FULL - American Water Resources Association

September 2001 • Volume 3 • Number 5

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[Cover Photo: Digital Vision “North American Scenics,” No. 030447]
ISSN 1522-3175
VOL. 3 • NO. 5
SEPTEMBER 2001

HISTORICAL ASPECTS OF WATER RESOURCES
Richard H. McCuen, Associate Editor
(rhmccuen@eng.umd.edu)
As students in technical subjects like engineering and biology, “soft”
subjects like history were a required part of our curricula. They provided
the breadth necessary for a complete education. But we know
that our education did not end with our graduation. However, the term
continuing education is rarely perceived to include the “soft” subjects.
It is primarily about technical knowledge. Should it be Technical journals
rarely include articles on the “soft” subjects. This issue of IMPACT
is intended to broaden our perspective on water resources and show
that technical knowledge gained in past centuries, and even past
millennia, now represents history just as our current expansion of
technical knowledge will someday be a part of history.
Introduction
2 Historical Aspects of Water Resources
Richard H. McCuen (rhmccuen@eng.umd.edu)
Feature Articles
3 A Pharaoh’s Plan for Water Management
Gregory B. Baecher (gbaecher@eng.umd.edu)
For more than three millennia, irrigation has been a necessity for
those along the Nile River. To improve annual productivity of irrigated
acreage, a king from the eighteenth century B.C. proposed storing
waters of the Nile. Even into the twentieth century A.D, the Pharaoh’s
idea was considered as an option for water management.
8 Assisting Nature: William Dibdin and Biological Wastewater
Treatment
P. Aarne Vesilind (vesilind@bucknell.edu)
In the history of water, the realization that microorganisms were a
benefit rather than a bane stands out as an important milestone.
William Dibdin, a nineteenth century, British, self-taught environmental
microbiologist, developed fundamental knowledge of biological
wastewater treatment. The knowledge enabled the River Thames to
be cleaned up and provided a basis for worldwide water quality
improvement.
14 Developments in Water Supply and Wastewater Management
in the United States During the Nineteenth Century
Steven J. Burian (sburian@engr.uark.edu)
By tracing the historical development of urban water management, it
becomes clear that technical innovations, scientific understanding,
and decisions made during the nineteenth century have had a lasting
influence in the United States. The core concept of water-carriage
waste removal remains the same. It would behoove present-day
engineers, scientist, planners, city administrators, and policy makers
to take note of the long lasting influence of urban water infrastructure
decisions. Choices made today will impact many generations to come.
19 Milestones in Water Resources Reclamation
Brit A. Storey (BSTOREY@do.usbr.gov)
Because of the scarcity of water in the largely arid American West,
reclamation was a necessity for growth to succeed. As the breadth
of demand for water resources increased, government expanded
knowledge about and services for water resources. Throughout the
twentieth century, the Bureau of Reclamation expanded its role to
meet the growing needs for water services.
26 History of the Clean Water Act
Charles A. Foster
Marty D. Matlock (mmatlock@uark.edu)
The Clean Water Act is less than 25 years old, yet it is said to have a
history because it has touched the lives and livelihoods of so many
Americans. In a sense, it has given a standing to navigable waters
and the aquatic life in these waters. It has become a living document
because knowledge gained from the experiences with the act has
shown the need for adjustments. With products of the Act like
TMDLs, we also know that the Act has a future and will produce
more history in the years to come.
Volume 3 • Number 5 • September 2001
Editorial Staff
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
N. EARL SPANGENBERG
(espangen@uwsp.edu)
University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point,
Stevens Point,Wisconsin
FAYE ANDERSON
(fayeanderson2@aol.com)
Washington, D.C.
ERICH P. DITSCHMAN
(Erich.Ditschman@ttmps.com)
Tetra Tech MPS
Lansing, Michigan
JEFFERSON G. EDGENS
(jedgens@ca.uky.edu)
University of Kentucky
Jackson, Kentucky
JOHN H. HERRING
(JHERRING@dos.state.ny.us)
NYS Department of State
Albany, New York
JONATHAN JONES
(jonjones@wrightwater.com)
Wright Water Engineers
Denver, Colorado
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
CLAY J. LANDRY
(landry@perc.org)
Political Economy Research Ctr.
Bozeman, Montana
RICHARD H. MCCUEN
(rhmccuen@eng.umd.edu)
University of Maryland
College Park, Maryland
LAUREL E. PHOENIX
(phoenixl@uwgb.edu)
University of Wisconsin
Green Bay, Wisconsin
CHARLES W. SLAUGHTER
(macwslaugh@icehouse.net)
University of Idaho
Boise, Idaho
ROBERT C. WARD
(rcw@lamar.colostate.edu)
CO Water Res. Research Inst.
Fort Collins, Colorado
▲ Employment Opportunities 2,18
▲ Heads Up! . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31
▲ President’s Message . . . . . . .31
▲ AWRA Business
31 AWRA Future Meetings
32 2001 Election Results
33 Member News
33 New Publication Available
34 Colorado State Section Scholarship Program
35 August 2001 JAWRA Papers
36 2002 Membership Application
37/38 AWRA Proceedings Available
▲ Future Issues of IMPACT . . . .34
▲ Water Resources Puzzler . . . .39
▲ Water Resources Continuing
Education Opportunities
40 Meetings, Workshops, Short Courses
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Managing Water Resources And Human Impacts In Our Dynamic World

INTRODUCTION: HISTORICAL ASPECTS OF WATER RESOURCES
Richard H. McCuen
In his Outline of History, H.G. Wells states: “Human history
becomes more and more a race between education
and catastrophe.” As each of the five papers in this issue
of IMPACT shows, Wells’ observation applies to the history
of water resources as well as to all of human history.
Education is partially a product of experience and includes
developing and acquiring knowledge. In each of
the five papers, which span the time from the pharaohs
to the present, societal problems that centered about
water required the development of new knowledge. The
lack of knowledge at the time enabled problems to develop,
and the race was between developing the knowledge
(i.e., Wells’ education) and the impending serious problem
(i.e., Wells’ catastrophe).
In Greg Baecher’s paper, the problem emerged in the
times of the Pharaohs when drought led to a scarcity of
food, which was complicated by the rising demand for
food because of an increase in population. The British
and Egyptian engineers of the nineteenth century faced
with the same problem three millennia later considered
using a solution recommended by a pharaoh. The lack of
knowledge of dam engineering prevented a solution from
being implemented until the mid-twentieth century.
In Aarne Vesilind’s paper, the problem began as one
of odor and aesthetics, but developed into a serious problem
of disease, notably cholera. The race to find a solution
required overcoming a lack of knowledge about the
emerging science of microbiology.
In Steven Burian’s paper, which parallels Aarne
Vesilind’s paper on the problem of wastewater management,
two races are discussed, one on water supply and
one on wastewater treatment. Both problems are associated
with the catastrophe of disease, but the search for
knowledge takes an interesting path during the nineteenth-century
U.S.
In Brit Storey’s paper, several races take place. Initially,
the problem is one of providing an adequate supply
of water for irrigation. But over time, problems related
to power, recreation, and the environment develop.
The fisheries problem is especially interesting as the race
is between the development of knowledge and the prevention
of a decline in fish populations.
In the paper by Charles Foster and Marty Matlock,
the races are between the development of knowledge and
policies that can overcome the catastrophes of environmental
damage due to polluted water. They show that
current water quality problems have many similarities
with the races in water resources between education and
catastrophe that have existed since the time of the
pharaohs.
By devoting an issue of IMPACT to the subject of the
historical aspects of water resources, I am suggesting
that the topics are important, interesting, and educational.
The races between developing knowledge and impending
catastrophe carry important lessons about discovery
and problem solving. But you must keep in mind that
Henry Ford, the automaker, would disagree with me.
After all, he concluded that, “History is more or less
bunk.” So as you read these five interesting papers, as
well as the five that will appear in the April 2002 issue of
IMPACT, you decide whether or not history is bunk. I believe
that you will agree that the races between H.G.
Wells’ education and catastrophe add a new dimension to
your perspective on water resources.
AUTHOR LINK
E-MAIL
Richard H. McCuen
Department of Civil Engineering
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742-3021
(301) 405-1949 / Fax: (301) 405-2585
rhmccuen@eng.umd.edu
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2 • Water Resources IMPACT September • 2001

A PHARAOH’S PLAN FOR WATER MANAGEMENT
Gregory B. Baecher
In June 1902, a year ahead of schedule, John Aird and
Company, London, completed the majestic, 2km long
masonry dam at Aswan (Figure 1). Queen Victoria, who
died in 1901, did not live to see the dedication, but the
dam was one more grand achievement of the colonial era
to which she lent her name.
Figure 1. Aswan Dam, 1902 (Addison, 1959).
Designed to a parsimonious esthetic by Sir Benjamin
Baker, the Aswan Dam was a marvel in an age of civil engineering
marvels. It changed for all time the regime of irrigation
in Egypt, which had already been irrigated for at
least 5000 years. Today, we think of the 1902 dam as a
stepping stone along an historical path that was to lead
inevitably to the High Dam in the 1960s, to surging population,
economic development, and modernity – a linear
path of dam development on the main course of the Nile.
But there had been alternatives in the late nineteenth
century, now faded from memory. One was a concept
originated by Pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom to divert
the Nile into the Libyan Hills of the western desert and
store it there below sea-level depressions.
THE PECULIAR HYDROLOGY OF THE NILE
The Nile is really two rivers, which differ sharply, giving
the stream north of Khartoum a character peculiar
among the great rivers of the world. This peculiar character
molded Egyptian civilization, and in so doing,
deeply influenced the cultural history of the world.
The White Nile rises in the equatorial lake district of
East Africa, fed by weather patterns blowing east across
the Congo basin. It descends into the vast Sudd swamp
of southern Sudan, and finally joins the Blue Nile at
Khartoum. The Sudd is the bottom of a great in-land sea
that existed before the Nile broke through mountains to
the northeast and escaped to the Mediterranean. The
Sudd buffers the flow of the river so that the White Nile
entering Khartoum has more or less constant flow, averaging
about 16 BCM a year.
The Blue Nile meets the White at Khartoum, having
dropped from elevation 1760m at Lake
Tana in Ethiopia, to 389m at Khartoum,
almost 1500m in a distance of
only 1500km. The Blue Nile is quixotic,
not the annual constant of the
White. For much of the year its flow is
small, but come June, monsoons off
the Indian Ocean drop 2m of rain on
the Ethiopian highlands. The river
rises, and 60 BCM of water cascade
down the mile deep channel of the
Blue Nile heading for a rendezvous in
Khartoum.
The result of this schizophrenic
origin is that the Nile entering Egypt at
Wadi Halfa has a hydrograph strongly
peaked in late summer (Figure 2).
About 80 percent of the flow originates
in Ethiopia, and essentially all of that
comes between July and October.
Since before the Dynastic Period,
Egyptian agriculture had been based
on this annual cycle of flooding. In the winter and spring,
the river was quiet; then, in summer the river would turn
from a chalky-white to a red-brown and would begin to
rise. When the inundation came, levees were opened to
flood the fields, sending water flowing from one basin to
another, saturating the land, flushing down salts, and
depositing a veneer of volcanic Ethiopian silt. This basin
irrigation supported one good crop
. . . it is still
possible that the
3000-year-old
engineering
idea of the
Pharaohs might
yet benefit
modern Egypt
a year.
Egyptian mythology held that
the annual inundation started
about June 21 (in the modern calendar),
on the Day of the Drop,
when Isis’s tears for Osiris fell into
the river at the first cataract. In a
good year, the river would rise 16
cubits (3.2m) and flood the river
plain. A larger flood meant bounty,
but a lower flood could mean
famine. An extended drought
starting about 2100 BCE, of which
there is geological evidence
throughout the mid-east, has been argued to have triggered
the first Intermediate Period of dynastic history
during which the political structure in Pharaonic Egypt
broke down (Said, 1993).
Volume 3 • Number 5 Water Resources IMPACT • 3

A Pharaoh’s Plan for Water Management . . . cont’d.
Figure 2. Annual Hydrograph of the Nile at Aswan (Hillel, 1994).
TIMELY WATER
Egypt in the nineteenth century enjoyed an improving
economy, entry into world markets, the planting of
cash crops like cotton and sugar, and a gradually increasing
population (Figure 3). As the population increased,
the country’s limited land and single planting
were becoming inadequate. Something had
to be done to increase cropped feddanage,
the product of land area under cultivation
by the number of crops per year. [The feddan
(4200m 2 ), about an acre and said to be
the area of land a pair of oxen canplough in
a day, is the traditional Egyptian unit of
land area, and is still in use today.] Increasing
cropped feddanage could be achieved either
by increasing the land area under production
– difficult because it required reclaiming
desert lands – or by planting multiple
crops. The latter could easily be
achieved if water were available other than
at the time of the flood. This winter irrigation
became known as “timely water.”
But, how to provide timely water The
average annual flow of the Nile is about 90
BCM. In the late 1800s it was inconceivable
that a main-stem reservoir could be created
of sufficient capacity to provide multi-year
storage, and any smaller reservoir would
quickly silt in. Thus, another scheme was
needed. Sir Colin Scott-Moncrieff, British
head of public works in Egypt, had such a
scheme. It involved temporarily storing the
falling tail of the annual hydrograph, the
water of late fall, and releasing it in winter
and spring to irrigate a second crop.
But to effect this scheme, some place
had to be found to store the water for
six months each year, and one idea
was to follow the lead of Pharonic engineers
of almost three millennia before.
ANCIENT LAKE MOERIS
(THE FAYUM)
As early as the XIIth Dynasty in the
Middle Kingdom, King Amenemhat III
(1842-1801 BCE) is said to have built
a channel and diverted waters from
the Nile into the western desert depression
of the Fayum. The Fayum lies
100km south of Cairo and 30km west
of the Nile in the Libyan Hills. It has
been an important agricultural district
since ancient times. Herodotus (about
450 BCE) talks about the Lake Moeris
that existed in the Fayum in dynastic
times. “The water in the lake is not derived
from local sources, for the earth in that part is excessively
dry and waterless, but it is brought in from the
Nile by a canal. It takes six months filling and six months
flowing back” (Herodotus and De Sélincourt, 1954:85].
Diodorus Siculus, about 20 BCE, says, “King Moeris dug
a lake which is amazingly useful and incredibly large. For
as the rising of the Nile is irregular, and the fertility of the
country depends on its uniformity, he dug the lake for
Figure 3. Trend of Population and Cropped Feddanage in Egypt
(Waterbury, 1978).
4 • Water Resources IMPACT September • 2001

A Pharaoh’s Plan for Water Management . . . cont’d.
the reception of the superfluous water, and he constructed
a canal from the river to the lake 80 furlongs in length
and 300 feet in breadth. Through this he admitted or lets
out the water as required” (Siculus and Murphy, 1990).
Thus, the concept of out-of-basin storage in the Nile was
hardly new to the Victorian age, and its history was well
known to British and Egyptian engineers of 1900 CE.
(The remains of Lake Moeris still exists today in the modern
L. Qarum.)
The fame of Lake Moeris apparently had also made
an impression on Mohammed Ali, the Viceroy of the first
half of the nineteenth century. He had his Chief Engineer,
the Frenchman Linant de Bellefonds, investigate the possibility
of undertaking a similar work for the irrigation of
the Delta (this was the same Pasha Linant who had earlier
convinced the Viceroy, for financial reasons, not to
quarry blocks from the Pyramids at Giza for use as building
stone in the new Delta Barrages). In these investigations,
Linant de Bellefonds (1873) identified not only the
Fayum but also Wadi Rayan, another grabben-like depression
in the Libyan Hills, as possible sites.
In 1896, then-Colonel Moncrieff approached William
Willcocks to find a suitable site for the storage of timely
water, appointing him to the newly created position of
Director-General of Reservoir Studies for that purpose.
Willcocks would spend the following three years, much of
it alone, roaming the desert and water courses of the Nile
seeking a suitable place to store water.
Egypt enjoys a bountiful climate – dry
year round, and agreeably cool in winter.
Willcocks took to traveling light. He slept
on the ground under a blanket and forsook
the advantages of a tent. He developed
an apocalyptic sense of mission,
which he carried with him for the rest of
his life, leading to considerable notoriety.
While in the desert he would subsist
principally on rice, apricots, and scotch
(Addison, 1959). This was a habit that
was not to play well later with the French
and Italian members of the international
consultants board empanelled to review
reservoir sites. Willcocks, an irascible
sort, was responsible for catering for the
board’s travels. Boulé, a prominent
French engineer on the board would harbor
bitter feelings about the food and
lack of both French mustard and wine,
complaining that Sir Benjamin Baker,
also a member of the board, would eat
whatever was put before him, while Torricelli,
an Italian board member, was content
merely with Chianti (Addison, 1959).
Willcocks, later Sir William, was a
child of the British Raj. Born in a tent in
India in 1852 and educated at Thomason
Civil Engineering College, Roorkee, he
took part in major irrigation projects
across the face of the subcontinent.
Along with many young engineers working
for the Raj in the waning days of the
nineteenth century, Willcocks was recruited by Scott-
Moncriff to work under the British authority in Cromer’s
Egypt. Willcocks came to Egypt in 1883, leaving India for
the first time, and traveling to Egypt where he would remain
for the rest of his life.
Wadi Rayan is smaller than the Fayum and much
less populated. It has about the same bottom elevation,
-41m. If filled to +29m – the adjacent flood height of the
Nile is +31m – a lake in Wadi Rayan would have a depth
of 70m and a surface area of 700km 2 (Figures 4 and 5).
Only the upper 4 to 5m could be used for active storage
(Figure 6), yielding a usable volume of 3 BCM out of a
total capacity of 20 BCM. The evaporative loss off a Wadi
Rayan reservoir would be 1.8 BCM a year. Thus, holding
surplus water in Wadi Rayan into winter might sacrifice
one-third of the active stored volume, a number not inconsistent
with losses from other Nile works, but a large
volume nonetheless. On the other hand, sediment accumulation
would not be a problem, unlike a conventional
reservoir on the river. The annual inundation deposits
about one millimeter of silt, or a meter per 1000 years.
Presuming five meters of active storage (i.e., about twice
the average height of the flood), even taken in the muddiest
part of the cycle, would generate at most a few meters
per 1000 years compared to a dead storage of some
65m. This is to be compared to the 500 years of sediment
storage planned for the High Dam, but being used at a
Figure 4. NASA Image of Wadi Rayan and the Fayum,
North to Bottom (NASA, 2001).
Volume 3 • Number 5 Water Resources IMPACT • 5

