The CWA at 40

In 1967, onboard the naval aircraft carrier USS Forrestal, a rocket mounted under the wing of a Phantom aircraft accidentally launched while the plane sat on the flight deck. It struck the fuel tank of another plane, starting a fire that engulfed the ship and set off the weapons carried by many of the other planes, making the situation worse with each explosion. By the time it was over, 134 people were dead and many more injured.

That event changed how the Navy does many things, including how it trains crews to fight fires. It was also one of the drivers for a program called “insensitive munitions,” which requires that military weapons be designed to withstand various extreme conditions they might encounter-fire, freezing temperatures, being dropped from a great height-without accidentally blowing up.

Several years ago, while working as a technical writer, I documented some of the Navy’s insensitive munitions testing. References to the Forrestal were by that time nearly cliché, as the story had been repeated so many times-but, in a way, the name itself summed up the situation more succinctly than anything else could, as clichés often do. It was a reminder of why all this laborious and expensive work was being done, and the consequences of not doing it.

In the erosion control and stormwater arena, we have a similar cataclysmic event: the 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga River. It wasn’t the first or even the biggest fire on that polluted, oil-sheened Ohio river, but it captured the attention of the media, spawned a handful of songs, and more importantly became the symbolic event that helped launch the Environmental Protection Agency the following year and the Clean Water Act in 1972.

You’ve heard this story before, and you might be thinking enough, already, with the Cuyahoga. It, too, has become somewhat of a cliché. Of course, the many people 40 years ago whose work involved erosion control-in agriculture, conservation (the Soil and Water Conservation Society started nearly three decades earlier, in 1943), or some other context-understood the need for protecting our waters long before the Cuyahoga fire. But for those whose work was elsewhere-for those who perhaps only on the occasional summer vacation got anywhere near a lake or river-it was the event that made the problem real, that became a kind of shorthand for the need to prevent further degradation of the waters.

EPA has put together a summary of key points and milestones of the Clean Water Act. It has some useful information, especially when you find yourself in the position of summarizing, for those outside the field, what we do and what the overall goals are.

But for those in the field: What about your own experience? As the Clean Water Act turns 40, what do you think are its biggest successes, and what do you think most urgently remains to be done? And how well do you think the public today understands what’s been accomplished in the last four decades? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.