Tell the EPA: No Dirty Water Rule
Clean water is essential to America’s health and welfare. Our lakes, rivers, streams and creeks provide us with water to drink, give character to our most beautiful natural places and give us places to fish and swim. Yet, across the country, thousands of miles of waterways are threatened by at least one of five major potential sources of contamination: coal ash pits, oil pipelines and trains, fracking wastewater pits, animal waste lagoons and toxic chemical storage facilities.
A report by Environment America Research & Policy Center
Written by John Rumpler, Environment America Research & Policy Center and Gideon Weissman, Frontier Group
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Clean water is essential to America’s health and welfare. Our lakes, rivers, streams and creeks provide us with water to drink, give character to our most beautiful natural places and give us places to fish and swim. Yet, across the country, thousands of miles of waterways are threatened by at least one of five major potential sources of contamination: coal ash pits, oil pipelines and trains, fracking wastewater pits, animal waste lagoons and toxic chemical storage facilities.
Our analysis and review finds thousands of “accidents waiting to happen” across the country, including 31 toxic facilities in flood zones in New Jersey; 170 hog waste lagoons in flood zones in North Carolina and at least 326 coal ash ponds at coal plants within a quarter-mile of a waterway.
Many of these facilities could, in the event of a spill, devastate the environment and threaten human health.
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Industrial sites use toxic chemicals that pose long-term threats to the health of humans and wildlife:
Oil is transported via train and pipeline routes along and across America’s rivers:
Animal waste lagoons at factory farms threaten lakes and streams with pollution:
Pits of toxic coal ash sit along America’s major rivers and lakes:
Fracking waste pits store toxic and radioactive wastes:
To protect our waterways, state and local governments should strictly regulate activities that involve the production, storage or use of large quantities of dangerous substances, and ensure that, to the extent those activities occur, they take place far from water. Policymakers should:
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