A Pharaoh’s Plan for Water Management . . . cont’d.
Figure 5. Map of Egypt Showing Faiyum, Wadi Ryan, and Aswan (Willcocks, 1904).
yet faster rate. The 1902 Aswan Dam adopted another
approach to sediment control. It allows the full discharge
of the river to flow through bottom sluices at the peak of
the flood, thus scouring the sediment.
WILLCOCKS’ “MODERN LAKE MOERIS”
(WADI RAYAN)
Willcocks was looking for a geological formation and
a topography with a storage capacity of at least 2 BCM,
topographically located to accept gravity flow from the
river at the end of the annual flood, and to provide gravity
flow back at low
river stage in winter.
After many months in
the desert and up
river, he settled on
three places: two
prospective dam sites
on the main Nile, and
the “great hole in the
ground called Wadi
Ryan.” By constructing
a canal from
the river valley west
into the depression,
surplus water during
the flood could be
drained into the
Wadi, held for a period of months, and then gravity fed
back to the river valley in time for winter cotton, creating
what Willcocks called, a Modern Lake Moeris.
The only construction challenges of importance were
excavating through the relatively soft limestone of the
western valley wall, and stabilizing slopes cut into the
partially consolidated salty marl. Herodotus and De
Sélincourt (1954) was told that Amenemhat’s canal from
the Bahr Yusuf into the Fayum had been excavated by
hydraulically transporting the spoil into the valley, and
Willcocks proposed doing the same, hydraulically mining
the salty marl using the “American system of excavating
Figure 6. Plan and Profile of Wadi Ryan Works (Willcocks and Craig, 1913).
6 • Water Resources IMPACT September • 2001

A Pharaoh’s Plan for Water Management . . . cont’d.
by the aid of water issuing from nozzles” (Willcocks,
1903), following the California style. He estimated the
cost of the project at £2,600,000 in 1900.
EPILOG
The Wadi Rayan Reservoir was never built. The great
weakness of the plan by itself – that is, without a mainstream
dam like the 1902 structure at Aswan – was that
the reservoir could provide ample water downstream in
April and May, but less in June, and little in July. There
simply would be insufficient head difference between the
reservoir and the river as the stored water started to recede.
A reservoir like that ultimately built at Aswan,
being high above normal river level, could provide flow
from May through July, either slowly, or in a rush. Even
though the original 1902 dam would provide but a third
of the storage of Wadi Rayan, it was the ultimate choice.
Ultimately, Willcocks’s recommendation, and the
scheme recommended by an international consulting
board was to build a mainstream dam at the first
cataract at Aswan. This dam would not store water from
year to year, but rather would allow the full discharge of
the silt-laden annual flood to pass through a series of
140 under sluices, each 2m wide and 7m high, and then
capture the receding tail of the hydrograph to fill the
reservoir with clearer water by early December.
After the 1902 dam at Aswan, Willcocks (1904) continued
to believe in the usefulness of a Wadi Rayan reservoir.
Indeed, he believed that the Aswan Dam and the
Wadi Rayan reservoir would complement each other. The
Aswan Dam went on to be heightened two times. This
had significant impact on antiquities in the expanding
reservoir. Contemporary photographs of the Kiosk at
Philæ, half flooded during the inundation, became common
currency in debates of the first quarter of the twentieth
century over adverse consequences of dams. We forget
today how long the environmental and social impact
controversy over dams has raged.
In the 1940s and 50s, as the need for additional irrigation
again became pressing, sites throughout the Nile
basin, from Lake Victoria in the south to Wadi Rayan in
the north were again studied. Now the goal was not seasonal
but over-year storage, envisioned in the Century
Storage concept of Hurst and others (Hurst et al., 1929-
1959).
In 1962, with the completion of the High Dam upstream
of the 1902 dam, the issue of intermediate storage
at Wadi Rayan again came up, although the vast capacity
of Lake Nasser obviated the need for either additional
flood control or timely water. On the other hand,
electricity from the High Dam could drive pumps at Wadi
Rayan and thus increase active storage from 3 to 50 BCM
or more, which is a significant fraction of the annual discharge
of the Nile. Also, without downstream reregulation,
optimizing water supply and power generation at
the High Dam demands tradeoffs. Thus, a Wadi Rayan
reservoir might yet prove useful, and it is still possible
that a 3000-year-old engineering idea of the Pharaohs
might yet benefit modern Egypt.
LITERATURE CITED
Addison, H., 1959. Sun and Shadow at Aswan: A Commentary
on Dams and Reservoirs on the Nile at Aswan, Yesterday,
Today, and Perhaps Tomorrow. Chapman and Hall, London,
United Kingdom.
Herodotus and A. De Sélincourt, 1954. Herodotus: The
Histories. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Baltimore,
Maryland.
Hillel, D., 1994. Rivers of Eden: The Struggle for Water and the
Quest for Peace in the Middle East. Oxford University Press,
New York, New York.
Hurst, H. E. et al., 1929-1959. The Nile Basin (in 12 volumes).
General Organization for Govt. Printing Offices, Cairo, Egypt.
Linant de Bellefonds, L., 1873. Memoires sur les travaux publics
en Egypte. Paris, France.
NASA, 2001. L. Qarum, Nile River Valley, Egypt Nasa Photo ID:
Sts058-95-083. JSC Digital Image Collection Earth Observation
Images.
Said, R., 1993. The River Nile: Geology, Hydrology, and Utilization.
Pergamon Press, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Siculus, Diodorus and E. Murphy, 1990. The Antiquities of
Egypt: A Translation With Notes of Book I of the Library of
History of Diodorus Siculus. Transaction Publishers, New
Brunswick, New Jersey.
Waterbury, J., 1978. Egypt: Burdens of the Past, Options for the
Future. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana.
Willcocks, W., 1903. The Nile Reservoir Dam at Assuân and
After. E. and F.N. Spon Ltd., London, United Kingdom.
Willcocks, W., 1904. The Nile in 1904. E. and F.N. Spon Ltd.,
London, United Kingdom; New York, New York.
Willcocks, W. and J.I. Craig, 1913. Egyptian Irrigation. E. and
F.N. Spon Ltd, London, United Kingdom.
AUTHOR LINK
E-MAIL
Gregory B. Baecher
Professor and Chairman
Department of Civil and Environmental
Engineering
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
(301) 405-1972 / Fax: (301) 405-2585
gbaecher@eng.umd.edu
Gregory B. Baecher is Professor and Chairman of the
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at
the University of Maryland. He holds a BSCE from Berkeley
and Ph.D. from MIT. Dr. Baecher served on the MIT
faculty from 1975-1989, and then as CEO of ConSolve
Incorporated. He joined the University of Maryland in
1995.
❖ ❖ ❖
FEEDBACK! . . . Let us know what you think. We
want to encourage dialogue. Write or e-mail your comments
to the Associate Editor of this issue or to me.
We appreciate everyone who has sent their comments
to us so far and ask that you continue to do so. We
would like to get everyone involved in some “conversation”
on various topics.
Earl Spangenberg, Editor-In-Chief
(espangen@uwsp.edu)
Volume 3 • Number 5 Water Resources IMPACT • 7

ASSISTING NATURE: WILLIAM DIBDIN AND
BIOLOGICAL WASTEWATER TREATMENT
P. Aarne Vesilind
In H. G. Wells’ classic story The War of the Worlds, written
in 1898 (Wells, 1898), we humans are about to become
domesticated farm animals to feed the Martians,
new masters of the earth. In a wonderful exchange of
views by two humans hiding out in the sewers, the debate
ensues on whether it would not be too bad to be
taken care of like a farm animal and periodically harvested,
with our hero holding out for human dignity. Before
they both become hamburger meat for the Martians,
however, the world is saved by an unlikely ally. The Martians
had not counted on the presence of microorganisms,
and lacking immunity, succumb to the attack by
pathogenic microorganisms.
At the time of the publication of The War of the
Worlds, the “germ theory” was still being debated. The
microbes that attacked the Martians were not benign,
but were deadly to life, in this case Martian life.
Most people did not understand how microorganisms
could also be beneficial. Of course,
beer had been made for many centuries, but the
beer-making process was thought to be a chemical
reaction. Similarly, the pollution of rivers
was thought of as a chemical problem, and
therefore all treatment systems relied on chemical
principles. The recognition that minute
creatures actually were doing the work of
cleansing our aquatic environment was slow in
coming and even slower in being applied to
wastewater treatment. How this paradigm shift
occurred is a fascinating story that changed forever
the nature of environmental engineering.
EARLY SANITARY CONDITIONS
IN EUROPEAN CITIES
European cities during the nineteenth century were
not genteel places to live, although one would never know
that by reading the novels of that time. Nobody in Jane
Austen’s stories, for example, appeared to have a need of
toilets. The fact was that human waste was a prodigious
problem, especially in large cities such as London.
The River Thames during the nineteenth century was
the single recipient of all of London’s wastewater. There
were no wastewater treatment plants and human waste
was collected in cesspools and transported by carts to
farms. Often these cesspools leaked or were surreptitiously
connected to storm sewers that emptied directly
into the river. The stench from the Thames was so bad
that the House of Commons, meeting in the Parliament
building next to the river, had to stuff rags soaked with
chloride of lime [calcium hypochlorite, Ca(ClO) 2·4H 2 O]
into the cracks in the shutters to try to keep out the
awful smell. Gentlemen used to carry pomegranates
Most of the
smaller streams
feeding the
River Thames
were lined with
outdoor privies
overhanging
into the river
stuffed with cloves to help mask the odors. Waste from
trades people was simply thrown in the streets where it
would be washed into the sewers by rain. The Shambles
was the street where the butchers sold their wares and
where they left their wastes to rot. Eventually the street
name became a common word for any big mess. On one
pretty Sunday, a private party was socializing on a barge
on the Thames when the barge overturned and dumped
everyone into the water. Nobody drowned but almost
everyone came down with cholera as a result of swimming
in the contaminated water. Most of the smaller
streams feeding the River Thames were lined with outdoor
privies overhanging into the river (Turnbull, 1909;
Metcalf and Harrison, 1935; Hibbert, 1969; Clout, 1991).
Edwin Chadwick launched in the 1840s the “great
sanitary awakening,” arguing that filth was detrimental
and that a healthy populace would be of higher
value to England than a sick one. He had
many schemes for cleaning up the city, one of
which was to construct small-diameter sanitary
sewers to carry away wastewater, a suggestion
that did not endear himself to the engineers.
A damaging confrontation between
Chadwick, a lawyer, and the engineers ensued,
with the engineers insisting that their hydraulic
calculations were correct and that
Chadwick’s sewers would be plugged up, collapse,
or otherwise be inadequate. The engineers
wanted to build large-diameter eggshaped
brick sewers that allowed human access.
These were, how-ever, three times as expensive
as Chadwick’s vitrified clay conduits.
Eventually, the answer was a compromise with pipes
used for the collecting sewers and brick channels for the
interceptors (Finer, 1952).
FIRST ATTEMPTS AT CLEANING
UP THE RIVER THAMES
Before 1890, chemical precipitation and land farming
was the standard method of wastewater treatment in
England. The most popular option was to first allow the
waste to go anaerobic in what we today call septic tanks.
Such putrefaction was thought to be a purely chemical
process since the physical nature of the waste obviously
changed. The effluent from the septic tanks was then
chemically precipitated and the sludge applied to farmland
or transported by special sludge ships to the ocean.
The partially treated effluent was discharged to streams
where it usually created severe odor problems.
At this time, London’s services were provided by the
London Metropolitan Board of Works which, among its
other responsibilities, was charged with cleaning up the
River Thames. The chief engineer for this organization
8 • Water Resources IMPACT September • 2001

Assisting Nature: William Dibdin and Biological Wastewater Treatment . . . cont’d.
was Joseph Bazalgette who approached the Thames
water quality problem from a perfectly rational engineering
perspective. If the problem was bad odor in London,
why not build long interceptor sewers along both banks
of the Thames and discharge the wastewater far downstream
Although expensive, this solution was adopted
and the city spent large sums of money to export the
wastewater to Barking Creek on the north bank and
Crossness Point on the south bank. The idea was to collect
the sewage at these central locations and then treat
it to produce a useful product such as fertilizer. None of
the recycling schemes came to fruition and the wastewater
was discharged untreated from the outfalls into the
lower Thames. Since at the location of the outfalls the
Thames is a tidal estuary, the initial plan was to discharge
wastewater only during the outgoing tide. Unfortunately,
the wastewater had to be discharged continuously
and the incoming tide carried the evil-smelling stuff
back up to the city and put great pressure on the politicians
to do something.
The discharge of the untreated London wastewater
into the lower Thames precipitated what became known
as “The Great Mud Fight” in which the shipping industry
charged the Board with creating large mud banks that interfered
with navigation. After much bluster and many
witnesses, the conclusion by a board of arbitrators was
that the mud banks could have been caused by dredging
operations and that the sewage discharged was not totally
responsible (Hamlin, 1988).
But the Board was placed under severe pressure to
do something to solve the problem. Several solutions
were considered. One was to simply continue the interceptor
sewers and extend them all the way to the North
Sea, but this proved to be prohibitively expensive. Another
solution was to spray the wastewater on land, but
the amount of land to be purchased far outstripped the
budget of the Board. The problem required a new approach,
one which was to come from the emerging science
of microbiology.
BENEFICIAL MICROBIOLOGY
The development of beneficial microbiology was slow
and irregular. Anton van Leeuwenhoek first discovered
the microbial world in 1695 with his simple microscope,
but for the next 150 years microorganisms were only a
scientific curiosity. The idea that these small organisms
could cause disease was considered unlikely.
In the 1850s many theories of why epidemics occurred
were advanced. Edwin Chadwick believed that
odor was to blame. He put it succinctly: “All smells, if it
be intense, initiate acute disease” (Eyler, 1979). William
Farr, one of the greatest public health physicians, stoutly
believed that cholera was contracted through the
atmosphere, with something he called “cholerine,” a
zymotic material of cholera. He was an excellent epidemiologist
and was one of the first to bring statistics to the
assistance of disease prevention. For example, he plotted
the incidence of cholera in London as a function of elevation
above the River Thames (Figure 1) and concluded
that cholera must be contracted though the air, the
miasma evaporating from the river and carrying these
“cholerine” particles with it.
Figure 1. Farr’s Observation That Cholera Must
Be Related to the Miasma Emanating From
the River Thames (Langmuir, 1961).
Another explanation for cholera was advanced by
John Snow who suggested that cholera was a waterborne
disease. Snow believed that contaminated water
must contain this zymotic materials that found their way
from the intestines of the diseased persons to the digestive
tracts of others (Snow, 1936). Chadwick did not buy
this idea at all. Bad water was only a “predisposing” of
the cause of cholera: it was the smell that caused it
(Eyler, 1979).
The 1853 cholera outbreak in London provided a
classical opportunity to test Snow’s theories. Most of the
water companies serving water to the city drew their
water from the Thames at the most convenient location.
The Metropolitan Water Act of 1852 required the companies
to change their source to upstream locations, away
from the major contamination. By 1853 only one water
company had done so, but with this change came an immediate
and dramatic reduction in the incidence of
cholera in that section of London served by the water
company.
When the disease returned to London in 1854, one of
the water companies was still providing contaminated
water. John Snow plotted the incidence of cholera on a
city map, thus creating the first spot map in public
health history, and showed that the incidence was clearly
related to the contaminated water. The pump handle
was removed and the epidemic subsided.
The idea that contamination can cause disease was
also emerging in the medical field where infection was a
horror in all hospitals. In the maternity ward in Vienna,
for example, one in ten women contracted “birthing fever”
and died. Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician
working in the maternity ward, demonstrated in 1854
Volume 3 • Number 5 Water Resources IMPACT • 9

Assisting Nature: William Dibdin and Biological Wastewater Treatment . . . cont’d.
that washing hands in chloride of lime between examining
patients greatly reduced infections. He did not, however,
understand that the infections were caused by
microorganisms, but rather blamed them on the transmission
of “organic particles” from one patient to the
next. Meanwhile, Joseph Lister in England showed that
infections could be greatly reduced by applying carbolic
acid to a wound. Lister had a better idea of what he was
actually doing because he was aware of the work on microorganisms
conducted by Lois Pasteur in France. Lister
accepted the “germ theory” and concluded that
microorganisms were dangerous and deadly and that
killing microorganisms (disinfecting) was a good thing.
The idea that microorganisms could also be beneficial
was slow in evolving although some microbiologists
were beginning to understand the function of these organism
in the natural environment. For example, the
work of Theophile Schloesing and Achille Müntz in 1877
was highly significant in that it showed that bacteria can
produce nitrification (Schloesing and Müntz, 1877). During
“The Great Mud Fight” one of the witnesses had been
Henry Clifton Sorby, a wealthy amateur scientist who
had taken his yacht into the harbor to study mud samples
under a microscope. He discovered that some mud
samples contained large numbers of fecal particles coming
from the sewage but that the number of these particles
was inversely proportional to the fecal particles from
crustaceans. He concluded that the crustacea were feeding
on the sludge solids and disposing of the sewage
being discharge into the Thames. He had stumbled on an
explanation as to why the river was able to cleanse itself.
As he later stated: “A very large portion of the detritus of
feces thus manifestly lost in the river is not lost by decomposition,
but utilised by countless thousands of living
creatures” (Dibdin, 1903).
At the same time August Dupré was conducting experiments
with aerobic microorganisms. Dupré, a German
émigré and a public health chemist, understood the
importance of Sorby’s findings and during “The Great
Mud Fight” argued that aerobic organisms were responsible
for the cleansing of the river (and therefore the
sewage could not be the source of the mud banks). In
1885 he suggested that odors could be reduced if the
health of the aerobic microorganism could be maintained.
His idea of the need for oxygen became a crucial
argument in convincing the Metropolitan Board to initiate
wastewater treatment at the outfalls.
THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF WILLIAM DIBDIN
The chief chemist working for the Board at that time
was William Joseph Dibdin
(Figure 2). Dibdin, a selfeducated
son of a portrait
painter, began work with
the Board in 1877, rising to
chief chemist in 1882, but
with the responsibilities of
the chief engineer. In seeking
a solution to the wastewater
disposal problem at
the Barking Creek and
Crossness outfalls, he initiated
a series of experiments
using various flocculating
chemicals such as alum,
Figure 2.
lime, and ferric chloride
William Joseph Dibdin
to precipitate the solids before
discharging to the river.
(1850-1925).
This was not new, of course,
but Dibdin discovered that using only a little alum and
10 • Water Resources IMPACT September • 2001

