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clean water act Tag

Failure of cleanup efforts has left America's largest estuary still nearly 'dead.' Why? Since 1972, the Clean Water Act has helped restore many of America's waters, allowing fish and humans to swim safely in them. But the largest estuary in the US, the Chesapeake Bay, remains in trouble and little changed. The problem? More than two decades of efforts have fallen foul to complexity, size, and lack of political will.

Half of the waters in the United States are at risk of pollution or destructive development because of a wrongheaded Supreme Court decision in 2006. The decision narrowed the scope of the Clean Water Act, weakened the law’s safeguards and thoroughly confused the federal agencies responsible for enforcing it.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he usually toasts with red wine, but he switched to tap water yesterday, when the federal government announced the city won’t need to filter its drinking water from the Catskills and the Delaware Valley for at least the next 10 years.