April 21, 1966
Page 8694
A SICK RIVER IS RETURNED TO NATURE
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the April issue of True magazine carries on important article on water pollution abatement. It is entitled "A Sick River Is Returned to Nature." It is the story of how Wyoming has cleaned up its biggest river, the North Platte, in a decade
All States, from Maine to California, would be wise to review the North Platte experience. It is proof that the municipalities and industries of any State can achieve clean water if they have the will to do so, and if the State’s leaders show the way.
The article tells the story of the effort which began in 1955 under the then Governor, our present colleague, the distinguished junior Senator, Mr. SIMPSON.
He appointed Mr. Arthur E. Williamson as the State’s pollution abatement chief, and he strongly supported Mr. Williamson’s persuasive work to clean up the North Platte.
Wyoming’s success was not easy. In 1948, the Public Health Service reported that the North Platte was "so grossly polluted that it is doubtful recovery ever can be made." By 1954, the river had further deteriorated.
Significantly, through Mr. Williamson’s persistent efforts, Wyoming was able to improve the quality of the North Platte without intervention by Federal authorities, and without legal abatement enforcement proceedings.
The cost to industry and to the municipalities has been high; but residents and businessmen have found that the investment was sound.
A sugarbeet plant has turned its waste into cattle food.
The waste from a packinghouse now is converted to fertilizer.
A mining operation is diking iron ore that formerly drained into the river The oil companies were surprised to find that they had created an excellent wildlife refuge.
Land values along the river have increased from $240 an acre 10 years ago to $1,500 an acre.
Residents now take pride in their river, and fishing and recreation activities have returned.
The article concludes with a quote from Senator SIMPSON:
There is no question in my mind that a dedicated Governor with good men under him can clean up any river in America. Every industry and every municipality knows that cleanup is coming. The main thing needed is someone with a strong voice to tell them when.
As chairman of the Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution, I urge my colleagues to read the article. I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
A SICK RIVER IS RETURNED TO NATURE
(By Robert Gannon) .
(NOTE. Like many another major river in this country, the North Platte was seriously polluted. Then the State of Wyoming and a man named Art Williamson showed the rest of the United States what could be done to put a stop to a disgrace.)
CASPER, WYO. In a broad path winding through the center of Cleveland, Ohio, the Cuyahoga River flows north to Lake Erie. It’s a torpid swath of gray sludge pockmarked by pools of iridescence, and contains slowly churning masses of oily goo.
New York State’s beautiful Hudson River is a fetid dumping ground for 217 major sources of waste. The filth has decimated the fish population and wiped out all the shellfish.
Atlanta’s once dogwood lined Chattahoochee River is now bordered by surrealistic saplings anchored in filth strewn mud reeking of decay. The river is the main source of water for Atlanta; yet, at the city’s intake, the once crystalline water now is the color of coffee with cream.
Across the land, rivers once sweet and unsullied now are so polluted they’re good for little more than carrying away the human and industrial wastes that made them that way. "Except for headwaters," says one Public Health Service waterway expert, "virtually all of the Nation’s major rivers are seriously polluted."
The poisoning of our rivers has not escaped the attention of the architects of the Great Society: In his recent State of the Union Message to Congress, President Johnson called it "wasteful and degrading" and urged a cooperative effort to make our rivers "a source of pleasure and beauty for all of our people."
Pessimists and penny pinchers cry that this is impossible. The pollution process has gone so far, they say, that it can no longer be reversed. Filthy water is an unfortunate but necessary consequence of advancing industrial civilization. We’ll just have to learn to live with it.
A gloomy forecast: But it may be wrong. There are cases -- not many, to be sure -- where sick rivers have been cured. Take, for example, the North Platte River, largest in Wyoming and a prime feeder of the Missouri and the Mississippi. The North Platte rises from springs and melting snow, clear, and clean, high in the mountains of northern Colorado. Then it splashes northward into Wyoming. In a great arc, like a leftward leaning question mark, it turns southeast to churn through the broad Wyoming grasslands toward Nebraska.