Assisting Nature: William Dibdin and Biological Wastewater Treatment . . . cont’d.
lime was just as effective as using a lot, a conclusion that
appealed to the stingy Metropolitan Board.
Dibdin recognized that the precipitation process did
not remove the demand for oxygen and he had apparently
been convinced by Dupré that it was necessary to
maintain positive oxygen levels in the water in order to
prevent odors. Dibdin decided to add permanganate of
soda (sodium permanganate) to the water in order to replenish
the oxygen levels. Because Dibdin’s recommendations
were considerably less expensive than the alternatives,
the Board went along with his scheme.
Dibdin’s plan was adopted in 1885 and construction
of the sewage treatment works at the Barking outfall
commenced. Given the level of misunderstanding at the
time, a great many people doubted that Dibdin’s scheme
would work, and he had to continually defend his project.
He again argued that the addition of the permanganate of
soda was necessary in order to keep the odor down, and
he began to explain this by suggesting that it was necessary
to keep the aerobic microorganisms healthy.
Christopher Hamlin, a historian who has written widely
on Victorian sanitation, believes that this was a rationalization
on Dibdin’s part and that he did not yet have an
insight into biological treatment (Hamlin, 1988). The
more Dibdin was challenged by his detractors, however,
the more he apparently became an advocate of beneficial
aerobic microbiological activity in the water since this
was his one truly unique contribution that could not be
refuted.
At about this time, the Lawrence Experiment Station
in Lawrence, Massachusetts, was completing a fascinating
series of experiments in which they tested various
soils for use in intermittent filters. In their experiments,
they used a number of Massachusetts soils, and apparently
incidentally used gravel in one of the intermittent
filters. To their surprise, this filter worked the best of all.
They concluded that the gravel became coated with
microorganisms and that this microbial slime was what
produced the high degree of treatment. Dibdin was very
much impressed with these experiments and recognized
the importance of the presence of microorganisms on the
gravel. Years later, he would insist that his insights into
biological treatment occurred before the Lawrence Experiment
Station results were known, but this is problematical.
Although the Lawrence Experiment Station report
was not published until 1890 (MSBH, 1890), research information
was readily shared between the American researchers
and their British counterparts. The preliminary
results from the Lawrence Experiment Station no
doubt gave Dibdin additional ammunition to fight off his
detractors.
When Dibdin started to conduct his experiments at
the outfall, Dupré convinced him to study the aeration of
wastewater and tried to convert him to the understanding
of microbial action. In one letter to him, Dupré wrote:
“The destruction of organic matter discharged into the
river in the sewage is, practically wholly accomplished by
minute organisms. These organisms, however, can only
do their work in the presence of oxygen, and the more of
that you supply the more rapid the destruction” (GLCRO
MBW, 1885). Later, writing in an 1888 address to the
Royal Society of Arts, Dupré suggested that “our treatment
should be such as to avoid the killing of these organisms
or even hampering them in their actions, but
rather to do everything to favor them in their beneficial
work” Dupré, 1888).
But Dibdin and Duprè were not totally successful in
convincing the Board that their ideas were right. Many
scientists argued that odor control could only be
achieved by killing the microorganism, still believing in
the evils of the microbial world. These scientists managed
in 1887 to wrest control of the treatment works from Dibdin
and initiated a summer deodorization control suggested
by a college professor that involved antiseptic
treatment with sulfuric acid and chloride of lime. This
process failed and Dibdin was vindicated (Hamlin, 1988).
After regaining control of the treatment works, Dibdin
enlarged his research program on aerobic biological
treatment. His first tests were on filters with four different
pebble-sized media, much like the filters used in the
Lawrence Experiment Station tests. The filters were filled
for eight hours each day and then allowed to rest. Although
he was beginning to understand the need for the
bacterial slime on the pebbles, he still worried about the
large interstitial spaces, not being able to shake the old
notion that the filter acted mechanically to sieve out the
particles (Hamlin, 1988). His test results showed unequivocally,
however, that the nature of the media was
unimportant and that excellent results could be obtained
with such intermittent filters.
In 1894, he was authorized, based on his experimental
results, to construct a one-acre filter using coke
breeze. Dibdin was now convinced that the bacteria that
grew on the pebbles was the reason the filter worked and
began to think of such filters as super-organisms that
had to be fed and given sufficient oxygen. Not everyone
was convinced, of course. An engineer working with
Dibdin decided on his own to test the filter’s hydraulic
capacity and increased the loading on the filter, causing
it to clog. Dibdin understood what had happened from a
biological sense. He took the filter out of operation and
rested it for several months, slowly increasing the loading
to where the filter was again removing over 70 percent of
the oxygen demand. In so doing, he was apparently the
first to understand the concept of metabolic equilibrium,
a principle we all now take for granted.
In 1897, he resigned his position with the London
County Council and started his own consulting firm, continuing
to experiment with biological treatment. Thinking
like an engineer, he argued that if gravel beds are better
than sand, then bigger stones would be even better. With
this reasoning, he developed the slate bed contact filter in
which the biofilm grows on the surfaces of the slate
stacked horizontally in the tank (Stanbridge, 1976). The
first such systems were fill and draw using a dosing
siphon, followed by an intermittent sand filter with a dosing
mechanism (Dibdin, 1911). Years later, some of the
treatment plant operators figured out that if they took the
slate out of the contact bed and used the tank as a clarifier,
and if they used larger rocks in the intermittent filters,
the treatment could be continuous.
Volume 3 • Number 5 Water Resources IMPACT • 11

Assisting Nature: William Dibdin and Biological Wastewater Treatment . . . cont’d.
By 1900 Dibdin’s reputation had been made and
every treatment works in Great Britain and the United
States was constructing biological treatment processes.
The British press hailed biological treatment of wastewater
as a significant advance, but could not understand
why it took so long to discover such a simple thing (Hamlin,
1988).
Deoxygenation Constant
Type of Stream or River (k 2 , days -1 )
Small Backwaters 0.10 - 0.23
Lethargic Streams 0.23 - 0.35
Large Streams, Low Velocity 0.25 - 0.46
WILLIAM DIBDIN’S CONTRIBUTION
TO STREAM SANITATION
With the success of this treatment scheme for London,
it apparently dawned on Dibdin that the reason
rivers recover from pollutants is the presence of microorganisms.
The rivers, therefore, are like large organisms
themselves. To illustrate this idea, in 1889 he measured
the oxygen levels at various locations in the Thames
estuary (saturation = 100 percent = 2.0 cubic inches per
gallon) (Dibdin, 1911; Barker and Jackson, 1990):
Locality High Water Low Water
Teddington (above lock) 85.0 85.0
Kew 70.3 78.8
Hammersmith 55.7 67.6
Battersea 42.6 67.6
London Bridge 34.5 51.8
Greenwich 24.6 37.4
Blackwall 22.5 34.3
Woolwich 22.2 30.8
Barking Creek 24.2 30.8
Crossness 43.0 41.6
Erith 39.4 29.1
Greenhithe 38.4 25.1
Gravesend 50.7 39.5
The Mucking 83.6 72.0
The Nore 90.1 89.1
Figure 3. Dissolved Oxygen Sag Curve Based
on Data Reported by William Dibdin (1911).
Noting the recovery in oxygen levels, he concluded that
the microorganisms in the river were purifying the water.
Apparently Dibdin did not plot these data and did not
obtain a visual picture of the recovery. Figure 3 is a plot
of his data and shows what clearly is the first understanding
of the oxygen sag curve. The river is heavily polluted
as it travels though central London, and then slowly
begins to recover, only to be once again hit by the discharges
form the Barking Creek and Crossness outfalls.
In order to illustrate his ideas of the needs for oxygen
in the rivers, Dibdin plotted a reaeration curve, Figure 4,
which clearly shows a first order reaction (Finer, 1952).
We can plot these data on a semi-log plot and calculate
the reaeration constant, k 2 , as 0.29 day -1 . It is interesting
to compare this value to the deoxygenation constants
developed empirically by O’Connor and Dobbins (1956).
Some of their values are shown below:
Figure 4. Reaeration Curve as Measured
by William Dibdin (1911).
12 • Water Resources IMPACT September • 2001

Assisting Nature: William Dibdin and Biological Wastewater Treatment . . . cont’d.
It seems that Dibdin’s value of the reaeration constant for
the River Thames agrees remarkably well with these
empirical constants. More than 20 years later, Earle
Phelps used Dibdin’s work to develop his own ideas of
stream sanitation, culminating in the development of
the Streeter-Phelps oxygen sag curve equation (Phelps,
1944).
Dibdin eventually became a rabid environmental microbiologist.
He not only conducted oxygen measurements,
but he studied the fish life and microbial activity
in the muds to detect changes in river quality. The health
of the River Thames became a major objective for Dibdin,
a paradigm shift from those days when the only objective
had been to dispose of wastewater with the least nuisance.
CONCLUSION
In many ways, the application of biological principles
to engineering illustrates the nature of engineering.
Knowledge, developed by scientists such as Pasteur,
Schloesing and Müntz, Sorby, and Dupré was by itself of
little value. These scientists continued to argue among
themselves with little discernable progress in wastewater
treatment technology. It took a man like William Dibdin,
who did not have a formal engineering education but who
thought and acted like an engineer, to put this knowledge
to practical use. The recognition that waste treatment
should use naturally occurring microorganisms instead
of trying to kill them was a watershed moment in the development
of environmental engineering. Admittedly,
Dibdin was pushed into this understanding by having to
find ways to rationalize his treatment scheme, but he is
nevertheless recognized as the first to put these ideas to
work.
After the fight was over and biological treatment had
won, Dibdin was able to step back and be more philosophical.
He noted in 1903 that “... enormous forces [are]
at work in purifying our streams and rivers, ... effecting
the destruction of effete matters whenever they may be”
(Dibdin, 1911), and that previous wastewater treatment
systems had tried to reverse nature; that they had been
trying “to control Nature instead of assisting her.” He
suggested that this was because nobody had tried to understand
“the mystery of Nature’s method” (Finer, 1952).
By understanding and applying the principles of biological
treatment, Dibdin forever changed the face of environmental
engineering.
LITERATURE CITED
Barker, Felix and Peter Jackson, 1990. The History of London in
Maps. Barre and Jenkins, London, United Kingdom.
Clout, Hugh, 1991. The Times London History Atlas. Harper
Collins, London, United Kingdom.
Dibdin, William, 1903. The Purification of Sewage and Water
(Third Edition). The Sanitary Publishing Company, London,
United Kingdom.
Dibdin, William, 1911. The Rise and Progress of Aerobic
Methods of Sewage Disposal. London, United Kingdom.
Dupré, August, 1888. Address to the Section of Chemistry,
Meteorology, and Geology. Transactions of the Sanitary Institute
of Great Britain, No. 9, pg. 365.
Eyler, John M., 1979. Victorian Social Medicine: The Ideas and
Methods of William Farr. Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore,
Maryland.
Finer, S.E., 1952. The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick.
Barnes and Noble, London, United Kingdom.
GLCRO MBW 1218A, 1985. Report of the Metropolitan Board of
Works for 1884, No. 3, Dupré to Dibdin, July 27, 1885, as
quoted in Hamlin (1988).
Hamlin, Christopher, 1988. William Dibdin and the Idea of Biological
Sewage Treatment. Journal Society for the History of
Technology, pp. 189-219.
Hibbert, Christopher, 1969. London: The Biography of a City.
Wm. Morrow and Co., New York, New York.
Langmuir, Alexander D., 1961. Epidemiology of Airborne Infection.
Bacterial Review, Vol. 25, pg. 174.
MSBH (Massachusetts State Board of Health), 1890. Special Report:
Purification of Sewage and Water, 1890. Boston, Massachusetts.
Metcalf, Leonard and P. Eddy Harrison, 1935. American Sewerage
Practice. Vol. III. Disposal of Sewage. McGraw-Hill Publishing
Co., New York, New York.
O’Connor, Donald J. and W.E. Dobbins, 1956. The Mechanism
of Reaeration of Natural Streams. Journal of the Sanitary
Engineering Division, ASCE, Vol. 82, SA6.
Phelps, Earle, 1944. Stream Sanitation. John Wiley and Sons,
New York, New York.
Schloesing, T. and A. Müntz, 1877. Sur la nitrification par les
ferments organises. Comptes Rendus l’Academie des Sciences
84, pp. 303-303.
Snow, John, 1936. Cholera (a reprint of two papers by John
Snow, M.D., together with a Biographical Memoir by B.R.
Richardson, M.D., and an Introduction by Wade Hampton
Frost, M.D.). Oxford University Press, London, United Kingdom.
Stanbridge, H. H., 1976. The History of Sewage Treatment in
Britain. The Institute of Water Pollution Control, Maidstone,
Kent, England.
Turnbull, George, 1909. “Sewage” in London in the Nineteenth
Century. Ada and Charles Black, London, United Kingdom.
Wells, H. G., 1898. The War of the Worlds. William Heinemann,
London, United Kingdom.
AUTHOR LINK
E-MAIL
P. Aarne Vesilind
R.L. Rooke Professor of Engineering
Department of Civil and Environmental
Engineering
Bucknell University
Lewisburg, PA 17837
(570) 577-1112 / Fax: (570) 577-3415
vesilind@bucknell.edu)
P. Aarne Vesilind is the R.L. Rooke Professor of Engineering
at Bucknell University. He earned his Ph.D. from
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and
taught environmental engineering at Duke University,
where he also served as Chairman of Civil Engineering
for many years. He was awarded The Collingwood Prize
by the American Society of Civil Engineers. He is the author
of widely used textbooks on environmental engineering.
❖ ❖ ❖
Volume 3 • Number 5 Water Resources IMPACT • 13

DEVELOPMENTS IN WATER SUPPLY AND WASTEWATER MANAGEMENT
IN THE UNITED STATES DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Steven J. Burian
INTRODUCTION
The development of urban water infrastructure in the
United States during the nineteenth century exhibited an
interesting interrelationship between water supply and
wastewater management. During the colonial period until
the end of the eighteenth century, American cities had
relatively small populations that were sparsely distributed.
Urban water infrastructure needs were limited, and
municipal involvement in water services was rare. Shallow
wells, cisterns, and adjacent surface water bodies
were the primary water sources. The conveyance and distribution
of water from a source was either the responsibility
of the individual, provided as a service by private
enterprises, or for a very small fraction of the U.S. population
provided through municipally operated systems.
Municipal distribution systems were primarily constructed
for firefighting purposes, with residential water supply
being a secondary factor. Consequently, residential service
was often inconsistent.
Similar to urban water supply practices from colonial
times until the early nineteenth century the responsibility
for waste management was primarily with the individual.
Kitchen wastes, wash water, and other household
wastewaters were discarded into yards, gutters, streets,
or open sewers. Privies or dry-sewage systems were the
most common methods used to manage human excrement.
Vaults were constructed under privies to store accumulated
wastes or privy discharges were directed
into a nearby cesspool. Scavengers were
contracted to periodically empty privy vaults
and transport the wastes outside the city.
The urban water supply and wastewater
management practices in the late eighteenth
century were adequate for the population densities
of American cities at that time. But problems
developed as the population grew and densities
increased during the nineteenth century.
This paper briefly describes urban water supply
and distribution and urban wastewater management
developments in the United States during the
nineteenth century. In general, the developments were
not coordinated, but as the nineteenth century progressed
the two urban water systems gradually became
intertwined.
1800 TO 1850: MUNICIPAL
INVOLVEMENT INCREASES
Europeans visiting American cities during colonial
times often reported conditions to be relatively spacious,
orderly, and clean compared to European cities (Duffy,
1990:33; Melosi, 2000:18-19). This apparent “healthfulness”
of American cities was due more to the relatively
In 1844,
Boston
prohibited the
taking of baths
without a
doctor’s order
sparse population distribution than exemplary sanitation
practices. As the nineteenth century progressed, population
growth and the resulting degradation in sanitary
conditions spurred the need for municipal involvement in
city services, especially the supply of adequate quantities
of clean water and the proper disposal of wastes. During
the same time period, the societal view of the services
that a municipality should provide broadened.
Water Supply Developments
Four primary factors contributed to the need for municipal
involvement in providing a cleaner water supply
and an improved mode of distribution: (1) population
growth, (2) disease outbreaks, (3) degradation of local
water quality, and (4) fire protection. Depending on the
city each factor weighed differently in the decision, and
other factors contributed as well. The first factor, population
growth, influenced urban water infrastructure decisions
shortly after the Revolutionary War. New York grew
from a population of 12,000 after the British evacuation
in 1783 to more than 33,000 by 1790; and Boston experienced
nearly 60 percent growth in population from the
time of the Revolution until 1800 (Duffy, 1990:37). Existing
wells, cisterns, and local surface water sources were
unable to meet the potable water needs of the growing
population.
Disease outbreaks also stimulated the development
of urban water supplies during the beginning of
the nineteenth century. Before the late eighteenth
century the common epidemic diseases
were clearly contagious (e.g., smallpox, plague)
and quarantine laws were appropriate control
measures. However, at the end of the eighteenth
century, yellow fever began to devastate many
American cities, but it did not follow the traditional
concepts of disease etiology (Blake, 1959:
151-176). The cause of yellow fever was believed
by some to be gases exuded by putrefying organic
material, disturbed soils, low-lying damp
areas, or sewers. This etiological concept has been
termed the miasmatic theory, or anticontagionism. Instead
of quarantine measures, anticontagionists recommended
cleaning the city streets, obtaining healthful
supplies of water, constructing adequate drainage and
sewer systems to remove wastes expeditiously, and improving
ventilation in closely built up districts of the city
(Waring, 1873). Although the anticontagionist viewpoint
was later proven incorrect, massive outbreaks of yellow
fever and the occurrence of other diseases (e.g., cholera,
dysentery, and typhoid fever) during the first half of the
nineteenth century provided a strong impetus for municipal
involvement in water supply and distribution.
14 • Water Resources IMPACT September • 2001

Developments in Water Supply & Wastewater Mgmt. in the U.S. During the 19th Century . . . cont’d.
The degradation of water quality drawn from shallow
wells and adjacent surface water bodies was another factor
that stimulated the need for improved water supply
and distribution in nineteenth century American cities.
The increased density of uncontrolled privy discharges
coupled with the presence of stables and dairies in cities
most definitely contributed to the degradation of shallow
well water and local surface water bodies. Another contributor
was the overcrowding in urban areas, which
often resulted in many families discharging to a single
privy. The capacity of a single privy vault was not designed
for the disposal of wastes from multiple families
and would be exceeded in such a situation. In general,
the quality of urban water in the late eighteenth century
was degrading rapidly, as the following quote from Benjamin
Russell attests (quoted by Blake, 1959:157):
“…the well water continually grows worse in
cities, by the constant accumulation of matter
which soaks into the earth; hence it is that all
well water in old cities becomes extremely unwholesome,
and thereby greatly increases the
bills of mortality…”
Fire protection was the fourth factor that contributed
significantly to the need for new water supplies and improved
water distribution in urban areas. During the
early nineteenth century, buildings were constructed
almost entirely of wood and other flammable materials,
yet lighting was supplied by flame. This dangerous combination
presented a serious threat to the well being of
the entire city. Fire protection was given high priority,
and the construction of water supply systems for fire protection
usually garnered strong public and political support.
In response to the above factors many municipalities
searched for cleaner sources of water and constructed
improved distribution systems. Philadelphia, Boston, and
New York City tapped clean water sources outside the
city limits and constructed networks of distribution conduits
totaling hundreds of miles in length (Waring, 1886).
The successful demonstration of these and other municipally
owned and operated large-scale water supply and
distribution systems in the first half of the nineteenth
century set the stage for further municipal involvement
in the second half of the century.
Wastewater Management Developments
As the U.S. urban population grew during the early
nineteenth century, urban wastewater infrastructure
(e.g., common sewers, privy vaults, and cesspools) was
overwhelmed by the increased quantity of wastewater.
Common sewers, for example, were installed at slopes
that were unable to effectively transport large quantities
of wastewater to outlets. Wastes also accumulated in
Volume 3 • Number 5 Water Resources IMPACT • 15

