulation plan that Warren had denounced, became law...

...In other words, state officials who had not observed ground-water contamination knew of the danger and thought it had been avoided only because their state lacked industry, lacked usable ground water, and so on...

...The report shows a widespread understanding that many industrial wastes are not broken down in the soil as sewage is, and that these materials are prone to migrate downward and pollute water supplies...

...Industry had an enormous financial interest in the question...

...For instance, the following account is attributed to one of the papers: Recognizing the increasing potential for chemical contamination of ground water, the American Water Works Association created a task force of scientists . . . to study the problem in the early 1950s...

...Senate, had links to water interests that opposed the Dickey Bill as well as to industries that supported it...

...DISSENT / Summer 2000 n 57...

...In 1946, the health department issued new regulations aimed at enforcing these long-ignored laws...

...As early as the 1920s, control of waste water from oil wells and refineries was a major political issue in the area, and sewage treatment works grew rapidly in number...

...Soon afterward, the passage of the Superfund law set in motion a massive cleanup...

...On this basis, a thorough deregulation of waste discharges was proposed...

...With the passage of hazardous-waste laws in 1976 and the creation of the Superfund in 1980, protection of ground water became a federal responsibility for the first time...

...they could not set limits on what was in the waste or require any specific kind of treatment...

...In the spring of 1949, after twenty-four days of public hearings, the Dickey Commission issued its findings...

...If pollution had been an intentional act, cleanup costs would not be covered by insurance, and polDISSENT / Summer 2000 n 55 POISONED WATER, CONTAMINATED HISTORY luters would be liable to civil suits by those they injured...

...Their strategy was to control the public debate over this complicated subject...

...A first encounter with the Dickey report is startling for any reader convinced by conventional accounts of environmental history...

...But these papers—key documents in the history of ground-water contamination— directly contradict what the Academy report says...

...Scientists, public health officials, and the public were already intensely concerned about toxic chemicals getting into ground water...

...But the commission turned away from these scientific findings...

...The problem of ground water contamination did not receive widespread public recognition until the 1970s...

...Lessons of Lost History After the full extent of ground-water pollution became evident in the 1980s, industry had strong financial incentives to express surprise...

...what today would be called environmental groups played little role...

...The task group's first report, issued in 1952, documented that very few states were aware of the potential for ground water contamination...

...Yet the debate over the Dickey Act remains unknown to history...

...With strong incentives to spread accounts favorable to industry, and little inclination to check them, a conventional wisdom arose from sparse and flimsy historical studies...

...They were joined by an alliance that included the Farm Bureau, water utilities, irrigation districts, and county governments...

...Legislative debates have real consequences...