STREAM POLLUTION

- It is ruining one of the nations basic resources by rendering water unfit for human consumption
and unsuitable for many industrial or domestic uses.
- It is particularly alarming near most big cities but emptied into rivers and creeks, other
communities may feel its effect a hundred or more miles downstream.
- Even in remote or rural regions, it originates as wastes from mines, paper mills, canneries and
creameries.
- Unless such waters are boiled or chlorinated, there is danger from typhoid, dysentery and many
other diseases.
- The most common and offensive effects of stream pollution arise from household sewage and
wastes from the processing of foods: packing of canneries, distilleries and the like.
- This decaying organic matter, as it becomes putrid, stimulates an enormous multiplication of
water bacteria and a host of other small plant and animal life which use it as food.
- A clean fresh stream, receiving a heavy dosage of sewage first becomes turbid and murky; then
it bubbles, gives off foul odors and shows floating sludge; then if not further polluted, it slowly
improves downstream finally becoming clear and fresh again. This process is called natural
purification.
- Sewage treatment plants merely speed up this natural action and remove the sludge so that
damage to streams and lakes is held to a minimum.
- This sludge, properly processed can be used to improve the soil on lawns, gardens, and fields.
- Pollution by oili wastes and by industrial wastes such as acids, cyanides, copper and arsenic, may
poison aquatic life directly and make waters so unsafe for human use that they require special
treatment
- Water is truly a critical material in modern civilization and must be conserved for our very
existence.


STREAM POLLUTION
- Nearly everything that can be found on land eventually makes its way to a stream.
- Every bit of ground on earth is a part of some rivers watershed.
- Water flows downhill.
- Whatever doesnt sink into the ground will flow into the nearest stream.
- In reality, much of the water that soaks down into aquifers also eventually finds its way to a
stream.
- Before the ecology movement in the 70s, factories and sewage plants were usually the main
suspects when people saw foam in streams.
- Today, there is still plenty of foams in streams. However this foam is natural and belongs there.
It is caused by diatoms, tiny one celled algae that live in crystalline houses and creep across the
rocks at the bottom of the stream.
- Pollutants = the things that dont belong in a stream and didnt show up until human
technology began to upset the stream ecosystem.
- POINT SOURCE POLLUTION
- Pollution that enters streams from industrial and agricultural sites.
- Agricultural runoff from farms and raches still contains unsavory levels of bacteria, hormones,
pesticides, herbicides, excrement and fertilizers, as well as large amount of sediment.
- Industries are still responsible for such massive amounts of toxic chemical pollution that it has
entered our drinking water supplies.
- Many of the pollutants, from both farm and factory are endocrine disruptors.
- They endanger public health : human health and animals that lives in the streams as well.
- PSP--- Build up in the bodies of fish and birds.
- PSP--- Include heavy metals, DDT, dioxin, polychlorinated biphenyls, and other banned
pesticides.
- Fertilizers and animal wastes cause their own problems: they enrich rivers, causing the growth
of algae, removing oxygen from the water and blocking sunlight.
- Sediments also block sunlight as well as cover riverbeds, choking and killing of the plants and
animals that live there.
- Hormones which are fed to livestock to increase production and excreted in their urine, alter the
reproductive processes of stream animals like fishes.
- URBAN RUNOFF
- Fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, most of them actually come from peoples lawns and
gardens.
- Water rushes over the many hard/impermeable surfaces that humans create, over roadways
and into gutters, and from there through pipes to the nearest stream.
- ::::::Non point source pollution
- Urban : also contains a toxic soup of cancer-causing chemicals (carcinogenic hydrocarbons) that
are deposited by cars, buses, and trucks on roadways.
- Rainwater that runs off the road collects in ditches, which run alongside the road collecting
more toxins until they finally empty into a stream.
- Toxins : chemicals (hexane, cyclohexane, benzene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons,
formalydehyde, methanol, acrolein, acetaldehyde, lead)
- If these chemicals can cause cancer, birth defects, and immune suppression in humans, it is a
good bet that they will do similar damages to fishes and birds.

SEWAGE
- Urban pollutants also enter rivers through water treatment plants. (only clean out some of the
pollutants, leavintg the rest in the treated water that they pipe into streams)
- Most of the chemicals we put in our sinks, toilets, washing machines, and bathubs will end up in
the local stream
- Pollutants like pharmaceutical drugs and reproductive hormones will later be found in the local
stream, and eventually to a bigger stream and finally to estuaries where young marine fish
mature.
- Other chemicals will not all simply wash out to sea: much of them will remain behind to form
toxic soups and sediments in the streams floodplain.Endocrine disrupters : industrial chemicals
and chemicals that we flush down our toilets may result in the feminization of male fish.
- POWER PLANTS
- -Heat pollution that can cause a devastating change in river history. It pollutes the air with
mercury, which eventually falls on the land and runs off with rainwater, entering streams and
poisoning the animals in them as well as the fishermen who catch and eat their fish.
MINING
- Today, the main pollutant of gold mining is sulfuric acid. Acidification will not only kills streams
but also puts toxic metals found in the soils into the solution, enabling them to enter streams.
- Nearly, all mining results in large quantities of acid leaching into streams as well as runoff of
heavy metals like lead, cadmium, and arsenic.
- SEDIMENTS
- Housing construction, road construction, mines, and logging roads all contribute large amounts
of sediments to rivers.
- Sediment can make hunting food difficult for stream residents.

SOLUTION
- Citizens can monitor streams and keep a watchful eye on industry, including farms, ranches,
dairies, and feelots.
- Water treatment plants can be upgraded to filter out more pollutants.
- Urban runoff can be minimized by providing permeable areas in gardens and rainwater
collection pits.
- Vehicles with better fuel efficiency pollute less per mile.
- Lawns can be replaced with more ecologically friendly spaces.
- Home owners can decline to use pesticides and herbicides.
- Construction companies can take steps to control sediment.
- Citizens can press for more ecologically friendly forms of power, support organic farmers by
buying their products and help educate their communities about watershed.
-
-
-
- CRITERIA
- In determining the degree of pollution, the oxygen and bacteria in the river have come to be
quite generally accepted as the best indices of pollution and the permissible pollution has been
expressed in terms of sewage-contributing population as related to stream flow..
-