Developments in Water Supply & Wastewater Mgmt. in the U.S. During the 19th Century . . . cont’d.
privy vaults and cesspools. Scavengers were contracted
to collect wastes and prevent the development of nuisance
conditions, but the crews hired to perform these
duties did not perform adequately leading to accumulated
wastes, nuisances, and public health problems (APHA,
1891). Complaints relating to the unsanitary conditions
created by overflowing privy vaults and cesspools were
common in many large cities (Duffy, 1968:211).
Ordinances were the primary avenue for municipal
involvement in wastewater management in the early
nineteenth century. Some ordinances were directed at
improving the construction and maintenance of sewers,
privy vaults, and cesspools. For example, a 1798 New
York City ordinance required common sewers to be graded
and a sewer inspector to be hired to keep them clean
(Duffy, 1968:180). A few years later (1829) New York City
addressed the nuisance conditions created by privy vault
discharges by passing an ordinance that prohibited the
construction of privies within 30 feet of public wells
(Duffy, 1990:73). The ordinance also required privy
vaults to be at least 5 feet deep and built of stone or
brick.
Other ordinances were directed at reducing the
quantity of wastewater generated or at preventing the introduction
of fecal and other organic matter into the
wastewater collection system. For example, in 1844
Boston prohibited the taking of baths without a doctor's
order (Armstrong et al., 1976). Municipal bans prohibiting
the discharge of fecal matter to the sewer system were
in effect in Boston until 1833, in Philadelphia until 1850
(Armstrong et al., 1976), and in New York until 1854, at
which time sanitary connections to sewers became required
(Goldman, 1997).
The enforcement of imposed wastewater discharge
limits and the prevention of illegal sanitary connections
to the common sewers was difficult. Privy vaults and
cesspools continued to overflow, while the connections to
the common sewers exacerbated unsanitary conditions.
Unlike the municipal response of constructing water supply
and distribution infrastructure, municipalities did
not get involved on a significant scale in the construction
of centralized urban wastewater management infrastructure
despite the clear problems.
1850 TO 1900: WATER-CARRIAGE
SEWER SYSTEMS
As the nineteenth century progressed, city officials
throughout the United States took notice of the success
of the large-scale public water supply projects in New
York City, Philadelphia, and Boston. By 1880, 64 percent
of the cities had waterworks, and this amount increased
to 72 percent by 1890 (Melosi, 2000:117). The influx of
copious amounts of water from new water supply systems,
coupled with the increase in urban population and
the standard of living, significantly increased the consumption
of water and the generation of wastewater.
The widespread implementation of the water closet
had perhaps the most profound impact, increasing not
only wastewater quantity but also the amount of fecal
matter in wastewater discharges. Municipal response
was limited despite the number of complaints regarding
improperly operating privy vaults and cesspools. In addition,
society was still largely reluctant to change their
personal waste management habits or to spend public
money on wastewater management infrastructure. The
reluctance to spend money gradually eased during the
second half of the nineteenth century as scientific evidence
illustrated the link between wastewater discharges
(containing fecal matter) and disease transmission.
The construction of additional common sewers was
one of the first infrastructure responses by individuals
and municipalities to mitigate wastewater management
problems. Building upon the common sewer concept,
technological advancements in European sewerage technology
in the 1820s and 1830s refined the use of watercarriage
waste removal in comprehensively planned underground
networks of conduits and channels. Although
forms of water-carriage waste removal had been used in
other parts of the world as early as 3000 B.C. (Burian et
al., 1999), the Europeans were the first to actively incorporate
scientific experiments and the knowledge of engineers,
scientists, and other technical experts into the
planning, design, and construction of sewer systems.
Edwin Chadwick, a nineteenth century English sanitarian,
was one of the first Europeans to clearly articulate
the modern day water-carriage sewer system concept
and its reliance on a plentiful supply of water (Melosi,
2000). The success of the first comprehensively planned
and designed water-carriage sewer system constructed in
Hamburg, Germany, in 1843 provided a model for other
European and American cities to follow. The establishment
of the water-carriage sewer system created for the
first time a direct link between water supply and wastewater
collection on a citywide scale.
The first water-carriage sewer systems constructed
in the United States were combined-sewer systems
(CSSs). CSSs by design used a single conduit to transport
stormwater and other household and industrial wastewater
to a designated disposal location. The first CSSs incorporating
engineering planning and design in the United
States were constructed in Chicago and Brooklyn during
the late 1850s (Metcalf and Eddy, 1928:13-14). The
designs of the Chicago system by E.S. Chesbrough and
the Brooklyn system by J.W. Adams were both heavily influenced
by European experiences. As the first CSSs were
being constructed in Europe and the United States, several
authorities on sewerage were advocating a separatesewer
system (SSS). The concept underlying the SSS was
to manage stormwater and sanitary wastewater separately.
The first SSS design incorporated two conduits,
one to convey the sanitary wastewater to a specified disposal
location and another to transport the stormwater to
the nearest receiving-water body.
Despite having a choice between a combined or separate
system in the late nineteenth century, most of the
water-carriage sewer systems constructed in the United
States were combined because: (1) there was no European
precedent for successful SSSs; (2) there was a belief
that CSSs were cheaper to build than a complete separate
system; and (3) engineers were not convinced that
agricultural use of sanitary wastewater was viable (Tarr,
16 • Water Resources IMPACT September • 2001

Developments in Water Supply & Wastewater Mgmt. in the U.S. During the 19th Century . . . cont’d.
1979). Of these three, the primary deterrent to the acceptance
of a two-conduit separate system was cost.
The SSS became more economically viable with the
introduction of vitrified clay pipe (Rawlinson, 1852). Clay
pipes could be constructed with smaller diameters and in
different shapes more cost-effectively than traditional
wood, brick, or stone sewers. George E. Waring, Jr., furthered
the acceptance of the SSS in the United States
during the late nineteenth century. Waring was outspoken
about the economic advantages of his version of the
SSS (Waring, 1873), which incorporated smaller diameter
clay pipes and usually did not include an underground
conduit for stormwater removal. Those characteristics
made it much less expensive compared to the traditional
combined system. Waring also argued persuasively in
favor of his separate system in terms of its supposed sanitary
advantage compared to the combined system.
Two centralized water-carriage technologies (combined
and separate) were firmly established in the late
nineteenth century, but little guidance was available to
help select the proper technology for a particular city. In
an attempt to remedy this situation, the U.S. National
Board of Health sent Rudolph Hering, an American engineer,
to Europe in 1880 to investigate European sewerage
practices. In his report, he suggested a model for the
choice between combined-sewer and separate-sewer systems
(Hering, 1881). Hering’s model recommended using
CSSs in extensive and closely built-up districts (generally
large or rapidly growing cities), while using SSSs for
areas where rainwater did not need to be removed underground.
Ultimately, Hering concluded that the final
decision should hinge on local conditions and financial
considerations because neither system had a significant
sanitary advantage.
The debate over sewerage technology choice continued
into the 1880s despite Hering’s report and acceptance
of its recommendations by many engineers, public
health officials, and sanitarians (White, 1886; Tarr,
1979). The general thought prevailed though that neither
the combined-sewer nor separate-sewer system had significant
sanitary advantages. The choice for implementation
should instead be based upon local needs and system
costs. The perceived cost benefits of CSSs made
them the primary system constructed in urban areas in
the nineteenth century (Philbrick, 1881).
SUMMARY
Throughout the nineteenth century water supply and
distribution and wastewater management were planned
and managed as independent entities. But as the century
progressed the linkage between the two systems became
closer, especially after the adoption of water-carriage
sewer systems as the wastewater management
choice for urban areas. The hydraulic arterial system of
conduits and channels supplying potable water and removing
wastes was the realization of ideas proposed by
Edwin Chadwick and John Roe in England during the
first half of the nineteenth century.
By tracing the historical development of urban water
management, it becomes clear that technical innovations,
scientific understanding, and decisions made
during the nineteenth century have had a lasting influence
in the United States. Parts of urban water systems
in many older cities date to the nineteenth century. These
systems have undergone massive expansion, numerous
technological innovations, and important system modifications
(e.g., introduction of treatment), but the core concept
of water-carriage waste removal remains the same.
In summary, it would behoove present-day engineers,
scientists, planners, city administrators, and policy makers
to take note of the long lasting influence of urban
water infrastructure decisions. Choices made today will
impact many generations to come.
LITERATURE CITED
APHA (American Public Health Association), 1891. Report of the
Committee on Disposal of Waste and Garbage. Papers and
Reports of the American Public Health Association, No. 17.
E.L. Armstrong, M.C. Robinson, and S.M. Hoy (Editors), 1976.
History of Public Works in the United States, 1776-1976.
American Public Works Association, Chicago, Illinois.
Blake, J.B., 1959. Public Health in the Town of Boston, 1630-
1822. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Burian, S.J., S.J. Nix, S.R. Durrans, R.E. Pitt, C.-Y. Fan, and
R. Field, 1999. Historical Development of Wet-Weather Flow
Management. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
125(1):3-13.
Duffy, J., 1968. A History of Public Health in New York City
1625-1866. Russell Sage Foundation, New York, New York.
Duffy, J., 1990. The Sanitarian. University of Illinois Press,
Urbana, Illinois.
Goldman, J.A., 1997. Building New York's Sewers. Purdue
University Press, West Lafayette, Indiana.
Hering, R., 1881. Sewerage Systems. Transactions of the American
Society of Civil Engineers 10:361-386.
Melosi, M.V., 2000. The Sanitary City. The Johns Hopkins
University Press, Baltimore, Maryland.
Metcalf, L. and H.P. Eddy, 1928. American Sewerage Practice:
Volume I. Design of Sewers. McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.,
New York, New York.
Philbrick, E.S., 1881. American Sanitary Engineering. The Sanitary
Engineer, New York, New York.
Rawlinson, R., 1852. On the Drainage of Towns. Minutes of the
Proceedings of the Institution of Institution of Civil Engineers
XII, Session 1852-1853.
Tarr, J.A., 1979. The Separate vs. Combined Sewer Problem: A
Case Study in Urban Technology Design Choice. Journal of
Urban History 5:308-339.
Waring, G.E., Jr., 1873. Draining for Profit, and Draining for
Health. Orange Judd and Company, New York, New York.
Waring, G.E., Jr., 1886. Report on the Social Statistics of Cities.
Department of the Interior, Census Office, Government Printing
Office, Washington, D.C.
White, W.H., 1886. European Sewage and Garbage Removal.
Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers
15:849-872.
AUTHOR LINK
E-MAIL
Steven J. Burian
Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering
University of Arkansas
4190 Bell Engineering Center
Fayetteville, AR 72701
(501) 575-4182 / Fax: (501) 575-7168
sburian@engr.uark.edu
Volume 3 • Number 5 Water Resources IMPACT • 17

Developments in Water Supply & Wastewater
Mgmt. in the U.S. During the 19th Century
. . . cont’d.
▲ Employment Opportunity
Steven J. Burian is an assistant professor of civil engineering
at the University of Arkansas, where he has
taught courses in hydraulics, hydrology, and stormwater
quality management since January 2000. His research
interests focus on stormwater management; modeling
and analysis of hydrologic systems; atmospheric deposition;
and integrated airshed, watershed, and water body
modeling. He has civil engineering degrees from the University
of Notre Dame and the University of Alabama.
❖ ❖ ❖
FAIRFAX COUNTY, VIRGINIA
DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC WORKS
AND ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES
DIRECTOR OF STORMWATER PLANNING
Under the general direction of the Director of Public Works
and Environmental Services, manages and facilitates the operations
of the Stormwater Planning Division. Directs the
County-wide stormwater planning, watershed master planning,
NPDES MS4 permit and stream protection strategy programs.
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of stormwater projects from conceptual through final design.
Assists in administration and management of the
Stormwater Line of Business, which also includes maintenance,
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advancements, innovative technologies and enabling
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goals of the County. Works with citizens, industry
representatives, environmental groups, and government
leaders to foster dialogue and linkages between interest
groups in the County. Seeks opportunities to promote,
through action, the Department’s Mission, Vision, Leadership
Philosophy and Values. Works in a collaborative environment
providing leadership to professional engineers and
scientists.
Minimum Qualifications: Graduation from an accredited
college or university with major coursework in engineering,
environmental sciences, or a related field; PLUS five years of
progressively responsible engineering or environmental sciences
experience in stormwater management programs and
ecosystems improvement; two of which must have been in a
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Preferred Qualifications:
• 9 or more years of experience in watershed planning and
stormwater management design, with 5 years of management
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18 • Water Resources IMPACT September • 2001

MILESTONES IN WATER RESOURCES RECLAMATION
Brit A. Storey
INTRODUCTION
Only about 2.6 percent of the earth's water supply is
fresh, and some two-thirds of that is frozen in icecaps
and glaciers or locked up in some other form such as
moisture in the atmosphere or ground water. That leaves
less than eight-tenths of 1 percent of the earth’s water, or
about 30 percent of fresh water, available for humankind’s
use. The largely arid American West receives a
distinctly small share of that available supply of fresh
water. As a result, water is a dominating factor in the arid
West’s prehistory and history because it is required for
occupation, settlement, agriculture, and industry.
The snowmelt and gush of spring and early summer
runoff frustrated early Western settlers. They watched
helplessly as water they wanted to use in the dry days of
late summer disappeared down Western watercourses.
Settlers responded by developing water projects and creating
complicated Western water law systems, which varied
in detail among the various states and territories but
generally allocated property rights in available water
based on the concept of prior appropriation (first in time,
first in right) for beneficial use.
At first, water development projects were simple.
Settlers diverted water from a stream or river and used it
nearby; but, in many areas, the demand for water outstripped
the supply. As demands for water increased, settlers
wanted to store “wasted” runoff for later use. Storage
projects would help maximize water use and make
more water available for use. Unfortunately, private and
state-sponsored irrigation ventures often failed because
of lack of money and/or lack of engineering skill. This resulted
in mounting pressure for the Federal Government
to develop water resources.
In the jargon of the day, irrigation projects
were known as "reclamation" projects.
The concept was that irrigation would “reclaim”
or “subjugate” arid lands for human
use. John Wesley Powell’s western explorations
and his published articles and reports;
private pressures through publications,
irrigation organizations, and irrigation
“congresses;” nonpartisan Western political
pressures; and Federal Government studies,
conducted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS),
contributed to the discussions that influenced
American public opinion, Congress,
and the executive branch in support of
“reclamation.”
During their period of dominion, the Spanish and
Mexican governments in the American Southwest supported
settlement and irrigation through their land grant
Ironically, opposition
was based . . . on the
public’s belief that
nuclear power
generation was a
viable alternative
for meeting growing
electric power needs
in the west
systems. Before 1900, the United States Congress had
already invested heavily in America's infrastructure.
Roads, river navigation, harbors, canals, and railroads
had all received major subsidies. A tradition of government
subsidization of settlement of the “west” was longstanding
when the Congress in 1866 passed “An Act
Granting the Right-of-Way to Ditch and Canal Owners
over the Public Lands, and for other Purposes.” A sampling
of subsequent congressional actions promoting irrigation
reveals passage of the Desert Land Act in 1877
and the Carey Act in 1894, which were intended to encourage
irrigation projects in the West. In addition, beginning
in 1888, Congress appropriated money to the
USGS to study irrigation potential in the West. Then, in
1890 and 1891, while that irrigation study continued, the
Congress passed legislation reserving rights-of-way for
reservoirs, canals, and ditches on lands then in the public
domain. However, westerners wanted more; they
wanted the Federal Government to invest directly in irrigation
projects. The “reclamation” movement demonstrated
its strength when pro-irrigation planks found
their way into both Democratic and Republican platforms
in 1900. In 1901, “reclamation” gained a powerful supporter
in Theodore Roosevelt when he became President
after the assassination of William McKinley.
RECLAMATION BECOMES
A FEDERAL PROGRAM
President Roosevelt supported the “reclamation”
movement because of his personal experience in the
West, and because of his “conservation” ethic. At that
time, “conservation” meant a movement for sustained exploitation
of natural resources by man
through careful management for the good of
the many. Roosevelt also believed “reclamation”
would permit “homemaking” and support
the agrarian Jeffersonian Ideal. Reclamation
supporters believed the program
would make homes for Americans on family
farms. Passed in both Houses of the Congress
by wide margins, President Roosevelt
signed the Reclamation Act in June of 1902.
In July of 1902, Secretary of the Interior
Ethan Allen Hitchcock established the United
States Reclamation Service (USRS) within
the Division of Hydrography in the USGS.
Charles D. Walcott, as director of the USGS,
became the first “Director” of the USRS, and
Frederick Newell became the first “Chief Engineer”
while continuing his responsibilities as chief of
the Division of Hydrography.
Volume 3 • Number 5 Water Resources IMPACT • 19

Milestones in Water Resources Reclamation . . . cont’d.
The Reclamation Act required that
Nothing in this act shall be construed as affecting
or intended to affect or in any way interfere
with the laws of any State or Territory relating to
the control, appropriation, use, or distribution of
water . . . or any vested right acquired thereunder,
and the Secretary of the Interior . . . shall
proceed in conformity with such laws ... .
That meant implementation of the Act required that
Reclamation comply with numerous and often widely
varying state and territorial legal codes. Development and
ratification over the years of numerous interstate compacts
that governed the sharing of streamflows between
states and of several international treaties that governed
the sharing of streams by the United States with Mexico
or Canada made Reclamation’s efforts to comply with
state or territorial water law even more complex.
In its early years, the Reclamation Service relied
heavily on the USGS Division of Hydrography’s previous
studies of potential projects in each western state with
Federal lands – the sale of which was the original source
of reclamation funding. Between 1903 and 1906, about
25 projects were authorized throughout the West. Because
Texas had no Federal lands, it was not one of the
original “reclamation” states. It became a reclamation
state in 1906.
PRINCIPLES OF THE RECLAMATION PROGRAM
During its early years, several basic principles underlaid
the reclamation program. The details have
changed over the years, but the general principles remain:
(1) Federal monies spent on reclamation water development
projects that benefitted water users would be
repaid by the water users; (2) projects remain Federal
property even when the water users repay Federal construction
costs (the Congress could, of course, choose to
dispose of title to a project); (3) Reclamation generally
contracts with the private sector for construction work;
(4) Reclamation employees administer contracts to assure
that contractors’ work meets Government specifications;
(5) in the absence of acceptable bids on a contact,
Reclamation, especially in its early years, would complete
a project by “force account” (that is, would use Reclamation
employees to do the construction work); and (6) hydroelectric
power revenues could be used to repay project
construction charges.
EARLY HISTORY OF RECLAMATION
In 1907, the USRS separated from the USGS to become
an independent bureau within the Department of
the Interior. The Congress, and the Executive Branch, including
USRS, were then just beginning a learning period
during which the economic and technical needs of
Reclamation projects became clearer. Initially overly optimistic
about the ability of water users to repay construction
costs, Congress set a 10-year repayment period.
Subsequently, the repayment period was increased to 20
years, then to 40 years, and ultimately to an indefinite
period based on “ability to pay.” Other issues that arose
included: soil science problems related both to construction
and to arability (ability of soils to grow good crops);
economic viability of projects (repayment potential) including
climatic limitations on the value of crops; waterlogging
of irrigated lands on projects resulting in the need
for expensive drainage projects; and the need for practical
farming experience for people successfully to take up
project farms. Many projects were far behind their repayment
schedules, and setters were vocally discontented.
The learning period for Reclamation and the Congress
resulted in substantial changes when the USRS
was renamed the Bureau of Reclamation in 1923 and, in
1924, the Fact Finder’s Act began major adjustments to
the basic Reclamation program. Those adjustments were
suggested by the Fact Finder’s Report, which resulted
from an in-depth study of the economic problems, and
settler unrest on Reclamation’s 20-plus projects. Elwood
Mead, one of the members of the Fact Finder’s Commission,
was appointed Commissioner of Reclamation in
1924 as the reshaping of Reclamation continued. A signal
of the changes came in 1928, for instance, when the
Congress authorized the Boulder Canyon Project (Hoover
Dam), and, for the first time, large appropriations began
to flow to Reclamation from the general funds of the United
States instead of from public land revenues and other
specific sources. Authorization of Hoover Dam was also
an implicit recognition that hydroelectric power revenues
would substantially alter the economics of Reclamation
projects for the better.
In 1928, the Boulder Canyon Act also ratified the
Colorado River Compact and authorized the construction
of Hoover Dam, which was a key element in implementation
of the compact. Subsequently, during the Depression,
Congress authorized almost 40 projects for the dual
purposes of promoting infrastructure development and
providing public works jobs. Among these projects were
the beginnings of some of Reclamation’s largest projects
– the Central Valley Project in California, the Colorado-
Big Thompson Project in Colorado, and the Columbia
Basin Project in Washington. Once again, the Columbia
Basin project furthered the implicit shift in the economics
of Reclamation’s program with two hydropower plants
that were huge for their day. These three large projects
ultimately brought irrigation water to over 4,000,000
acres of land, a little less than one-half of Reclamation’s
irrigable acreage.
Ultimately, of Reclamation’s more than 180 projects,
about 70 were authorized before World War II, but the remainder
were authorized during and after World War II in
both small authorizations and major authorizations,
such as the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program (1944),
the Colorado River Storage Project (1956), and the Third
Powerplant at Grand Coulee Dam (1966). The last really
big project construction authorization occurred in 1968
when Congress approved the Colorado River Basin Project
Act, which included the Central Arizona Project, the
Dolores Project, the Animas-La Plata Project, the Central
Utah Project, and several other projects.
20 • Water Resources IMPACT September • 2001

