The dry-looking stream in your backyard may play a major role in feeding U.S. rivers.
Channels that flow only in direct response to weather conditions like heavy rain, called ephemeral streams, on average contribute 55 percent of the water in regional river systems in the United States, researchers report in the June 28 Science.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency’s new water rules.
In April, President Joe Biden’s administration and the EPA introduced national limits on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances in drinking water. These PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” have been linked to health concerns such as cancer.
The Department of Justice, representing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), alongside the Attorney General of California, on behalf of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, has lodged a civil complaint in federal court against the City and County of San Francisco. The complaint highlights alleged Clean Water Act violations spanning the past decade.
California is no stranger to severe droughts. Eleven of the past 17 years have been in drought, with urban water shortages, barren farm fields, and a lack of water for fish and wildlife — the most recent ending just last winter when soaking rains finally returned.
A new rule governing federally protected waters and wetlands was issued Tuesday by the EPA to align agency regulations with a US Supreme Court ruling that will allow unpermitted development in wetlands across the country.
The rule revises the Biden administration’s earlier waters of the US, or WOTUS, definition finalized in January, removing its legal basis, which was struck down by the Supreme Court in May in Sackett v. EPA.
Limiting the government’s authority to regulate wetlands under the Clean Water Act, the Supreme Court ended a nearly two-decade-old dispute Thursday.
The ruling from the court was unanimous, with the justices affirming summary judgment in the suit by Chantell and Michael Sackett against the Environmental Protection Agency.
This week marks the 50th Anniversary of the 1972 Clean Water Act, which, among other things, made it a legal requirement to clean up sewage to certain standards before dumping it into rivers or the ocean.
Congressional staffers who helped craft the landmark Clean Water Act 50 years ago acknowledge they left a big hole in the law — one that’s now blamed for the single largest pollution source in streams, rivers and lakes.
Nonpoint-source pollution — a technocratic term describing pesticides, oil, fertilizers, toxins, sediment and grime that storms wash into waterways from land — still befuddles federal regulators to this day.
President Richard Nixon vetoed the Clean Water Act in 1972. But Congress overrode him on a bipartisan vote, and the landmark law to reverse the toxic degradation of U.S. rivers, lakes and streams took effect half a century ago today.
The law was inspired in part by the notorious 1969 Cuyahoga River fire in Ohio, in which the river itself, laden with oil and other industrial pollutants, went up in flames.
The Supreme Court opened its new term on Monday by hearing a property rights appeal that calls for limiting the government’s power to protect millions of acres of wetlands from development.
At issue is whether the Clean Water Act forbids polluting wetlands and marshes that are near — but not strictly part of — waterways.
