BY SUSAN EVANS
Pennsylvania’s history of protecting its water supply has been slow and unsteady, pandering much of the time to industrialists who have polluted the state’s rivers.
Now the state, along with New York and Maryland, face a federal deadline next year to show improvement in the vast Susquehanna River basin, which drains into the Chesapeake Bay.
As the longest river in the eastern United States, and draining 27,500 square miles, it is fed by the West Branch, which originates from headwaters in Cambria County.
Its pollution history:
• The first government survey of the West Branch was after the deadly 1889 flood.
• Congress then was told that the West Branch could never be made navigable, and that “the river is not worthy of improvement.”
• For the past century, unregulated acid mine drainage turned the waters a toxic orange color and killed the fish in Cambria and Clearfield counties’ streams.
• Additionally, Pennsylvania’s attempts to control sewage discharges were weak, if at all. In 1923 the General Assembly created a Sanitary Water Board to issue sewage discharge permits. But the three members of the governor’s cabinet and three citizens who made up the board were under orders to operate under this basic assumption:
The pubic welfare depended on industrial prosperity. Clean streams ranked second.
• In 1932, the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen’s Club was formed and quickly became a powerful lobbying force behind the landmark 1937 Clean Streams Act, which for the first time set penalties for water pollution. But the coal industry, probably then the major polluter of the West Branch, was exempted from compliance.
• In 1977, things changed in Pennsylvania. The coal mining firm most active in northern Cambria County, Barnes and Tucker, suffered this legal setback: Whereas in 1886 the courts declared that their mine discharges were merely a “trifling inconvenience”, the 1977 state Supreme Court ruling required them to treat their discharges. By then the Sanitary Water Board had been disbanded, replaced by the Department of Environmental Resources.
• The new state mandate was this: “The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment.
In 1983 the Chesapeake Bay cleanup agreement was signed, and efforts began to clean up
the Susquehanna basins, including the West Branch head-waters in northern Cambria County.