Milestones in Water Resources Reclamation . . . cont’d.
LABORATORIES
One problem confronted by Reclamation was laboratory
testing of special problems. Testing was carried out
in various locations – such as Montrose and Estes Park,
Colorado, and Colorado State University – until 1946
when Reclamation located its primary laboratory at the
Denver Federal Center. These research laboratories study
modeling and designs for hydraulic structures, concrete
technology, electrical problems, construction design innovations,
ground water, weed control in canals and
reservoirs, various environmental issues, water quality,
ecology, drainage, control of evaporation and other water
losses, and other technical subjects.
HYDROELECTRIC GENERATION
Although the earliest hydroelectric plants on Reclamation
projects went into operation in 1909, it was only
during the 1930s that the generation of hydroelectric
power became a principal benefit of Reclamation projects.
Reclamation built the major hydroelectric plant at Hoover
Dam only after a hard public debate about whether the
Federal Government should become involved in public
power production or whether private power production
should be the rule. It was the Hoover Dam precedent that
ultimately allowed Reclamation to become a major hydroelectric
producer. Once the issues received public airing
at Hoover Dam, hydroelectric projects became a feature
of many Reclamation projects. Hydroelectric revenues
have subsequently proved an important source for
funding repayment of Reclamation project costs. In 1993,
Reclamation had 56 powerplants online and generated
34.7 billion kilowatt hours of electricity. In 1999, revenues
from Grand Coulee hydroelectric generation alone
equaled about two-thirds of Reclamation’s entire appropriated
budget, and the total of Reclamation hydropower
revenues exceed the Reclamation’s current annual budget.
Reclamation is the the tenth largest electric utility
and the second largest hydroelectric producer in the
United States.
RECLAMATION AND INTERSTATE WATERS
Allocation of the waters of the Colorado River was addressed
in 1922 in Santa Fe when Secretary of Commerce
Herbert Hoover moderated a meeting of commissioners
representing Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada,
New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. The meeting developed
and signed the Colorado River Compact (Compact)
to divide and allocate the waters of the Colorado River.
For Reclamation, this is the most complex and difficult
of the interstate compacts, and it was ratified by the
Congress in 1928 without the concurrence of Arizona.
Volume 3 • Number 5 Water Resources IMPACT • 21

Milestones in Water Resources Reclamation . . . cont’d.
California and Arizona argued for years over how to calculate
Arizona’s share of the waters of the lower Colorado
River. The Arizona legislature ratified the Compact only
in 1944 and then later sued California over its interpretation
of the Compact. The lawsuit lasted from 1952 until
1962. Concern over the Compact has only heightened
over the years as it became increasingly apparent that
there is not consistently as much water in the Colorado
River as was presumed by the signers and ratifiers of the
Compact. In addition, the Compact did not anticipate
provision for 1.5 million acre-feet of water promised to
Mexico in a 1944 treaty. Reclamation is deeply involved
in these complicated Colorado River issues because
Reclamation reservoirs largely store and regulate the flow
of the Colorado River. Reclamation dams in the Upper
Colorado River Basin deliver water to Glen Canyon Dam,
which then stores the water in Lake Powell. From Lake
Powell, the water is delivered in accordance with the
terms of the Colorado River Compact to the Lower Colorado
River Basin states. Once delivered to the Lower
Colorado River Basin, Hoover Dam stores the water in
Lake Mead.
It is important to note that the Colorado River Compact,
at the interstate level, was the first major departure
in the West from the doctrine of prior appropriation. The
seven Colorado River Basin states agreed among themselves
to arrive at an allocation of what they believed was
the annual flow of the Colorado River. When Congress
ratified the Colorado River Compact in 1928, it assigned
the Lower Colorado River Basin states – California, Arizona,
and Nevada – specific annual shares of the river.
The Upper Colorado River Basin states signed another
compact in 1948 allocating shares of the annual supply
of the Upper Basin’s water to New Mexico, Colorado,
Utah, and Wyoming. At the time this was a radical departure
from most Western water law because the Compact
assured the states of a set entitlement to Colorado
River water regardless of when water development occurred.
SPECIAL PROJECTS
Reclamation’s traditional area of operation is the 17
arid, continental, states of the West. Reclamation has,
however, at times been assigned work outside that traditional
operational area. For instance, during the late
1920s Reclamation studied “planned group settlement”
in the South in cut-over areas and swamps. This project
was supposed to create new farms, but it ultimately died
as impacts of the Depression on the farm economy were
recognized. Other projects in the eastern United States
were also undertaken, and Reclamation’s collection of
photographs includes hundreds from areas outside the
arid West. Beginning in the 1930s Reclamation studied
possible projects in Hawaii, and in 1954 the Congress
authorized investigations on Oahu, Hawaii, and Molokai
among the Hawaiian Islands. In the 1940s and 1950s,
Reclamation studied water development projects in Alaska
and ultimately built the Eklutna Project outside Anchorage.
The Eklutna Project has since been transferred
out of Reclamation.
RECLAMATION PROJECTS AND
THE ENVIRONMENT
Conservation and environmental issues are not as
new to Reclamation as many think. The nature of conservation
and environmental issues and how they have
affected Reclamation, however, has changed considerably.
Very early in Reclamation’s history between 1908
and 1912, for instance, there was a public outcry about
conservation of Lake Tahoe’s natural lake level and
scenic beauty when Reclamation proposed to build a dam
both to increase storage capacity and to sometimes lower
the existing lake level to benefit the Newlands Project.
Subsequently, proposals for Reclamation projects
raised public consciousness about major dams and their
impacts on various resources. Reclamation, by the mid-
1930s, was looking at fishery issues as it addressed construction
of Grand Coulee and other dams. On another
front, in the mid- to late-1930s, Coloradoans and their
congressional representatives pushed Reclamation to
build the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, which would
require construction on the fringe of and under Rocky
Mountain National Park. The project was ultimately built
because Rocky Mountain National Park was created with
a provision in the enabling law that specifically authorized
a water development project infringing on the National
Park. In the 1950s, the controversy over construction
of Echo Park Dam in Dinosaur National Monument
heightened public awareness of issues surrounding construction
of a dam in a National Park Service managed
area. Ultimately, public opinion forced cancellation of
plans for Echo Park Dam and resulted in construction of
the alternative, Glen Canyon Dam. By the 1960s, Marble
Canyon and Bridge Canyon dams were proposed, but
Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall canceled those
dams because of public pressure in support of preserving
parts of the Grand Canyon. Ironically, opposition was
based at least partly on the public’s belief that nuclear
power generation was a viable alternative for meeting
growing electric power needs in the West.
Although effects on the environment were always, to
a limited extent, a part of Reclamation’s work, during the
1960s, Reclamation’s work began to change substantially
as public awareness of environmental issues reached
new heights. There was a sea of change in America and
the way Americans looked at natural resources exploitation.
This change resulted, in part, from improved communication
which meant that the average American’s
news came not from newsreels, radio, and newspapers,
but from television, with same-day information and images
which visually reinforced issues. It also came, in
part, from transportation changes which meant that the
average American could travel to the “West” on airliners
or in powerful cars on much improved highways. Americans
were coming to understand issues about the West
better and to consider the West “theirs.” Thus, expanded
knowledge and accessibility resulted in an increasingly
proprietary feeling on the part of large new groups of
Americans toward public lands and public works. At the
same time, communities across the country began to pay
increasing attention to water and air pollution issues.
22 • Water Resources IMPACT September • 2001

Milestones in Water Resources Reclamation . . . cont’d.
This new situation combined with far more sophisticated
science and resultant understandings of the complex interactions
of the communities of nature as well as of
water and air pollution issues. Among other items, the effects
of wetlands loss on fisheries and bird populations
were better recognized. Improved understanding of the
natural world and its issues combined with a shifting political
power that moved away from the rural and agrarian
population and components of the economy to the
urban population and components of the economy. The
change was signaled in many ways. Wide-open, little-regulated
exploitation of historic and natural resources,
even on private property, lost support in America as effects
on animals, birds, fishes, plants, water, air, archaeological
sites, and historic sites were better recognized.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring appeared in 1962 and
resulted in increased public support for more environmentally
sensitive project development. While even popular
music expressed growing environmental concerns,
increased public consciousness and support manifested
itself in political action when the Congress passed the
Wilderness Act in 1964, the Fish and Wildlife Coordination
Act in 1965, the National Historic Preservation Act in
1966, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968, the National
Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969, and
many other subsequent laws. Accompanying and buttressing
these Federal laws were presidential Executive
Orders; Federal regulations; and state and local laws, orders,
and regulations.
The specific effects of Reclamation projects were also
better identified in this period. Dam construction affected
fish populations and often altered the flow characteristics
and ecology of rivers and streams. Land “reclamation”
and construction projects affected plant, animal,
fish, and bird populations through displacement or destruction
because of ecological changes. In addition, land
development often destroyed historic or archeological resources.
Destruction of nonarable wetlands was a special
environmental problem. Hydroelectric production, often
considered pollution-free, was recognized as carrying environmental
effects because of altered water temperatures,
effects on native fish populations, effects on migratory
fish, and water fluctuations. Environmental issues
that conflicted with traditional bureau missions
were not unique to Reclamation. Americans identified
and targeted long menus of environmental effects
throughout construction and natural resources exploitation
programs in both the government and private sectors
in American society.
After a period of adjustment to the new laws and regulations,
and as a result of increasing public and political
pressure, Reclamation developed staffs to deal with
environmental and historic preservation issues. Reclamation
invests a great deal of time and money in issues
such as: endangered species, instream flows, the preservation
and enhancement of quality fisheries below dams,
preserving wetlands, conserving and enhancing fish and
wildlife habitat, dealing with Endangered Species Act issues,
controlling water salinity and sources of pollution,
ground-water contamination, and the recovery of salmon
populations on both the Columbia/Snake and the San
Joaquin/Sacramento River systems. Reclamation implemented
“reoperation” (revision of the way hydroelectric
power generation is scheduled and carried out) of hydroelectric
facilities at Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado
River to better achieve environmental objectives. Reclamation
has made costly modifications to dams such as
Shasta and Flaming Gorge to achieve environmental
goals. A major effort is underway among Federal and
state agencies and other interest groups to improve environmental
and water quality in the delta at the mouth of
the Central Valley of California, where the San Joaquin
and Sacramento Rivers join and flow into San Francisco
Bay.
RECREATION
Reclamation reservoirs have always attracted flatwater
recreation activities around the West. Westerners
quickly identified and began to enjoy recreation opportunities
on Reclamation projects; however, recreation was
not recognized legally as a project use until 1937. The
National Park Service initiated management of Lake
Mead, behind Hoover Dam, for recreation in 1936. Reclamation
manages about one-sixth of the recreation areas
on its projects. From the 1930s to the early 1960s, authorizations
for recreation identified specific projects; but
in the mid-1960s, the Congress began to give Reclamation
more generalized authorities for funding recreation
on all projects. Fishing, hunting, boating, picnicking,
swimming, and other recreational opportunities developed
over the years.
FLOOD CONTROL/DROUGHT AND
INTERNATIONAL BENEFITS
Flood control is one of the benefits provided on many
Reclamation projects. Reclamation’s facilities are operated
in a way that annually, prevents millions of dollars of
flood damage. Yet, flood control is needed only in very wet
years. In drought periods, Reclamation becomes involved
in drought management activities. Water shortages, often
drought-influenced, will probably increase in the Reclamation
West, thus forcing more effective and efficient use
of water supply.
International assistance is also an important aspect
of Reclamation’s program. Reclamation employees have
worked in more than 80 countries providing technical assistance
on a wide range of water resources issues, and
Reclamation has welcomed more than 10,000 visitors
from nearly every country in the world to its facilities.
Reclamation routinely provides training programs for foreign
visitors. All this activity is done in accordance with
United States policy and in cooperation with the U.S.
State Department. In addition, Reclamation provides
technical water assistance within the United States to
various public and private entities through a variety of
programs.
Reclamation’s projects provide agricultural, municipal,
and industrial water to about one-third of the population
of the West. Farmers on Reclamation projects produce
about 13 percent of the value of all crops in the
Volume 3 • Number 5 Water Resources IMPACT • 23

Milestones in Water Resources Reclamation . . . cont’d.
United States, including about 65 percent of all vegetables
and 24 percent of all fruits and nuts.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
(A larger list of suggested readings may be found in the
Bureau of Reclamation leaflet “Selected Readings in
the History of the Bureau of Reclamation.”)
AUTHOR LINK
E-MAIL
Brit A. Storey
Senior Historian
Bureau of Reclamation
P.O. Box 25007
Denver, CO
(303) 445-2918 / Fax: (303) 445-6690
BSTOREY@do.usbr.gov
Armstrong, E.L. (Editor), 1976. Irrigation. In: History of Public
Works in the United States, 1776-1976. American Public
Works Association, Chicago, Illinois.
Dawdy, D.O., 1989. Congress In Its Wisdom: The Bureau of
Reclamation and the Public Interest. Westview Press, Boulder,
Colorado, San Francisco, California, and London, United
Kingdom.
Dean, R., 1997. Dam Building Still Had Some Magic Then:
Stewart Udall, the Central Arizona Project, and the Evolution
of the Pacific Southwest Water Plan, 1963-1968. Pacific Historical
Review 66:81-98.
Dunar, A. and D. McBride, 1993. Building Hoover Dam: An Oral
History of the Great Depression. Twayne Publishers, New
York, New York.
Harvey, M.W.T., 1994. A Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and
the American Conservation Movement. University of New
Mexico Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Hundley, N., Jr., 1966. Dividing the Waters: A Century of
Controversy Between the United States and Mexico. University
of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California.
Jackson, D.C., 1993. Engineering in the Progressive Era: A New
Look at Frederick Haynes Newell and the U. S. Reclamation
Service. Technology and Culture 34:539-574.
Kollgaard, E.B. and W.L. Chadwick (Editors), 1988. Development
of Dam Engineering in the United States. Pergamon
Press, New York, New York.
Martin, R., 1989. A Story that Stands Like a Dam: Glen Canyon
and the Struggle for the Soul of the West. Henry Holt and
Company, New York, New York.
Morgan, R.M., 1993. Water and the Land: A History of American
Irrigation. The Irrigation Association, Fairfax, Virginia.
Pisani, D.J., 1979. Conflict Over Conservation: The Reclamation
Service and the Tahoe Contract. Western Historical Quarterly
10:167-190.
Pitzer, P.C., 1994. Grand Coulee: Harnessing a Dream. Washington
State University Press, Pullman, Washington.
Reisner, M.P., 1986. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its
Disappearing Water. Viking, New York, New York.
Robinson, M.C., 1979. Water for the West: The Bureau of Reclamation,
1902-1977. Public Works Historical Society, Chicago,
Illinois.
Smith, K.L., 1986. The Magnificent Experiment: Building the
Salt River Reclamation Project, 1890-1917. The University of
Arizona Press, Tucson, Arizona.
Terrell, J.U., 1965. War for the Colorado River: The California-
Arizona Controversy. The Arthur H. Clark Company, Glendale,
California (2 volumes).
Walton, J., 1992. Western Times and Western Wars: State, Culture,
and Rebellion in California. University of California
Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford.
Warne, W.E., 1973. The Bureau of Reclamation. Praeger Publishers,
Inc., London, United Kingdom; Reprint (1973), Westview
Press, Boulder, Colorado.
Brit A. Storey is the Senior Historian of the Bureau of
Reclamation and is currently leading planning for Reclamation’s
Centennial activities in 2002-2003. He has
worked for Auburn University, the State Historical Society
of Colorado, and the Advisory Council on Historic
Preservation.
❖ ❖ ❖
LEARN ABOUT RECLAMATION’S HISTORY
AND HISTORY PROGRAM AT
http://www.usbr.gov/history
LEARN MORE ABOUT RECLAMATION’S CURRENT
PROGRAMS AND ACTIVITIES AT
http://www.usbr.gov
LEARN MORE ABOUT RECLAMATION PROJECTS AT
http://dataweb.usbr.gov
24 • Water Resources IMPACT September • 2001

