U.S.Water News. October 2002

Good to the Last Drop

Protecting and preserving our municipal water supplies and forests

Drinking water comes out of your faucet – whenever you want it, however much you want, and perfectly safe to drink.

Actually, let’s back up. In the 1940s the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service produced an information film staring the character, “Junior Raindrop.” In the 10 minute film, dated by the style of its animation and narration, we watch Junior Raindrop’s danger-fraught journey from the headwaters of the Mississippi to the ocean.

What is most instructive in viewing the cartoon over 50 years later is that most of the problems plaguing public water supplies today were clearly identified and explained back then, albeit simplistically.

“There is no question that most of the issues were understood 50 years ago at an anecdotal level.” Explains Doug Ryan, watershed research specialist, Forest Service Washington Office. “The difference today is that we have a far greater body of research to support our understanding, and we know better how to protect public health.

But all of what Junior had to deal with still haunts our water supplies.

• Effects of urbanization – erosion from land cleared for construction, household pesticides and herbicides, leaking sewers an septic tanks, and storm water runoff,
• Industrial problems – oil spills and air pollution.
• Cropland and livestock activities on agricultural lands and grazing rangelands,
• Timber harvesting and recreation in forests.

Added to this list is the spread of pathogens. Certain pathogens didn’t even manifest themselves as threats until as recently as 20 years ago. The pathogenic E.coli didn’t cause disease unit it became antibiotic-resistant in the 1990s.  This pathogen can be waterborne and is not uncommon, similar to Cryptosporidium, which killed 100 people and infected 400,000 in an outbreak in Wisconsin in 1993. Many of its victims belonged to a group with compromised immune systems.

Through this gauntlet of human activities and disease susceptibilities, a lot of the nation’s drinking water travels relatively unfettered, and most of us continue to drink it with supreme trust.

According to national surveys, less than 10 percent of the U.S. water drinking population thinks beyond the kitchen faucet. A few imagine their water coming a water treatment plant, but not many ever get so far as to think about a forested watershed. Fewer than 40 percent of Americans can identify what a watershed is.

So what is the typical source of our drinking water?

In most states, over two-thirds of the population uses surface water as a municipal water source. Surface water provides less than a third of municipal supplies in only seven states-Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Nebraska, and New Mexico. Forests are critically important to protecting the surface water supplies and sustaining them in the future.

It is estimated that national forests and grasslands are the source of drinking water for 3, 400 towns serving an aggregate population of 60 million people, and for 3,000 non-community water supplies such as campgrounds.

The population served by all forests and grasslands nationwide is far larger than this figure, making the bond between drinking water and the forests very tight.

When it was decided to set aside some of the forested lands from settlement by proclaiming Forest Reserves, President Harrison and Congress were responding to public outcries to stop logging and burning of public lands, practices that were harming local water supplies.

The 1891 Creative Act set aside the first Forest Reserve but contained no direction for Forest Reserves or funds for their management. The 1897 Organic Administration Act provided direction for the Forest Reserves, including “ securing favorable conditions of water flows.”  This has remained a key objective of the Forest Service to the present.

A rising crisis

But the real threats to municipal water supplies at the end of the 19^th century – heavy – handed logging, land clearing, extensive agriculture, and intense grazing on forest lands – have paled beside the kaleidoscope of challenges some 100 years later.

These challenges include an American population that has almost quadrupled from 75 million to 280 million, increased pollution of water supplies, and the risk of environmental damage from internal or external activity.

So in this new century, the Forest Service is returning to is water roots. A renewed emphasis on the role of forests in supplying clean water to large segments of the population has taken hold both in policy making and in the research that supports it. The complex interactions among natural processes, land use, water management, and drinking water underscore the need for integrated management of watersheds and a renewed focus on the role of forests in their protection.

The sharp increase in local watershed councils and the states’ Source Water Assessments process across the country has given the Forest Service an important public venue for meeting the challenge of collaborating across mixed ownerships.

Checking the Source

Most water supplies are not suitable for human consumption without some form of treatment. Furthermore, standards for drinking water apply to water that is delivered to consumers- after it has been treated to remove contaminants, but not to raw water as it is withdrawn from surface or groundwater sources.

For the 250 million Americans who rely on public water supplies and source waters, the 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments are already under vigorous investigation. Congress chose source water protection as a strategy for ensuring safe drinking water because of its high potential to be cost effective.

All states and participating tribes must delineate the boundaries of areas that serve as sources for individual public drinking water systems, then identify potential source of contamination and determine how susceptible each system is to contamination. In other words to protect the water, we must look to the land and the forests that serve as its source.

“These measures help communities know the threats to their drinking water, and the citizens can then more effectively and efficiently address these threats,” Ryan explains. “Appropriate land-use practices that protect source water may be more cost effective for society than removing pollutants after the fact. However, decisions about land uses and their effects on water are often made piecemeal, and potential savings are often not realized.”

Until about 1990, water treatment was regarded as an engineering problem, a “we can fix it” mentality that focused more on mechanical and chemical methods of removing impurities than on preventing pollution as the source.

“What we’re discovering now is that more rigorous treatment can leave more residues in the water that are harmful to people, such as chlorinated hydrocarbons,” Ryan notes. “New methods of treatment are also becoming more expensive, and passing those costs on to consumers is not a popular move.”

Protecting the water source looks like the smarter solution.

For more information on the Forest Service and its efforts to protect our waters, please visit:www.fs.fed.us.

Reprinted from the U.S. Water News October 2002 issue, Freshwater Forum. The Freshwater Forum is sponsored by the Freshwater Society, a non-profit organization working to increase the awareness of complex water issues. By presenting this forum, the Freshwater Society hopes to encourage sharing, discussion and understanding among citizens, government, agencies, researchers and other stakeholders. To receive more information about the Society, or to suggest topics for the Freshwater Forum, please contact the Society at (612) 471-7685, e-mail:freshwater@freshwater.org.