December 16, is the fiftieth anniversary of the Safe Drinking Water Act, signed into law on December 16, 1974, by President Gerald R. Ford, a Re...
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network
To conduct research on clean drinking water and provide grants for states to clean up their systems, Congress authorized appropriations of $15 million in 1975, $25 million in 1976, and $35 million in 1977.
The Safe Drinking Water Act was one of the many laws passed in the 1970s after the environmental movement, sparked after Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring explored the effect of toxic chemicals on living organisms, had made Americans aware of the dangers of pollution in the environment. That awareness had turned to anger by 1969, when in January a massive oil spill off Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Then, in June, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire.
The nation had dipped its toes into water regulation during the Progressive Era at the beginning of the twentieth century, after germ theory became widely understood in the 1880s. Cleaning up cities first meant installing sewer systems, then meant trying to stop diseases from spreading through water systems. In 1912, Congress passed the U.S. Public Health Service Act, which established a national agency for protecting public health and called for getting rid of waterborne illnesses—including the life-threatening illness typhoid—by treating water with chlorine.
It was a start, but a new focus on science and technology after World War II pointed toward updating the system. The U.S. Public Health Service investigated the nation’s water supply in the 1960s and discovered more than 46,000 cases of waterborne illness. In the 1970s it found that about 90% of the drinking water systems it surveyed exceeded acceptable levels of microbes.
In February 1970, Republican President Richard M. Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.” He called for “fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”
Later that year, Congress passed a measure establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, and Nixon signed it into law.
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