Today, for virtually all of its 600 miles (before it crosses into Nebraska), the river swarms with fish: perch, channel cat, sunfish, pike, and German brown trout. Boy scouts canoe on it and, despite its iciness, swim in it. Tourists camp by its side and water ski behind the big dams. Some towns along its bank tap it in dry spells. The water is pure. But it wasn’t ever so. In 1948, a report of the U.S. Public Health Service about the 150-mile section from Casper to the State line said: "This stretch of the North Platte River is so grossly polluted that it is doubtful if recovery can ever be obtained."
Larry Peterson, district fisheries manager of the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission, thinks back and says, "What I remember most about the river in those days was the smell. In the spring of the year when the water was released from the dams for irrigation, it picked up the human sewage and refinery wastes that had accumulated over the winter and carried them downstream. That slug of stuff eliminated not only all the fish along the way but the bottom food as well. You could smell it for 3, 4 miles away. Just drive along the highway and when you hit that odor you’d know you were close to the river."
Today a fisherman can plop himself dawn on a 5-gallon oil can, stick his line over a broken slat in the wooden Mystery Bridge 3 miles south of Casper and, a couple hours later, have a string of 18-inch cutthroats. In Wyoming, the river has come back to life.
The North Platte, in fact, is the only large river in the United States ever to be cleaned up after having been polluted in a variety of ways. The very few other rivers that have been de-polluted suffered from only one or two major problems. Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill River, for example, polluted by coal dust, cleared up when the mines were sealed; Louisiana’s Ouachita River, salty from oil drilling, freshened when the State clamped down on offenders; New York’s Rondout Creek purified itself after local citizens complained so much that health authorities closed down a polluting paper mill.
Each is a success story. But each river had only one problem. Yet the history of the North Platte cleanup proves that even a grossly polluted river can be made pure again.
The problems of the North Platte, like those of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga, Atlanta’s Chattahoochee, and virtually all other polluted waters, were three: irresponsible industry, myopic municipalities, and an apathetic public. The large plants on its shore were built a half century ago, almost before the word "conservation" was invented. The small plants came later. But by then the river was so foul anyway that a little more putrescence wouldn’t hurt.
Towns along the way weren’t interested in setting up expensive sewage disposal plants. Everyone else was using the river as a cesspool; why shouldn’t they? Casper alone was bequeathing to its neighbors downstream an offering of nearly 4 million gallons of raw sewage a day.
Along with the industries and the towns, there was a third complication, common in Western States: peak power discharge. To run a hydroelectric plant efficiently, you let the water roar through the turbines for 4 hours in the morning, 4 hours in the evening, and turn the river off the rest of the time. In Wyoming, the North Platte is broken by six dams and six powerplants. "What happened when they let the water gush out of the last big dam above Casper," explained. one State official, "was a sight to behold: A bank of water would come sweeping down the practically empty streambed, kicking up oil sludge deposits in front of it, and flush the whole stinking mess down river. It’d kill even the carp and suckers that had ventured in from the side streams. Then the Bureau of Reclamation, [which builds the dams and regulates water use] would turn the water off and let the foul stuff sit there and percolate until the next cycle."
The fouling of the North Platte had grown slowly over the years with hardly a complaint raised. The people knew it was polluted but they figured nothing could be done about it.
Then, in 1948, Congress passed the first Federal water pollution law. It was a vapid, toothless bill, but in two ways important: First, it provided for the first basic cataloging of all major U.S. waters and, second, it focused. attention on these waterways; for the first time people realized they could get mad at pollution and not simply accept it.
One man who got mad was the late editor of the weekly Douglas Budget, Keith Rider. And according to those later involved, he was the catalyst for the whole North Platte cleanup. "He kept needling us;" says a spokesman for the Wyoming Department of Health. “This guy Rider, would just sit there downstream and turn out these editorials and the Casper paper, the Cheyenne paper and the rest of them in the State would pick them up."
The trigger was a Rider editorial that ran May 20 1954.
The North Platte is now nothing more than a second rate irrigation ditch and sewage disposal stream. Last Friday the first storage water of the season was released from the dams above Casper. By the time that head of water reached here, it had a black oily head on it which appeared to be a foot deep. Following in the wake of the foul, oily mass of water, the river banks were strewn with dead fish of all kinds from Casper to the Guernsey dam."
