PUB00111

• Year: 1996
• Title: Layperson's Guide to Water Pollution
• CWCB Section: Interstate & Federal
• Author: California Water Education Foundation
• Description: Layperson's Guide to Water Pollution
• Publications - Doc Type: Other

has been enough to make the water safer for
swimming and reduced the odorous and unsightly
algae I blooms.

California has initiated an Adopt-a-Watershed
program that encourages school children to use a
neighborhood stream as a living laboratory. The
Neighborhood Green Corps helps communities
become stewards of their streams by painting "No
Dumping" on storm drains, encouraging cleanup
days, and monitoring against polluters. The U.S.
Department of Agriculture offers incentive payments
to farmers who reduce erosion and control runoff
polluted with nutrients, pesticides and animal waste
while maintaining economical farm operations.

The need for continued vigilance in monitoring
industries became clear in early 1995 when Shell
Oil Co. settled a citizen lawsuit in which it was
charged with hundreds of violations of the CWA tor
discharging selenium, a petroleum refinery
byproduct, into San Francisco Bay. Researchers
found that some birds in the Bay had higher con-
centrations of selenium than the thousands of dead
and deformed birds discovered a decade earlier at
the Kesterson refuge. Shell agreed to pay $3 million,
and since the suit was filed in 1992, the company
has reduced the selenium discharged from its
refinery. The 1995 Shell lawsuit settlement conditions
mirror a 1994 enforcement order issued by the

SAN JOAQUIN RIVER

In dry months of the year, the lower reaches of
the San Joaquin River consist almost entirely of
agricullural runoff, replete with pesticides, salls
and other potentially harmful elements.

Intense farming defines the basin's complex water
qualify problems. Water is used and reused on
crops. Water is diverted from streams and
pumped from the ground, used to irrigate crops,
and ultimately much of it makes its way back to
both the river and underground aquifers. The
San Joaquin Valley's surface water problems
have become a case study. Generations of
chemical use have contaminated fish with
chlordane, DDT and toxaphene. Water samples
show that other contemporary chemicals also
pollute the river, often to a point that is toxic to
the small organisms that fish feed on. Irrigation
runoff also carries salts and other naturally
occurring elements - arsenic, selenium, boron-

San Francisco Regional Water Quality
Control Board for reducing selenium
discharges.

The State Board's fechnical review
committee recognized that watershed
management plans go beyond regu-
lations and physical projects. Water-
shed plans can engender - and at the
end of the day rely upon - the support
and participation of the people who
manage and use the land.

"Focusing on the watershed scale pro-
vides an appropriate sense of place
and identity to allow the partnerships
to be fruitful and feeling of steward-
ship to evolve," the committee
concluded. "The watershed scale also
allows for an integrated and compre-
hensive understanding of the natural
resources to be managed."

One place this concept is evolving into
reality is Tomales Bay north of San Francisco.
Ranchers, farmers, scientists and community leaders
have crafted a plan that calls for detailed study, public
education programs and targeted pollution controls
to reduce the flows of sediment and nutrients
into the bay.

that concentrate in the food chain and have killed
and deformed waterfowl.

The long-term consequences of the pollution are
now being felt, and the potential costs are
enormous. Pesticides used to sterilize soil have
contaminated hundreds of wells. Fifty of Fresno's
300 wells have been closed because of con-
tamination by a long-banned pesticide, DBCP,
forcing it to drill new wells or seek out scarce
surface water supplies. But the city's own polluted
runoff also is a concern. Fresno has tried to
manage the groundwater by capturing winter
rains and recharging the aquifer for future use.

That system could help satisfy growing water
needs. But its success will rest in part on whether
Fresno residents can curb their own pOllution so
that today's runoff can safely become tomorrow's
tap water.

I

Oil re.fineries (ire (i major
source ofselelliu11l in
.)"afl Francisco Bay.
Re,\"l~archers Iim'e found
some birds ill rlie hay h'irh
hif.:her COflcefltrarioll.5 of
selellium than rhose hirds
discm'ered at Kesti'r.wn
!?eserw,ir il1 rhe
early /980s.

19