by Rita Mcconnell

Created on: September 22, 2009   Last Updated: September 24, 2009

When concerns arise about specific aspects of our environment, as they have recently about water quality, the simple human reaction is to wonder who or what is to blame.

Yet faced with today's water issues, most of us will find no comfort in pointing fingers. That is because, in one way or another, we are all essentially to blame.

When enforcement of the Clean Water Act came into its own, most pollution sources were noted to be what the Environmental Protection Agency refers to as point sources, or stationary plants, factories, mills or facilities that, as part of their operations, discharge pollutants directly to a waterway.

A key strategy of protecting water quality was to identify and permit these facilities through the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES). NPDES permits set limits to the amount of pollutants facilities can discharge to waterways, and require both reporting of and compliance with those limits.

Later, and much more recently, water quality efforts in the United States turned to non-point source sources of pollution. Pollution abatement began to focus on more moving targets, like run-off from parking lots, corporate farms, housing developments and the like.

While progress has been made, substantial challenges still exist in the abatement of both point and non-point source pollution. But the ultimate sources, as in many cases of environmental whodunit, are humans.

Issue #1

One primary contributor of pollution to our waterways, as unsavory as it may be, is a broken sewer system. Most major American cities have severely-aged sewer and water infrastructure that can no longer handle the requirements placed on them by increased populations and usage.

As a result, most have what EPA refers to as a Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) problem, which means that during times of heavy rain, sewage treatment facilities are often overwhelmed by combined sewer and storm water flow, causing the whole mess to be bypassed through treatment to rivers and streams.

Most people who live in city centers would probably be surprised to know that public sewage is less common in sub-divisions, suburbs and rural areas. Malfunctioning on-lot septic systems are often the norm rather than the exception, and wild-cat sewers, where home or camp site owners simply run lines from bathroom facilities to waterways are more than myth.

The reason many of us are responsible for this? It's not what you think, although the fact that we all use the facilities from time

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