The editorial was picked up by the AP wire and printed throughout the State: L. O. Williams, State sanitary engineer, said he was "very; pleased" that Rider had reopened the problem."There has been . . . too much foot dragging," he added. The State fish warden called for "stringent stream pollution laws." The mayor of Casper, a city of 35,000 without any sewage treatment at all, said he was thinking really hard about some sort of system. And every candidate eyeing the upcoming November election, including Wyoming’s present Senator MILWARD L. SIMPSON, who was then running for Governor, snatched the pollution ball and ran.
In May 1955, on the first anniversary of the editorial, the excitement of the election having long cooled (SIMPSON won), another editorial appeared in the Douglas paper, titled "It Still Stinks." "Here we go again," wrote Rider, as he lambasted everyone, pointing out that except for a dandy meeting almost nothing had been done in the full intervening year. Again the piece was widely reprinted.
"That’s the editorial that got the Governor really going on the problem," recalls one of SIMPSON’s associates. "He printed up copies and sent them around to everyone remotely interested. The Governor said he was tired of being needled like this."
Governor SIMPSON may not have known it at the time, but he had already thrown the master switch. Early in 1955, he hired a man named Arthur E. Williamson, then 40, as the top pollution man in the State department of public health. Williamson’s official title is director of the division of environmental sanitation. He is a slim, sun scorched man who speaks with a drawl and, for the past 10 years, he has devoted the bulk of his considerable energy to cleaning up the North Platte.
Art Williamson was raised in the Midwest (Kansas) and educated in the East (an M.S. in sanitary engineering from New York University), but he belongs in and to the West. He drives a Ford pickup truck, wears cowboy shirts and black boots, and his hat looks like a prop left over from "Wagon Train." For dress up occasions he strings a bold tie around his open collar.
When the Governor appointed him, he said, "I don’t care how you do it -- how many arms you have to twist or heads to crack -- just clean up the damn river. I’ll back you to the fullest."
Williamson himself refers to the whole North Platte campaign as one big poker game. "We had to bluff our way most of the time. I still don’t know if our laws had teeth or not. But the Governor and the pollution council and I all said we had real good laws, and we were going to enforce ’em. Now maybe if we had gone to court we could have forced industry to comply. Maybe. But I’ll bet we couldn’t have touched the municipalities. The towns thought we could, though and that’s all that mattered."
Shortly after he appointed Williamson, the Governor named new members to the pollution control advisory council, a group composed of State agency people (commissioner of agriculture, commissioner of game and fish, State engineer, and director of the public health department) and laymen representing industry, municipalities and agriculture. One council appointment was especially interesting: Dr. C. C. Buchler, of the American Oil Co. refinery. "I appointed Doc Buchler for a couple of reasons," SIMPSON said later. "The main one was that he was very intelligent, a famous engineer, and a good chemist. And the second reason, or maybe it was the first, was that I wanted him there so he’d show the way to the other oil companies."
By the end of 1955 Williamson and the commission had worked out a rough formula for pollution abatement. On January 24, 1956, at a meeting in Wheatland, he presented timetables to representatives of both communities and industry. Says Williamson: "I told the people that the first thing I want is an engineering report. Tell me what can be done with your sewage, what it’s going to cost you, how you can finance it and by when. Well, the industries seemed to be expecting this, so at the meeting they only grumbled a little. But all the mayors tried to procrastinate. They said they didn’t have the money.
"But we had an ace: Our game and fish commission stepped into the breach with a $50,000 fund for grants to the cities to get together engineering reports. There went their excuses. This is the only State I know of where the game and fish people were serious enough about their fish to set up this kind of fund." Twenty-five towns used the fund in 1956 alone.
While the communities were reluctantly forming plans, Williamson and the committee turned their energy to industry, focusing their persuasive talents on the four oil companies spotted around Casper. Each day, someone figured, the plants were dumping enough waste into the river to fill a 14-story building the size of a tennis court. "Oh, it was bad, all right," admits slow talking, chain smoking Joseph W. Yant, chief engineer of American Oils Casper plant.
"But consider the enormity of our problems." These were big enough, figured company planners, to cost a million bucks or more to get rid of the three classes of gunk being dumped into the river:
1. Huge amounts of phenol (carbolic acid) and sulfides, along with a small quantity of silt and other chemicals formed during refining.