Volume 3 • Number 5 Water Resources IMPACT • 25

HISTORY OF THE CLEAN WATER ACT
Charles A. Foster and Marty D. Matlock
INTRODUCTION
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported
in the 1998 National Water Quality Inventory that
more than 291,000 miles of assessed rivers and streams
and 5 million acres of lakes do not meet State water quality
standards. This inventory represents a compilation of
state assessments of 840,000 miles of rivers and 17.4
million acres of lakes; a 22 percent increase in river miles
and 4 percent increase in lake acres over their 1996 reports
(U.S. EPA, 2000a). Siltation, bacteria, nutrients,
and metals were the leading pollutants of impaired waters,
according to EPA. The sources of these pollutants
were presumed to be runoff from agricultural lands and
urban areas. The EPA suggests that the majority of Americans
– over 218 million – live within ten miles of a polluted
waterbody (U.S. EPA, 2000b).
It is important to understand that the reports of
water quality status are based on assessed waterbodies,
and do not represent the status of the 3.6 million miles
of rivers and streams; 41.6 million acres of lakes, reservoirs,
and ponds; 90,500 square miles of estuaries;
or 66,645 miles of ocean shoreline. In
fact, only 23 percent of the Nation’s rivers and
streams, 42 percent of the lake area, 32 percent
of estuary area, and 5 percent of ocean
shoreline were assessed (U.S. EPA, 2000b).
Clearly this survey of water quality is inadequate
for characterizing the status of a critical
natural resource; the data are not complete.
Nevertheless, a series of Federal Court rulings
based on these assessments have resulted in
the development and implementation of a watershed-based
approach to water quality management,
the so-called Total Maximum Daily
Load (TMDL) approach. The implications of this
shift in approach are difficult to grasp without
some knowledge of the history of water quality
legislation and its implementation.
HISTORY OF THE CLEAN WATER ACT
More than 100 years of State and Federal regulations
and negotiations have culminated in the Clean Water Act
(CWA), a 1977 amendment to the Federal Water Pollution
Control Act of 1972 [33 U.S.C. s/s 1251 et seq. (1977)].
The CWA was developed as Congress’ mechanism for regulating
discharges of pollutants to waters of the United
States. It gave EPA the authority to set effluent standards
on an industry basis (technology-based) and continued
the requirements to set water quality standards for all
contaminants in surface waters. The CWA makes it
unlawful for any person to discharge any pollutant from
a point source into navigable waters unless a permit is
The EPA
suggests that
the majority
of Americans
– over 218
million – live
within ten miles
of a polluted
waterbody
obtained under the Act. While EPA has oversight responsibilities,
the CWA provides for the delegation of many
permitting, administrative, and enforcement aspects of
the law to state governments. The objective of the CWA is
“to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological
integrity of the Nation’s waters.”
The CWA has three explicit goals:
1. Discharges of pollutants into navigable waters
will be eliminated by 1985 (zero discharge goal).
2. Wherever attainable, an interim goal of water
quality that provides for the protection and propagation
of fish, shellfish, and wildlife and provides for recreation
in and on water be achieved by 1983 (fishable and swimmable
goal).
3. The discharge of toxic pollutants in toxic
amounts is prohibited (no toxics in toxic amounts goal).
The CWA has evolved to include a series of provisions to
address specific facets of water quality regulation. The
specific provisions of the CWA are often referred to by
their U.S. Code of Federal Regulations section
number. [The Code of Federal Regulations
(CFR) is a codification of the rules published
in the Federal Register by the Executive departments
and agencies of the Federal Government.
The codified rules in the CFR are not
law – laws are published as United States
Code (USC). However, when promulgated,
they carry the weight of law. The CFR is divided
into 50 titles, which represent broad
areas subject to Federal regulation. Environmental
regulations are contained mainly in
CFR Title 40: Protection of Environment.
Each volume of the CFR is revised once each
calendar year. Title 40 is issued every July 1.
Sections and subsections are labeled numerically
then alphabetically. For example, 40
CFR Section 303 Subsection (d) is generally referred to as
subsection 303(d).] The CWA is organized into six titles
addressing specific components of water quality regulation
(Table 1).
The history of the CWA is the history of conflict between
two fundamentally different regulatory philosophies
(Rodgers, 1994). One philosophy views water pollution
in absolute, even moral, terms; the other counts it as
a cost balanced against the social benefits of economic
activities. One asserts that the goal of regulation is clean
water; the other holds that a legitimate use of water is the
assimilation of wastes. One proposes federal intervention
in what it deems a national problem; the other holds that
local communities are the most qualified to determine the
best uses for their water and, given those uses, how
much pollution water bodies can tolerate (Houck, 1999).
26 • Water Resources IMPACT September • 2001

History of the Clean Water Act . . . cont’d.
TABLE 1. The Clean Water Act
Organization by Title and Section.
Title I – Research and Related Programs
Title II – Grants for Construction of Treatment
Title II – Works
Title III – Standards and Enforcement
• Section 301 Effluent Limitations
• Section 302 Water Quality-Related Effluent
Limitations
• Section 303 Water Quality Standards and
Implementation Plans
• Section 304 Information and Guidelines
(Effluent)
• Section 305 Water Quality Inventory
• Section 307 Toxic and Pretreatment Effluent
Standards
Title IV – Permits and Licenses
• Section 402 National Pollutant Discharge
Elimination System (NPDES) Permits
• Section 405 Disposal of Sewage Sludge
Title V – General Provisions
• Section 510 State Authority
• Section 518 Indian Tribes
Title VI – State Water Pollution Control
Title VI – Revolving Funds
These conflicting philosophies inspired two distinct
regulatory strategies – effluent limitations and water
quality standards. Effluent limitations propose to control
pollution at the source. Discharges into waters are flatly
forbidden unless authorized under a federal permit program.
Water quality standards, largely written and enforced
by the states, define how much of a pollutant a
body or segment of water may contain. These strategies
are not mutually exclusive and, in fact, implementation
of the CWA as we know it today is a combination of both.
The original legislation, the Federal Water Pollution
Control Act of 1948, (PL 80-845), did nothing in the way
of establishing federal goals or strategies. It acknowledged
the rights and responsibilities of states in matters
of water quality and provided funding to states for technical
assistance and research (WEF, 1997). The U.S. Surgeon
General was authorized to investigate problems in
interstate waters, but federal intrusion faced substantial
hurdles. The U.S. Attorney General could bring suit, but
only with the approval of the state in which the discharge
originated and then only after the Surgeon General had
given notice twice to both the state and to the discharger
and conducted a public hearing (WEF, 1997).
The Act was amended five times prior to a major
overhaul in 1972. For the most part, these amendments
addressed technical assistance and funding (Houck,
1999). In 1956 a proposal to allow the Surgeon General
to establish federal water quality standards failed on the
grounds that it would usurp state authority. Besides, it
was pointed out in debates, many of the states used
water quality standards already. Instead, the states’ role
in enforcement was enhanced by a 1956 law (PL 84-660),
which encouraged state and interstate abatement measures.
Water quality standards did become law with the
1965 Water Quality Act, (PL 89-234), which required
states to submit for federal review interstate water standards
and plans for implementation and enforcement. In
setting standards, states could consider the various uses
for public waters, including recreation and the propagation
of fish and wildlife, as well as agricultural and industrial
uses (Rodgers, 1994). Recognizing waste assimilation
as a legitimate use for some public waterways,
Congress rejected proposals for a national policy of keeping
waters as clean as possible. It also declined, for the
time being, to establish federal effluent limitations. The
House was uncomfortable with a provision in the Act that
authorized the federal government to set standards if a
state failed to do so. Arguing that federal standards
would impair local innovation and lead to Federal zoning,
the House argued in vain that sanctions should be limited
to withholding funds from states that fail to submit
standards (Houck, 1999).
By 1972 nearly all states had gained approval for
water quality standards. The requirement for implementation
and enforcement plans, however, went largely unfulfilled,
and Congressional reports questioned the adequacy
of existing programs as early as 1968 (WEF, 1997).
Effluent standards gained credence as Congressional interest
turned to resurrecting the Rivers and Harbors Appropriations
Act, or Refuse Act of 1899, which flatly prohibited
the discharge of any refuse into the nation’s navigable
waters. In 1970 President Nixon issued Executive
Order No. 11574 directing the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers
to implement a permit program to enforce the
Refuse Act against industrial dischargers (Rodgers,
1994).
Congress bristled at this affront to its policy setting
authority and moved to write new legislation. Water quality
standards were clearly out of favor among Senators,
and effluent limitations were in. The House worked to
combine the two methods, preserve the states’ authority,
and limit federal jurisdiction to interstate waters. The
House argued as well that any legislation should take
into account its costs as well as its benefits. The House
also called for a “dynamic approach” and advocated periodic
evaluations and studies to enlighten any subsequent
legislation (WEF, 1997).
As far as the Senate was concerned, water quality
standards had failed. Furthermore, the cost of implementation
should not be born by the government. The
Senate favored a “technology forcing” strategy. Set strict
Volume 3 • Number 5 Water Resources IMPACT • 27

History of the Clean Water Act . . . cont’d.
effluent standards and deadlines for compliance, argued
the Senate, and dischargers will find it in their own economic
best interest to install cost-effective treatment systems.
What emerged was a radical change from earlier legislation.
The Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments
of 1972 introduced a Federal permit program giving
dischargers until July of 1977 to comply with EPA effluent
standards. The legislation also forced technology
standards on dischargers, requiring them to install the
“best available technology economically achievable” by
1983. The year 1983 was also the deadline for an interim
water quality goal. The ultimate goal, which carried a
1985 deadline, was the elimination of pollution discharges
into “navigable waters.” The House kept water
quality standards in force, but only as a back up in case
technology standards failed to bring water up to quality
goals. The Senate bill’s principal author, Edmund
Muskie, went so far as to direct the EPA administrator to
assign secondary priority to water quality standards
(Houck, 1999).
In 1976 the National Commission on Water Quality
convened to determine the consequences (economic and
environmental, among others) of meeting the 1983 goals.
Since the commission’s composition included five House
members and five Senators, the arguments of 1972 were
largely revisited. The Commission’s chairman, Vice President
Nelson Rockefeller, had argued as governor of New
York for water quality standards and greater state authority
prior to passage of the 1972 Amendments. Over
the objections of Senator Muskie, the Commission recommended
a new goal to stress “conservation and reuse”
rather than zero discharge, and the postponement of
some technology requirements. Nevertheless, the 1977
Amendments made only small modifications to technology
standards and kept the 1983 and 1985 deadlines intact
(WEF, 1997; Houck, 1999).
The 1985 “zero discharge” deadline came and went;
yet the language remains intact in the Act. The Water
Quality Act of 1987 was written in part to address some
of the perceived failings of technology standards. Congress
revisited water quality standards to tackle “toxic
hotspots” that persisted despite technology controls.
State implementation and enforcement also made a
comeback in addressing such “nonpoint” sources of pollution
as agriculture, silviculture, and construction.
Thus the tension between Federal and State authority in
setting water quality goals continues in implementing the
CWA some 27 years after its inception.
IMPLEMENTATION OF THE CLEAN WATER
ACT’S WATER QUALITY PROGRAM
The tool for managing water quality under the CWA
has been the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination
System (NPDES) permit. The Clean Water Act requires
any point source wastewater dischargers to have an
NPDES permit establishing pollution limits and specifying
monitoring and reporting requirements. (The term
“point source” means any discernible, confined and discrete
conveyance, such as a pipe, ditch, channel, tunnel,
conduit, discrete fissure, or container. It also includes
vessels or other floating craft from which pollutants are
or may be discharged. By law, the term “point source”
also includes concentrated animal feeding operations,
but not agricultural storm water discharges and return
flows from irrigated agriculture.) NPDES permits regulate
point sources from municipal wastewater treatment
plants, industrial point sources, and concentrated animal
feeding operations that discharge into other wastewater
collection systems, or that discharge directly into
receiving waters. Over 200,000 NPDES permits have
been issued nationwide, each with five-year renewal cycles
(U.S. EPA, 1996). Discharge limits for NPDES permits
are based either on industry specific effluent limitations
or waterbody-specific water quality standards.
Effluent Limits
Technology-based effluent limitations for industrial
and municipal discharges are derived from National effluent
limitation guidelines (ELGs) developed by EPA, or
by applying Best Professional Judgment (BPJ) on a caseby-case
basis, in the absence of ELGs (U.S. EPA, 1996).
By legislation, EPA is responsible for developing ELGs.
However, EPA was unable to meet these responsibilities
in the first decade of the CWA, resulting in a lawsuit by
environmental groups (NRDC v. Costle, March 1979).
EPA agreed in a settlement, the terms of which were subsequently
incorporated into the 1977 amendments to the
CWA, to develop pretreatment standards for a list of priority
pollutants and classes of pollutants for 21 major industries
(primary industries). The list of priority pollutants
now includes more than 150 chemical compounds
(predominantly man-made organic and inorganic toxicants),
and ELGs have been developed for more than 50
industrial categories.
Water Quality Standards
Water quality standards (WQSs) are rules designed to
establish numerical and narrative goals for water quality
throughout a State. They provide a basis for states to implement
and attain water quality goals. Typical state regulatory
language describes water quality standards as
“sufficient to protect the ways that water bodies in the
state will be used, with defined measurements that will
assure water quality is adequate to maintain those uses,
and include a margin of safety so that conditions at or
just less than the standards indicate a potential for use
impairment prior to that impairment actually occurring”
(TNRCC, 1999). WQSs are designed to ensure waterbodies
meet the uses States have decided are appropriate,
taking into account cumulative impacts of all discharges
on the waterbody. Water quality standards are composed
of three parts: (1) designated uses, (2) water quality criteria,
and (3) antidegradation principle.
Designated uses and associated water quality criteria
are developed by state water quality agencies working
with federal regional EPA offices at a resolution of the
eight-digit hydrologic unit code (HUC). (Watersheds are
designated by the number of digits in their USGS Hydro-
28 • Water Resources IMPACT September • 2001

History of the Clean Water Act . . . cont’d.
logic Unit Code (HUC) designation; eight-digit HUCs are
drainage areas about 1,000 square miles in size, though
this is strongly dependent on location.) Waterbodies are
often assigned more than one designated use. NPDES
permit criteria are calculated based on cumulative load
to the stream and permit-specific limits for toxics and
other pollutants. The difference between the WQS approach
and effluent standards is this explicit requirement
for consideration of cumulative impacts on the receiving
waterbody. EPA is required to publish and update
ambient water quality criteria for specific pollutants to
“accurately reflect the latest scientific knowledge . . . on
the kind and extent of all identifiable effects on health
and welfare including, but not limited to, plankton, fish,
shellfish, wildlife, plant life . . . which may be expected
from the presence of pollutants in any body of water . . ."
[Section 304(a) of the Clean Water Act, 33 U.S.C.
1314(a)(1)]. States that do not adopt these criteria must
demonstrate alternative criteria using similar rigorous
analytical processes. This approach is rarely affordable,
and thus is not common. Water quality criteria are intended
to protect designated uses while not allowing
water quality to be degraded from ambient conditions
(the Antidegradation Principle). This provision is integrated
throughout the NPDES permitting process. Permits
cannot be written in such a way as to allow a waterbody’s
quality to be degraded from ambient conditions,
even if they are well above or below the quality necessary
to protect their designated uses.
NPDES permit writers must prepare wastewater discharge
permits in such a way as to consider effluent limitations,
water quality standards, and the antidegradation
principle. In theory, limits are calculated for each
pollutant constituent or class using each method. The
most restrictive (or protective) value is selected for permitting.
However, these processes are time-consuming
and expensive. Many permits are, therefore, prepared
using a “boilerplate” approach, applying generic criteria
from other permits.
WHERE DID TMDLS COME FROM
The CWA Section 303(d) specifies that States must
identify waters that are not attaining water quality standards
and submit a list to EPA of those impaired waters
(U.S. EPA, 2000c). These data are compiled by EPA into
a report to Congress (The National Water Quality Inventory),
often referred to as the 305(b) Report. The CWA Section
303(d) also specifies that States must develop Total
Maximum Daily Loads (TMDLs) or other watershed approaches
for restoring to compliance those streams listed.
TMDLs are calculations of the amount of a pollutant
that a waterbody can receive and still meet water quality
standards, or the sum of all allowable loads of a single
pollutant from all contributing point and nonpoint
sources. It includes reductions needed to meet water
quality standards and allocates those reductions among
sources in the watershed (U.S. EPA, 2000b). The language
of the CWA is very explicit [from Section 303(d) of
the Clean Water Act, 33 U.S.C. 131(d)(1)]:
Each State shall establish for the waters identified
in paragraph (1)(A) of this subsection, and in
accordance with the priority ranking, the total
maximum daily load, for those pollutants which
the Administrator identifies under section
1314(a)(2) of this title as suitable for such calculation.
Such load shall be established at a level necessary
to implement the applicable water quality
standards with seasonal variations and a margin
of safety which takes into account any lack of
knowledge concerning the relationship between
effluent limitations and water quality.
While the responsibility of implementing TMDLs resides
with States, the act makes it clear that the authority
for implementing them resides with the EPA as well
[Section 303(d) of the Clean Water Act, 33 U.S.C.
1313(d)(2)]. More than 20 Federal Judges have interpreted
this language very conservatively in response to suits
brought by environmental organizations against regional
EPA offices. The TMDL requirement grew out of a series
of Federal Court rulings rather than EPA rulemaking,
generating a rapid shift in water quality management
strategies.
During the first 20 years of the CWA, there was no
negative ramification for listing a waterbody on the 303(d)
list. The requirement that listed waterbodies be restored
using a TMDL or other watershed approach was never enforced.
States had no uniform approach to developing
303(d) lists and criteria were so nonspecific that a single
report of a fish kill on a river or lake in a two-year period
could result in the waterbody being listed. The result was
an inflated accounting of noncompliant waterbodies, and
somewhat inaccurate analysis of the degree and sources
of degradation of the Nation’s waters. In an attempt to
standardize the listing process, EPA has recently developed
a national Consolidated Assessment and Listing
Methodology (CALM) (U.S. EPA, 2000c). States are now
required to provide this information every four years
rather than two. Suddenly, if a waterbody was on the
303(d) list, it mattered.
The EPA has recently promulgated the Final Rule for
TMDLs [FR 65 (135), pp. 43586-43680, Thursday, July
13, 2000). This rule is the result of a contentious debate
between industry, agriculture, silviculture, and many
other parties, and implementation is on hold until 2002.
As written, the TMDL rule will shift water quality management
in listed waterbodies to water quality standardsbased
permits integrated with local nonpoint source controls.
EPA is also developing numeric criteria for nitrogen
and phosphorus in concert with the TMDL process, to be
implemented nationally by 2003. These criteria will be
developed on an ecoregions basis. The cost for implementing
these criteria could be enormous, given the cost
of reducing nutrients in waste flows. The potential for increased
local control through this process is very high,
since both nutrient criteria and TMDLs recognize the regional
variability of processes that control ambient water
quality. However, there is always a strong tendency within
Federal and State agencies to paint with a large brush.
Local control of these processes is going to be maintained
Volume 3 • Number 5 Water Resources IMPACT • 29

