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Cholera outbreak occurs due to a contaminated well in England. Hundreds die. (See Project WET activity – Poison Pump)
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Louis Pasteur develops theory that microorganisms (germs) spread disease.
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At the request of the Massachusetts State Board of Health, Ellen Swallow Richards conducts the first statewide study of water pollution in the United States as part of her work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
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First drinking water treatment systems built in United States to reduce turbidity and microbial contamination.
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Reverses the flow of the Chicago River
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Bubble air through sewage
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engineers try to convince the authorities that sewage is a public health issue
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Supplies New York with 5oo million gallons of water a day. It is 92 miles long
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AbelWilson Linn Enslow experiment with chlorine to dissinfect water
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Large scale use of sludge processing is used
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Pipes and storage tanks that deliver water at a constant pressure
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Hoover Dam delivers water to Nevada California
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Delware Aquaduct is 115 miles long, liks to 19 reservoirs, 3 lakes and provides 500 million gallons of water a day to New York City
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Trout Unlimited, a volunteer organization of concerned Michigan citizens, is formed to conserve, protect, and restore Michigan’s coldwater fisheries and their watersheds. The organization has grown into a national organization with 130,000 members.
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The Cuyahoga River that runs through Cleveland, Ohio, into Lake Erie catches fire for the third time! One time it burned for 8 days! (The Rouge River in Detroit also burned.)
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President Nixon establishes the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to “protect public health and safeguard the natural environment—air, water, and land—upon which life depends."
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Federal Water Pollution Control Act (also called the Clean Water Act) establishes a program to regulate discharges of pollutants into the waters of the United States.
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Federal Water Pollution Control Act (also called the Clean Water Act) establishes a program to regulate discharges of pollutants into the waters of the United States.
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Love Canal near Buffalo, New York, explodes and becomes a front-page environmental disaster. Land that was used as a municipal and industrial chemical dumpsite for 30 years was sold to the city of Buffalo for $1. Houses and schools were built on the land. Twenty years later, 82 different compounds, 11 of them suspected carcinogens, percolate upward through the soil, leaching their contents into the backyards and basements of 100 homes and a public school.
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After 13 years of hard work, the one-woman crusade of Verna Mize, a native of Houghton, Michigan, is finally successful and the Reserve Mining Company in Silver Bay, Minnesota, is ordered to stop dumping tailings (ground rock) from its mining operations directly into Lake Superior. Over a 25-year period (1955-1980), the Reserve Mining Company had dumped 400 million tons of wastes contaminated with asbestos into the lake that polluted the water so badly that people in Duluth, Minnesota, had to us
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Water Quality Act requires EPA to regulate storm water runoff; and states to prepare management plans to control non-point source pollution.
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An estimated 100 people die and 403,000 people, or 25% of the residents of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, located on Lake Michigan, become ill from contamination of their public water supply with Cryptosporidium, a protozoan parasite that causes gastrointestinal illness and is transmitted by ingestion of contaminated human or animal wastes causing diarrhea. The outbreak costs $31.7 million in direct medical costs and $64.6 million in productivity losses. During this decade, 10 Cryptosporidium outbreaks f
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Fish contaminated with mercury from industrial wastes and agricultural insecticides become a source of concern in the inland lakes of the Midwestern United States. Tests of lake water by EPA are positive for mercury in 90% of samples from 380 different sources in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, causing more than 1,000 fish consumption advisories in the eight Great Lakes states.