2. Calcium and magnesium salts pulled from river water used for cooling. If it isn’t removed from the hard Wyoming water, thick crusts form on equipment.
3. Oil seepage. The refinery has been in operation for half a century and, as is usual with these plants, the storage tank leak. Oil seeps into the ground, then into the river.
Along with two other oil companies (Sechuana Mobil and Texaco), American decided to cooperate. The fourth, Continental, tarried for the rest of the year, then in December 1956, solved the problem by going out of business. "It was an old refinery debating whether to keep going anyway," Williamson explains. "When we put the heat on them it was the thing that convinced them to close."
In the meantime, American was examining possible solutions. One it almost bought: shoot the waste through pipes up a mountain and let it run back into the river, oxidizing along the way. The company finally decided to solve things by cleaning up nothing but by returning nothing to the river.
Four miles north of the plant, surrounded by rolling hills, a strongly alkaline pond called Old Soda Lake sat landlocked in the center of a huge basin The company bought the slough and 2,200 acres around it and enclosed the whole thing in 8 miles of fence. They built a pump house at the plant, ran a 23,000-foot pipe to the pond and, in June 1957, hooked it all together. From the end of the pipe poured everything: phenols, dissolved calcium and magnesium salts, suspended oil, even sewage from the employees’ washrooms.
Not long after the company had spent $1.5 million building the new Old Soda Lake (and the other two oil companies had installed similar setups), fish began slowly to return to sections of the river downstream. But the oil firms’ trouble wasn’t quite ended; people down river complained that the fish tasted like petroleum. American discovered that the soil around the plant was so saturated with oil that some was still oozing into the river.
A little more pressure and the company came up with the solution: two wells 8 feet in diameter with pumps constantly sucking up whatever drains in, mostly oil. Today, it seems to be working. At least nobody complains of oily fish anymore. "A few months ago we stopped a fellow fishing from our railroad bridge, right in front of the plant," Yant said recently."He had 64 trout – something impossible only a little while ago."
"Now you may wonder why American and the other oil companies paid any attention to anybody," says Williamson. In the first place, he explains, Doctor Buchler, manager of American’s plant, as chairman of the pollution council, was placed in the odd public position of having to force his own company to comply. And in that position his leverage with others was considerable. "He never had a bit of sympathy for other industries," relates Williamson. "They’d come in and say, This is going to cost us to beat hell, and he’d answer, I know what its costing, I spent a million and a half bucks on it.”
In the second place, so much publicity had been given the work of. the committee and the condition of the stream that the companies were expecting pressure. And privately they believed they were in the wrong; "Our head office had been receiving complaints from elsewhere, too," says oilman Yant, "so the biggest hurdle was convincing the people with the purse strings that what we wanted do, form a lake, was the cheapest practical solution."
Then, too, in cities the size of those along the North Platte, the people responsible for pollution are well known. If water pollution becomes something to be against, social pressures can be enormous. And the Governor was backing Williamson and the antipollution fight to the hilt.
With the massive quantities of oil refinery waste being eliminated, smaller polluters became more obvious. The city of Casper, for example, which had never bothered with even elementary sewage treatment, suddenly found itself a principal offender. Williamson tells how it was:
"Whenever another area built up, Casper would run a 4-foot sewer pipe down to the river and attach the houses to it. That was it. You could stand at the outlet and see the excrement flush right into the river."
In local politics, no matter what the section of the country, building water purification plants usually is easy. People must drink. Sewage treatment plants, however, are more difficult because it appears that they benefit only those downstream. Politically, you don’t do anything about pollution; you just talk about it. But now, a good many people were demanding action. They wanted a clean river and they wanted a plant built. The local paper, primed by an outdoor columnist named Chuck Morrison, began to grind out a barrage of pro-plant editorials. Then with each utility bill, the city inserted little leaflets proclaiming that "Water Is the Lifeblood of a Progressive Community -- Vote For on Sewer Bond."
On May 14, 1957, the $1,150,000 sewer bond passed overwhelmingly. Because the North Platte was classified a river with interstate pollution, the U.S. Health Department added another $250,000.