History of the Clean Water Act . . . cont’d.
only through local participation and activity as TMDLs
are implemented.
LITERATURE CITED
Houck, O.A., 1999. The Clean Water Act TMDL Program: Law,
Policy, and Implementation. Environmental Law Institute,
pg.11.
Rodgers, W.H., Jr., 1994. Environmental Law (Second Edition).
West Publishing, pg 259.
TNRCC, 1999. Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission
Memorandum of Agreement with EPA Region VI, 1999.
Implementation of the TPDES Program. TNRCC, Austin,
Texas,
U.S. EPA, 1996. NPDES Permit Writers’ Manual. U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency, Office of Water, December, 1996;
EPA-833-B-96-003.
U.S. EPA, 2000a. National Water Quality Inventory: 1998 Report
to Congress. EPA 841-R-00-001, U.S.Environmental Protection
Agency Office of Water (4503F), Washington, D.C.
U.S. EPA, 2000b. Water Quality Conditions in the United States:
A Profile from the 1998 National Water Quality Inventory
Report to Congress. EPA-841-F-00-006, U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency Office of Water (4503F), Washington, D.C.
U.S. EPA, 2000c. Consolidate Assessment and Listing Methodology
Fact Sheet. EPA 841-F-00-004, U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency Office of Water (4503F) Washington, D.C.
WEF (Water Environment Federation), 1997. The Clean Water
Act Desk Reference. Water Environment Federation, Washington,
D.C.
AUTHOR LINK
E-MAIL
Marty D. Matlock
Dept. of Biological & Agricultural Engr.
University of Arkansas
233 Engineering Hall
Fayetteville, AK 72701
(501) 575-2849 / (501) 575-2846
mmatlock@uark.edu
Charles A. Foster received a BS in finance at the University
of Minnesota. He has studied the effects of government
policy on agricultural production and commodity
prices and has published a number of articles on public
policy themes. He is currently a student at the University
of Utah College of Law.
Dr. Marty D. Matlock is an assistant professor of Ecological
Engineering at the University of Arkansas. He applies
the principles of biosystems engineering to improving
understanding, design, and management of humandominated
ecosystems. He investigates anthropogenic
impact on ecosystem functions such as nutrient cycling,
primary productivity, and carbon sequestration at the
watershed level.
❖ ❖ ❖
30 • Water Resources IMPACT September • 2001

▲ Heads Up!
Compiled by Jeff Edgens
▲ President’s Message
John S. Grounds III
AWRA President, 2001
EPA DELAYS TMDL RULE
In July 2000, EPA issued new rules for TMDL development.
Congress, in response to what it considered EPA
brazenness, delayed the effective date of the rules to October
2001, pending a National Academy of Sciences Report
on the cost of TMDL development for the states.
But in recent action, EPA has sought to settle numerous
court cases as it revises the TMDL rules package.
In an August 9 notice in the Federal Register, EPA has issued
a rule to delay by another 18 months the effective
date of the TMDL regulations to March 30, 2003. EPA is
expected to revise an alternate version of the rules before
the March 30 date.
According to the draft study released by EPA on August
3, costs for states and EPA in TMDL development
would be $63-$69 million per year. Point and nonpoint
sources claim the figures are too low. The assumptions
underlying EPA’s estimates are not clear, but the cost estimates
are based on earlier studies conducted for EPA.
Earlier cost figures assumed that all states had developed
TMDLs and the figures represented the incremental
costs to tackle nonpoint source concerns.
SCOTTISH HERITAGE
Our conference on "Globalization and Water Resources:
The Changing Value of Water" at the University
of Dundee, Scotland has set our place as a world leader
in water resources. With over 29 countries represented
and 115 delegates attending, we are building a legacy.
Our bequest will be that of education. We can improve
the availability and quality of water by overcoming limitations
of geography, politics, and society with successful
solutions developed, implemented, and conveyed by our
membership. Our heritage will be defined by the customs
that we adopt and exhibit. Customs such as our journal
with one in seven articles authored outside of the United
States, entire editions of Impact dedicated to international
affairs, special memberships to individuals in developing
nations, or conferences expertly executed in a foreign
land. I hope that you will dedicate your resources in supporting
what the world will inherit from the American
Water Resources Association. The scale of the influence
that you may have is limited to your exposure. Let the
world know what you have to offer through participation
in the international activities of the American Water Resources
Association.
KLAMATH RIVER BASIN
Oregon farmers are in the middle of a water allocation
controversy that pits irrigation against the in-stream
needs of fish and wildlife. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
issued a biological opinion this past spring that effectively
denies water for irrigation, opting instead to
leave it in the stream.
Farmers believe they are rightly entitled to the water
and that such a major last minute change in allocation
will work hardship on all producers in the Klamath
basin. The decision was made after farmers had placed
crops in the ground and after they had made decisions
for spring planting. Farmers have staged protests to draw
attention to their plight. Bureau of Reclamation officials
shut off water to 90 percent of the 220,000 acres in the
Klamath region to protect the endangered suckerfish and
coho salmon.
In recent action, Bureau of Reclamation rangers shut
off all water coming from the headgates and dismantled
the operating mechanism so they cannot be opened.
(Please e-mail your submissions or suggestions of timely
water quality efforts in your state or industry to me at
jedgens@ca.uyk.edu.)
❖ ❖ ❖
John S. Grounds III, AWRA President, 2001
❖ ❖ ❖
FUTURE AWRA MEETINGS
2001
NOVEMBER 12-15, 2001
ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
“ANNUAL WATER RESOURCES CONFERENCE”
2002
MAY 13-15, 2002
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
SPRING SPECIALTY CONFERENCE
“COASTAL WATER RESOURCES”
JULY 1-3, 2002
KEYSTONE, COLORADO
SUMMER SPECIALTY CONFERENCE
“GROUND WATER/SURFACE WATER
INTERACTIONS”
NOVEMBER 4-7, 2002
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
“ANNUAL WATER RESOURCES CONFERENCE”
For additional information / info@awra.org
Volume 3 • Number 5 Water Resources IMPACT • 31

▲ AWRA Business
2001 ELECTION RESULTS
(TAKE OFFICE EFFECTIVE JANUARY 1, 2002)
JANE L. VALENTINE
PRESIDENT-ELECT
(1-YEAR TERM)
Jane Valentine has been a
member of AWRA since 1978
and currently serves as a
member of the AWRA Board of
Directors. Her involvement in
the water resources field
began in 1968 with academic
enrollment in the Water
Chemistry Program of Civil
Engineering at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison. Studies
of pesticides in the environment and a diverse set of
courses spanning water supply, industrial waste, and microbiology
were pursued. An M.S. degree in Water Chemistry
was received for those efforts in 1970. A Ph.D. was
taken in water quality studies in the Environmental
Health Sciences Department at the University of Texas
School of Public Health. Studies on tap water exposures
and health were pursued as a major focus. Continued
studies of trace metal exposures through drinking water
and health were evaluated during postdoctoral studies at
the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry and expanded
upon during the current faculty appointment at
UCLA. Jane performed some of the initial and crucial
studies of arsenic and selenium exposures in drinking
water and health effects. Studies in various southwestern
and midwestern states were undertaken that have
served to form the basis for current consideration of
proposing new arsenic regulations and past deliberations
on selenium standards for drinking water. In the area of
community water resources involvement, Dr. Valentine
serves as a regular participant in the Santa Monica Bay
Restoration Project.
Serving on the AWRA Board for the past three years
has been a most rewarding experience. Recognizing the
need for a California Section of AWRA, she (with the help
of John Dracup) initiated the Southern California Section
of AWRA in June 2000. The group has since been run effectively
by Kelly Rowe (current AWRA Southern California
President), with Dr. Valentine as Section Secretary.
The Section has held monthly meetings and has attracted
a substantial group of water professionals. Dr. Valentine
has also served on the Cultural Diversity, International
Affairs, and Education Committees of AWRA.
Dr. Valentine has been selected for inclusion in Who’s
Who in Science and Technology, published by Marquis.
She is a consultant for NIH, NIEHS, EPA, and ATSDR, for
whom she reviews proposals and final reports. She has
served as Chair of the UCLA University Extension Committee,
as a member of the UCLA Legislative Assembly,
and as a past member of UC Academic Council. She is a
current member of the Bruin Caucus and Advocacy Programs,
also at UCLA. Dr. Valentine serves on the Board
of the UCLA Association of Academic Women. She has
also participated in various community activities in Los
Angeles and has served as President of the Los Angeles
Master Chorale Associates (volunteer support group) and
as a Member of the Board of the Los Angeles Master
Chorale Association (the main Board of the Master
Chorale). Dr. Valentine loves her involvement with the
local and academic communities and looks forward to
applying such enthusiasm to the continued growth of
AWRA.
KENNETH H. RECKHOW
DIRECTORS
(3-YEAR TERM)
Kenneth H. Reckhow is a professor
at Duke University with
faculty appointments in the
School of the Environment
and the Department of Civil
and Environmental Engineering.
In addition, he is director
of The University of North
Carolina Water Resources Research
Institute and an adjunct
professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at
North Carolina State University. He currently serves as
President of the National Institutes for Water Resources
and is Chair of the North Carolina Sedimentation Control
Commission. He has published two books and over 80
papers, principally on water quality modeling, monitoring,
and pollutant loading analysis. In addition, Dr. Reckhow
has taught several short courses on water quality
modeling and monitoring design, and he has written
eight technical guidance manuals on water quality modeling.
He is serving, or has served, on the editorial boards
of Water Resources Research, Water Resources Bulletin,
Lake and Reservoir Management, Journal of Environmental
Statistics, Urban Ecosystems, and Risk Analysis. He
received a B.S. in engineering physics from Cornell University
in 1971 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in
environmental systems analysis in 1977. Dr. Reckhow is
Chair of the National Academy of Sciences Committee to
Assess the Scientific Basis for the EPA TMDL Program
and is currently a member of the National Academy of
Sciences Committee to Improve the USGS National Water
Quality Assessment Program.
32 • Water Resources IMPACT September • 2001

▲ AWRA Business . . . cont’d.
CLAIRE WELTY
Claire Welty is currently Associate
Professor of Environmental
Engineering at Drexel
University in Philadelphia,
where she teaches courses in
water resources and carries
out research in the ground
water area. Her research is
principally funded by the National
Science Foundation, including
a current NSF/EPA/USDA Water and Watersheds
grant to study the effects of urbanization on the
hydrology of Valley Creek watershed near Philadelphia.
Dr. Welty received her Ph.D. from M.I.T. in Civil Engineering
in 1989, and joined Drexel University upon
graduation. Prior to that she worked at EPA in Washington,
D.C., and earned an M.S. in Environmental Engineering
at George Washington University while employed
at EPA. It was during this period that she became active
with AWRA, joining the National Capital Section in 1982.
Over the years, Dr. Welty has also been active with the
Water Resources Planning and Management Division of
ASCE and the Hydrology Section of the American Geophysical
Union. Dr. Welty has held positions as Associate
Editor of the ASCE Journal of Water Resources Planning
and Management, Associate Editor and Deputy Editor of
Water Resources Research, and Editorial Board Member
of Advances in Water Resources. She has served on three
National Research Council committees within the past
three years, representing expertise in the ground water
hydrology area.
Dr. Welty’s most recent involvement in AWRA has
been as co-founder and first President of the Philadelphia
Metropolitan Area Section of AWRA. Along with Eric Lienhard
and other employees of Greeley and Hansen Engineers,
she spearheaded forming this AWRA section in the
summer of 2000, basing its operations on the very successful
model of AWRA’s National Capital Section. As the
first year of AWRA-PMAS comes to an end, this new section
boasts 89 members from the tri-state region surrounding
Philadelphia, with an average attendance of 42
at the nine luncheon meetings and one field trip held over
the past year.
❖ ❖ ❖
SUBSCRIPTION RATES / WATER RESOURCES IMPACT
DOMESTIC...................................................$45.00
FOREIGN.....................................................$55.00
FOREIGN AIRMAIL OPTION ..............................$25.00
CONTACT THE AWRA HQ OFFICE FOR
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION OR TO SUBSCRIBE
MEMBER NEWS
DAVID W. LAYTON, was elected President of the Zone 7
Water Agency by its Directors on July 18, 2001. The transition
from outgoing President John Marchand to newlyelected
President David Layton is expected to be smooth,
with Layton stepping up to his new post from his previous
position as Vice President of the Board. Layton has
served on the Zone 7 Board since 1992. This will be his
second term as President. Layton leads the Health and
Ecological Assessment Division at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory where he has worked for 25 years.
He has been a member of the American Water Resources
Association for many years.
❖ ❖ ❖
New Publication Available
HYDROLOGY/WATERSHED MANAGEMENT
TECHNICAL COMMITTEE MEMBERS
Here is an announcement about a publication that may be
of interest to you . . . Jan Bowers, Committee Chair.
A book titled “Watershed Protection: A Statewide
Approach” is now available from the National Small Flows
Clearinghouse (NSFC). Produced by the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency Office of Water, this book is one
of two watershed protection guides designed for state
water quality managers and others involved in watershed-based
activities as they adopt, implement, and evaluate
watershed protection programs. The book discusses
the premise of the watershed protection approach: that
many water quality and ecosystem problems are best
solved at the watershed level rather than at the individual
waterbody or discharger level. This 81-page book
may be useful to planners, local and state officials, and
the general public. The book is free. To order, call the
NSFC at (800) 624-8301 or (304) 293-4191 or e-mail
and request Item No.
GNBKGN14.
Funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency, the National Small Flows Clearinghouse (NSFC)
helps small communities find affordable wastewater
treatment alternatives to protect public health and the
environment. Located at West Virginia University, the
NSFC is a nonprofit organization established in 1979
under an amendment to the 1977 Clean Water Act. Since
that time, the NSFC has become a respected national
source of information about "small flows" technologiesthose
systems that have fewer than one million gallons of
wastewater flowing through them per day-ranging from
individual septic systems to small sewage treatment
plants.
Anyone who works with small communities to help
solve wastewater treatment problems can benefit from
the NSFC's services, which include more than 450 free
and low-cost educational products, a toll-free technical
assistance hotline, five computer databases, two free
publications, and an online discussion group.
❖ ❖ ❖
Volume 3 • Number 5 Water Resources IMPACT • 33

▲ AWRA Business . . . cont’d.
COLORADO SECTION SCHOLARSHIP
PROGRAM BRIDGES GAP BETWEEN
PROFESSIONAL AND STUDENT MEMBERS
The Colorado Section of the AWRA began its scholarship
program in 1991 when the Section awarded its
first scholarship. Since the program’s inception, the Colorado
Section has awarded annual scholarships to 25
different individuals in amounts up to $1,500 and totaling
$27,000. Scholarship recipients must be enrolled in
a graduate or undergraduate program at an accredited
college or university in Colorado and pursuing research
or independent study in areas related to water resources.
The Section’s scholarship committee awards scholarships
based on the student’s application, which includes
a copy of the applicant’s resumé, abstract of current research,
and letter of recommendation from a faculty advisor.
At the end of the academic year, the scholarship recipients
have the opportunity to make presentations to
the Section membership, summarizing their research efforts.
This allows the Section membership to learn firsthand
about the recipients’ research projects, and the recipients
have an opportunity to network with professionals
in the water resources field.
The AWRA Colorado Section scholarships are given
in memory of Rich Herbert, a former member of the Colorado
Section and the National AWRA Board of Directors.
Rich had a great interest in water resources education
and was instrumental in establishing the Colorado Section
scholarship fund. He first became active in the
AWRA Louisiana Section while with the U.S. Geological
Survey. He was president of the Louisiana Section and
later elected to the National AWRA Board as West-South-
Central Director in 1985. Upon his return to Colorado,
Rich served on several AWRA committees and chaired the
Conference Planning Committee in 1988 and Education
Committee in 1989. In recognition of his contributions to
AWRA, Rich was given the President’s Award for Outstanding
Service in 1989. Of his many professional accomplishments,
Rich was perhaps most proud of his role
in developing the Water-Resources Education Initiative.
In 1989 he instigated a joint AWRA/USGS program to
promote water-resources education among secondary
and elementary students. Rich was diagnosed with cancer
in 1993 and died in March 1994. Shortly thereafter,
it was without hesitation that the Colorado Section dedicated
what had by then become an annual award as the
Rich Herbert Memorial Scholarship in honor and memory
of his inspiration and unselfish contributions.
Funds for the scholarship program are raised
through two primary sources. Contributions from individual
members, corporations, and institutions have
comprised a significant part of the fund raising effort, but
the majority of the funds come from proceeds of the Section’s
annual symposium. The symposium is an all-day
conference in which presenters from private, corporate,
institutional, and governmental sectors come together to
share ideas and experiences revolving around a central
theme related to water resource issues. The symposium
is held in a scenic country club setting in the foothills of
the Rocky Mountains about 20 minutes from downtown
Denver. Between the idyllic location and the excellent
food served, the symposium can’t help but be a success.
The Colorado Section is obviously proud of the scholarship
program. Perhaps the Section’s success will inspire
other Sections who may not have similar programs. Besides
having the satisfaction of knowing the Section’s efforts
have gone to furthering education and knowledge in
a field of common interest, several of the former scholarship
recipients have become active contributors to the
Colorado Section in varying capacities. To learn more
about the Colorado Section’s Scholarship program, including
how to apply for next year’s scholarship, click on
the Scholarship button on the Colorado Section’s web
site, which is linked to the National AWRA homepage
(www.awra.org).
Submitted by Bill Bates
Denver Water Department
❖ ❖ ❖
▲ Future Issues of IMPACT
NOVEMBER 2001
JONATHAN JONES, ASSOCIATE EDITOR
URBAN BMPS AND RECEIVING WATER IMPACT
E-MAIL: krwright@wrightwater.com
JANUARY 2002
CLAY J. LANDRY
THE BUSINESS OF WATER
E-MAIL: landry@perc.org
TENTATIVE SUBJECTS
FOR FUTURE ISSUES
SMALL MUNICIPALITIES AND WATER SUPPLY
COASTAL MANAGEMENT PROBLEMS
ISSUES IN WATER RESOURCES EDUCATION
DISTANCE LEARNING IN WATER RESOURCES
INTERNATIONAL TRANSBOUNDARY
WATER DISPUTES
POST FIRE MANAGEMENT
NATURAL DISASTERS /
EXTREME EVENT PLANNING
URBAN MANAGEMENT PROBLEMS
WATER QUALITY TRADING
WATERSHED COUNCILS REVISITED
DAM REMOVAL
If you wish to submit an article for any of the above
issues, contact the Associate Editor (if listed) or the
Editor-In-Chief, N. Earl Spangenberg.
34 • Water Resources IMPACT September • 2001

PAPERS APPEARING IN THE
JOURNAL OF THE
AMERICAN WATER RESOURCES ASSOCIATION
AIGIST 2001 • VOL. 37 • NO. 4
DIALOGUE ON WATER ISSUES
• Watersheds Are Not Equal: Exploring the Feasibility of
Watershed Management
• Establishing Watershed Management in Law: New Zealand’s
Experience
TECHNICAL PAPERS
• Mercury in Water and Sediment of Steamboat Creek, Nevada:
Implications for Stream Restoration
• Utilization of Landscape Indicators to Model Potential
Pathogen Impaired Waters
• The Epidemiology of Monitoring
• Predictability of Surface Water Pollution Loading in
Pennsylvania Using Watershed-Based Landscape
Measurements
• Multiobjective Real-Time Reservoir Operations With a Network
Flow Algorithm
• Simulated Annealing With Memory and Directional Search
for Ground Water Remediation Design
• Application of Enhanced Annealing to Ground Water
Remediation Design
• Seasonal ARIMA Inflow Models for Reservoir Sizing
• Trophic State Evaluation for Selected Lakes in Grand Teton
National Park
• Accuracy and Precision of NRCS Models for Small Watersheds
• RiverWare: A Generalized Tool for Complex Reservoir System
Modeling
• Sensitivity Considerations When Modeling Hydrologic
Processes With Digital Elevation Model
• Development and Application of a Spatial Hydrology Model of
Okefenokee Swamp, Georgia
• Stormflow Simulation Using a Geographical Information
System With a Distributed Approach
• The Effects of Climate Change on Stream Flow and Nutrient
Loading
• Susceptibility of Indiana Watersheds to Herbicide
Contamination
• Sampling Frame for Improving Pebble Count Accuracy in
Coarse Gravel-Bed Streams
• Identification of an Optimal Sampling Strategy for a
Constructed Wetland
• Sacramento River Flow Reconstructed to A.D. 869 From Tree
Rings
• Mesoscale Atmospheric 2XCO2 Climate Change Simulation
Applied to an Oregon Watershed
JAWRA
Journal of the American Water Resources Association
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Volume 3 • Number 5 Water Resources IMPACT • 35

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36 • Water Resources IMPACT September • 2001

• 2001 • 69 Papers • 3 Abstracts • 430 Pages • Soft Cover
• $40.00/AWRA Member • $50.00/Non-Member • ISBN 1-882132-54-8
• Proceedings available for purchase at www.awra.org •
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UNIVERSITIES COUNCIL ON WATER RESOURCES
UCOWR
ANNUAL CONFERENCE
PROCEEDINGS
Decision Support
Systems For
Water Resources
Management
JUNE 27-30, 2001
SNOWBIRD, UTAH
AMERICAN WATER RESOURCES ASSOCIATION
ADVANCING MULTIDISCIPLINARY WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT AND RESEARCH
As water resources managers struggle to satisfy society’s growing demand for water, we rely increasingly
on technology and information to increase the efficiency of our aging storage and delivery
systems. Decision Support Systems (DSS) have matured during the past decade and become a way of
life in water resources management. Integrated data collection and control systems are now widely
used. Although DSS use was initially hampered by inadequate real-time data, some systems now suffer
from information overload; data is received at a faster rate and volume than it can be processed
and assimilated. Never has there been a greater opportunity or better reasons to exploit the use of DSS
than now; and never has there been a greater need for research and development of DSS information
technologies as applied to water resources management, and for education and training to support
their proper use. A closer look at the splendid beauty and majestic peaks of the Wasatch Mountains
exemplifies the problem. The snow pack is below normal again; this year makes several consecutive
years of below normal winter precipitation and above normal temperatures in the mountain west. Yet,
in the valley below – clearly visible through the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon – lays a thirsty
metropolitan community bustling with growth. This desert community demands more water for culinary
and industrial uses, wastewater treatment, and irrigation than ever before. It relies on hydropower
generation as a significant source of electricity, and at the same time it appreciates the value
of water as a recreational resource and is demanding higher reservoir levels and summer-time stream
flows for fishing, boating, and swimming. It recognizes the environmental value of natural stream
flows and natural stream channels, and is a community for which water is the source of both life and
controversy. The setting for the Conference could hardley be more fitting. It brought together a unique mix of water resources management practitioners
and academicians focused on how to exploit information technology and the Internet in DSS.
This published proceedings represents a good sampling of presentations made throughout the conference. Author contact information appears
on the first page of each paper and will allow interested readers to followup directly with authors, thereby propagating the dissemination of information
beyond the conference and this published volume. Papers are included on the following topics: • Decision Tools for Integrated Watershed
Mgmt.; • Information Mgmt. in Water Resources; • Innovative Approaches to Water Resources Education; • Watershed Mgmt. & TMDL Issues; •
Water Quality Protection & Prediction; • Managing Water Resources for Divergent Political Interests; • Water Resources Mgmt. & Ecological
Restoration; • Systems Approaches to Water Resources Mgmt.; • Innovative Ground Water Mgmt.; • Irrigation Mgmt. Systems; • Managing Floods
& Floodplains; • Decision Support in Water Supply Sytems; • Decision Support Systems for Managing Western Watersheds; and • Water Resources
Mgmt. in the Middle East. (Proceedings includes several pages that have been printed in four-color.)
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Volume 3 • Number 5 Water Resources IMPACT • 37

• 2001 • 42 Papers • 10 Abstracts • 284 Pages • Soft Cover
• $40.00/AWRA Member • $50.00/Non-Member • ISBN 1-882132-53-X
• Proceedings available for purchase at www.awra.org •
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Water
Quality
Monitoring
and
Modeling
PROCEEDINGS
APRIL 30-MAY 2, 2001
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
The focus of this conference was freshwater quality, including both surface water and ground water.
Presentations summarized monitoring studies, including both long-term and one-time synoptic field
data collection efforts, along with strategies designed to support adaptive management restoration efforts.
Presentations also covered modeling efforts, including all organized methods of data interpretation
from statistical analysis through numerical simulation of hydrodynamics and associated water
quality transformations. Finally, significant attention was also given to the relationship between monitoring
and modeling in various studies.
The need to understand the current state of water quality has never been greater. Understanding
is not merely reporting a water quality observation, but rather involves developing insight to explain
its value. Specifically, our insight must help explain the relationships between human activities and
desired water quality. A continued growth in population, coupled with increased expectations of acceptable
water quality, places an ever-growing demand on this need to understand. The financial ramifications
associated with limited understanding are increasing dramatically. It is, therefore, crucially
important for us to be monitoring appropriate system attributes at correct spatial and temporal scales.
Our interpretation (i.e., modeling) of collected data must capture true system functionality while clearly
relating management alternatives to desired water quality goals. The drive to establish Total Maximum
Daily Loads (TMDLs) for over 20,000 river segments, lakes, and estuaries across the United
States highlights our need to better understand water quality and to do so soon.
This published proceedings represents a good sampling of presentations made throughout the
conference. The volume is organized in the same manner in which the conference was held, by sessions. Author contact information that appears on
the first page of each paper will allow interested readers to follow-up directly with authors, thereby propagating the dissemination of information beyond
the conference and this published volume. Papers are included on the following topics: • Indices of Water Quality; • Basins & HSPF; • Surface
Water Quality Monitoring Strategies; • Characterizing Ground Water Contaminant Plumes; • Techniques in Load Estimating; • Surface Water/Ground
Water Interactions; • Assessment of Fresh Water Impacts on Estuaries; • Surface Water Quality Modeling Case Studies, • Uncertainties in Developing
TMDLs; • Pesticides in Surface Water; • Characterization & Impacts of Urban Runoff; • Ground Water Quality; • Pathogens in Surface Water; •
Defining Biological Resources; and • South-Central Texas Systems.
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38 • Water Resources IMPACT September • 2001

▲ Water Resources Puzzler (answers on pg. 41)
ACROSS
1 vodka and orange juice
7 river in California
12 civil service job classification
14 escapeway
15 perfect
16 Red or Black
17 Louisville and Nashville and Sante Fe
19 unit of weight
21 pertaining to a kitchen
22 sway
23 not out
24 matches
26 followed by heat or period
28 ancient Greek colonade
30 word from a history course
32 architects’ group
33 maxim
35 spokes of a wheel
37 deface
38 football score
39 trig function
41 execs ride in these
43 a pronoun
44 “_______ to Billy Joe”
46 cotton cloth
48 Cleo’s river
49 flat
51 one who acts in self interest
53 period of time (abbr.)
55 exposure to risk
56 location of Juniata River
57 mother’s command to child
58 professor’s helper
60 illegal drug sellers
63 river in England
65 ascend
67 a blood deficiency
69 not any
70 dealer
71 Peter _______ of TV fame
72 extremely cold
75 hydraulic grade _______
77 hard _______ to crack
78 a drinking spree
79 American auto pioneer
80 Redding or Skinner
DOWN
1 air or magnetic
2 Hawaiian feast
3 type of bill
4 tributary of the Mississippi River
5 Laura or Bruce
6 ermine
7 June and July
8 Koch and Asner
9 memo heading
10 Suez or Erie
11 map features
12 prefix for hydrology
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
14
17
21
33
38
44
49
55
23
60
29
24
34
18
65 66 67
68
69
72
78
28
45
39
50
73 74
46
70
61
30
40
56
15
13 hygenic
16 a small river
18 lacking water
20 followed by blanket or cell
25 German prisoner-of-war camp
27 city on the Niger River
28 followed by shoe or soap
29 60s rock group: “The _______”
31 part of TAE
33 cork or plug
34 growl
36 contraction
40 “Mister _______” of TV fame
42 river in Burma
45 Virgil and Wyatt
47 brought up
50 “Savage Island”
52 Greek letter
54 offends
56 followed by code or service
59 quantity
61 Ethiopian province
62 one of the senses
64 boredom
66 _______ of Man
68 any plant belonging to the iris family
70 neckware
72 location of 63 across (abbr.)
73 symbol for actinon
74 bank purchase
76 Canadian province (abbr.)
❖ ❖ ❖
25
22
57
19
26
35 36
47
51
79
41
31
52
62 63
75 76
48
20
42
58
71
80
16
32
37
59
77
12
27
43
53
64
13
54
Volume 3 • Number 5 Water Resources IMPACT • 39

▲ Water Resources Continuing Education Opportunities
MEETINGS, WORKSHOPS, SHORT COURSES
SEPTEMBER 2001
22-23/Conf. on Stormwater & Urban Water Systems
Modeling. Toronto, ON, Canada. Contact Dr. Lyn
James, CHI, 36 Stuart St. Guelph, ON, Canada
N1E 4S5 (519/767-0197; f: 519/767-2770;
e: info@chi.on.ca; w: www.chi.on.ca)
24-26/Water Resources Mgmt. 2001. Halkidiki, Greece.
Contact Conf. Secretariat WRM 2001, Wessex Inst.
of Technology, Ashurst Lodge, Ashurst, Southampton,
SO40 7AA, UK (w: www.wessex.ac.uk/
conferences/2001/wrm01/)
OCTOBER 2001
2-5/Applicaton of Remote Sensing in Hydrology - 5th
Int'l Workshop. Montpellier, France. Contact
R. Granger, raoul.granger@ec.gc.ca; voice: 306/
975-5787; http://hydrors2001.teledetection.fr
14-17/Hydrologic Science: Challenges for the 21st Century.
Bloomington, MN. Contact AIH, 2499 Rice St.
Ste. 135, St. Paul, MN 55113-3724 (e: AIHydro@
aol.com; w: www.aihydro.org)
18-20/Non-Structural Measures for Water Management
Problems - UNESO and Western Ontario Workshop.
London, Ontario, Canada. Contact Prof. Slobodan
P. Simonovic (e: simononovic@uwo.ca)
22-25/Contaminated Soils, Sediments, and Water -
17th Annual Intn'l Conference. Amherst, MA.
Contact University Conference Services CS02-02,
918 Campus Center, University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, MA 01003. (f: 413/545-0050; w:
www.UmassSoils.com)
25-27/IV Water Information Summit. Panama City,
Panamá. Contact Lenin Montano, CATHALAC, P.O.
Box 873372, Panamá 7, Rep. of Panamá
(+507/317-0125; f: +507/317-0127; e: wis4@
cathalac.org; w: www.cathalac.org; http://www.
waterweb.org); or David W. Moody, Inter-American
Water Resources Network (603/835-7900;
f: 603/835-6279; e: dwmoody@beaverwood.com);
or Terry Dodge, Water Web Consortium (561/961-
8557; f: 561/691-8540; e: tdodge@ces.fau.edu;
w: www.waterweb.org)
NOVEMBER 2001
5-9/Process Based Channel Design Short Course 2001.
Vancouver, WA. Contact Lisa Hughes, Inter-Fluve,
Inc. (406/586-6926; e: lhughes@interfluve.com;
w: www.interfluve.com)
6-7/The Practice of Restoring Native Ecosystems. Nebraska
City, NE. Contact National Arbor Day
Foundation, P.O. Box 81415, Lincoln, NE 68501-
1415 (402/474-5655; f: 402/474-0820;
e: conferences@arborday.org)
7-9/Bridging the Gaps Between Science, Policy, & Practice
– NALMS Sym. Madison, WI. Contact
T. Thiessen (e: thiessen@nalms.org;
w: www.nalms.org)
7-9/Annual Course on “Facilitating and Mediating Effective
Environmental Agreements.” UC-Berkeley,
CA. Contact CONCUR (510/649-8008;
e: concur@concurinc.net; w: www.concurinc.com)
12-15/AWRA’s Annual Water Res. Conf. Albuquerque,
NM. Contact AWRA, 4 West Federal St.,
P.O. Box 1626, Middleburg, VA 20118-1626
(540/687-8390; f: 540/687-8395;
e: info@awra.org)
14-16/ Groundwater Technology Conf. Pittsburgh, PA.
Contact Groundwater Foundation (402/434-2740;
e: cindy@groundwater.org)
26-29/Water for Human Survival – International Regional
Sym. New Delhi, India. Contact Mr. A.R.G.
Rao, Director (Water Resources), Central Board of
Irrigation and Power, India (e: cbip@nda.vsnl.net.in)
FEBRUARY 2002
25-March 1/IECA 33rd Annual Conf. Orlando, FL.
Contact International Erosion Control Association,
P.O. Box 774904, Steamboat Springs, CO 80477-
4904 (970/879-3010; f: 970/879-8563;
e: ecinfo@ieca.org; w: www.ieca.org)
MAY 2002
29-31/Ninth International Conf. on Hydraulic Information
Management – HYDROSOFT 2002. Montreal,
Canada. Contact Lucy Southcott, Conf. Secretatiat,
HYDROSOFT 2002, Wessex Inst. of Technology,
Ashurst Lodge, Ashurst, Sjouthhampton, SO40
7AA, UK (+44(0)238-029-3223; f: +44(0)238-029-
2853; e: lsouthcott@wessex.ac.uk; w:www.
wessex.ac.uk/conferences/2002/hy02
JULY 2002
23-26/Integrated Transboundary Water Management.
Traverse City, MI. Contact EWRI of ASCE, 2002
Conference (UCOWR), 1015 15th St., NW, Ste 600,
Washington, D.C. 20005 (202/789-2200; f: 202/
789-0212; e: ewri@asce.org;
w: www.uwin.siu.edu/ucowr)
CALLS FOR ABSTRACTS
October 1, 2001 (Abstracts Due) – Integrated Transboundary
Water Management. July 23-26, 2002. Traverse
City, MI. Contact EWRI of ASCE, 2002 Conference
(UCOWR), 1015 15th St., NW, Ste 600, Washington,
D.C. 20005 (202/789-2200; f: 202/ 789-0212;
e: ewri@asce.org; w: www.uwin.siu.edu/ucowr)
October 26, 2001 (Abstracts Due) – AWRA’s Annual
Spring Conf. – “Coastal Water Resources.” New Orleans,
LA. Contact AWRA, 4 West Federal St., P.O.
Box 1626, Middleburg, VA 20118-1626 (540/687-
8390; f: 540/687-8395; e: info@awra.org)
❖ ❖ ❖
40 • Water Resources IMPACT September • 2001

▲ Feedback . . . N. Earl Spangenberg, Editor-In-Chief
Vol. 3 No. 4 July 2001 “International Water Resources
Activities”
Water Resources IMPACT is one of the most valuable publications
produced by AWRA. The July 2001 issue was particularly
informative and will be of considerable use to many
readers. Please extend my thanks to all who participated in
preparing materials for this issue. Much of the material in all
the issues of Water Resources IMPACT will likely have lasting
value. It provides a record of thinking and concerns of our
times. I think it highly desirable to make the material
archival, possibly electronically on a www server. Kudos for
your excellent work.
Stephen J. Burges
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Thanks for your kind note to Earl about the July 2001 issue
of IMPACT. Following up on a similar suggestion made at the
recent AWRA "Globalization and Water" conference in Scotland,
we're going to start indexing IMPACT articles just like
JAWRA. Thus,
will search both publications, and a table of contents for each
issue will be posted. We expect to start putting selected
JAWRA articles on line starting with the February 2002 issue,
and to have entire issues on line by December 2002. We plan
to continue to place at least the PDF version of Impact on line
also.
Ken Lanfear, AWRA President-Elect 2001
U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, VA
Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 20-24, July 2001 – “A Global Initiative
for Hydro-Socio-Ecological Watershed Research” by
Theodore A. Endreny
BRIDGING THE PARADIGM LOCK
Endreny (2001) discusses the four obstacles standing in
the way of implementing sustainable water resource management
plans. These are: (1) sufficient demonstrations of
successful watershed management schemes, (2) lack of international
and interdisciplinary coordination, (3) a decline
in water quality monitoring and research, and (4) the “Paradigm
Lock.” I submit that the inability to bridge the inherent
communications gap caused by the “Paradigm Lock,” as described
by Bonnell, et al. (2001), can be circumvented by understanding
that the scientists involved in Process Hydrology
on one side, and the professional and lay public Decision
Makers on the other must both embrace common notions of
the fundamental nature and importance of water on this
planet. If that is successfully achieved, the isolation and
poor communication between the two groups will dissolve,
leaving the way open for truly interdisciplinary solutions to
wide-spread water resource management problems as well
as enabling sufficient time, energy, and resources to overcome
the first three obstacles.
In elementary school science classes students learn that
water is ubiquitous, that we cannot live without it; that 97
percent of the Earth’s water is in the oceans that cover 70
percent of the planet’s surface; that 90 percent of our bodies
is water, and so on. The information is impressive, but does
not stick and, as a consequence, the importance of its
applicability isn’t appreciated. And, by the time we graduate
from college or graduate programs and are thoroughly indoctrinated
by the disciplinary nature of our professions or
are infused with the propaganda of environmentalists’ organizations,
we forget these fundamental principles: that without
water we would not be here; that with the exception of
nuclear reactions, all chemical reactions on this planet – and
probably in the universe – take place in the presence of
water; that, as Marston Bates pointed out, we live at the interface
of a continuum from the bottom of the oceans to the
tops of the trees, and often have only a limited interface view,
and so on. For a wonderful example of the understanding
needed, see John Grounds’ Presidents’ Message on pg. 41 of
the July issue of Water Resources IMPACT.
If we really understand and accept the reality and significance
of water-based life, the two sides of HELP’s “Paradigm
Lock” would have the basis for setting a mutual goal,
along with the basis for establishing effective partnerships
that would achieve mutually-desired objectives. The bottom
line: for an across-the-paradigm-lock solution, both “sides”
must have a common goal. The common goal that professionals,
decision makers, and the lay public need to embrace
is simply the sustainability of life on Earth, the aquatic planet.
LITERATURE CITED
Bates, M., 1960. The Forest and the Sea. Mentor Books, New
York, New York.
Bonnell, M., 2001. Health, Environment, Life, and Policy (HELP)
Programme. Introductory remarks at a Plenary Session Panel
on HELP. AWRA International Specialty Conference on Globalization
and Water Management: The Changing Value of
Water, Dundee, Scotland.
Endreny T. 2001. A Global Initiative for Hydro-Socio-Ecological
Watershed Research. Water Resources Impact 3(4):20-24.
Peter E. Black (peblack@esf.edu)
Distinguished Prof. of Water and Related Land
Resources (retired)
SUNY College of Environ. Science and Forestry
Syracuse, NY
❖ ❖ ❖
Solution to Puzzle on pg. 39
Volume 3 • Number 5 Water Resources IMPACT • 41

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