With Casper well on the way to clean up, one by one the towns down river began to come around: Douglas, Torrington, Guernsey. Glenrock, for example, is a smiling little community of 1,500, 22 miles east of Casper. "We’re a pretty progressive town," says George McConnaughey, ex-mayor and owner of the Corner Market. "Art Williamson came down here and we had a meeting in the town hall and then we all went out and accomplished it. This is a small town with big people, he exclaims, straight faced. The settling ponds, pumping stations and sewage lines cost $37,700, of which the U.S. Public Health Service paid a third. That did the job.
Meanwhile, Williamson was talking with representatives of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, because no matter how clean the river became, if peak power requirements daily cut off flow, fish could hardly survive. "About this time we got hold of an advanced study of the Bureau reporting on how they were going to operate this river," Williamson recalls. "From what I saw, I didn’t like it. They were still figuring on this surge.”
On May 12, 1957, Williamson, the Water Pollution Control Council, all interested State agencies, and everyone else who wanted to be there held a mass meeting with the Bureau. "We really pulled in a tremendous number of people from down along the river," says Williamson. "We had a lot of power in that meeting.”
As a result, a subcommittee was formed to study the problem. Soon afterwards it came up with a solution. The plan called for a small dam below the giant Alcova power plant with a reservoir to absorb the discharge pulses in its 181-acre lake, then let the water flow out at a constant rate.
The Bureau acquiesced . But 2 years dragged by before dam construction began, another 2 years, until 1961 before it started operating. Yet there was no real opposition to the plan, Williamson says. "It just took someone to get the idea, push it and keep at ’em.”
As the water began to clear, free from refinery and city sewage pollution, Williamson increased his pressure on the little industries: meat packing plants, mines, and small manufacturers. "He kept retracing his steps," says Senator SIMPSON. "Just as soon as the industries would recover from one blow, he’d go back and give them something else." They climbed all over me because of a little red iron ore that never got down to the river anyway," complains Les Wahl, superintendent of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Corp. mine at Sunrise, some 125 miles down river from Casper. "I think one of our disgruntled employees told somebody we were killing the river fish."
The 65yearold mine produces hematite, a red iron oxide, that tends to dye water bright red, whether or not it harms the fish. To counteract leakage in the Sunrise mine, pumps suck out 200 gallons of water a minute, dump it into a ravine that leads 6 miles to the North Platte. Last summer, Williamson drove up the winding road to the plant. "What looked like red paint was discharging down the dry draw. It had flowed 3 miles or so from the plant. Another 3 miles and it would have been in the river. I says, Boy, this gotta be stopped quick. I talked to ’em and asked the fish and game boys to go in and follow it up, and now its fixed."
"I don’t want the stuff running into the river anyway," says Wahl. "Its worth dollars and cents to me. The pollution people had nothing to do with our building these dikes." At any rate, a series of little dams are up now and the silt flow has stopped.
On the outskirts of Casper, the Rocky Mountain Packing Co. squats. alongside Interstate Highway 25. Inside, workers in white smocks butcher buffalo. "When I first saw the operation," recalls Williamson, "they were letting the waste run through a very small septic tank, then out across the ground. It eventually got into the river so you had a bloody, black looking mess. It certainly wasn’t a major pollution source, but it was a stinking one."
Williamson urged, threatened, and cajoled and, finally, the plant bought an old gravel pit with 20 or 30 feet of water in it. They began to dump waste there. Williamson told them: "I’ll go along with that, but I think you’re going to have some problems because that water’s too deep. It’s cold. You’re just going to be pickling the stuff here. Its going to start smelling someday."
A few years later it did. There was a suit instituted by the plant’s neighbors, but Rudy Stanko doesn’t care to talk about it. Rudy Stanko is a large, red faced man who now runs the company. "We settled," he says. "Then we figured we had better do something. So now we boil everything down; we dry it and sell it for fertilizer."
All along the North Platte everything was going smoothly. The cities were cooperating, the peak power demand no longer was a problem, the industries were, with a little pressure here and there, cleaning up their outflows. Everything was rolling.
With one exception: Holly Sugar Corp., just outside Torrington. "It wasn’t that we didn’t want to cooperate," says Ira D. Croghan, plant superintendent, a short, balding man with freckles."It’s just that our equipment happened to break down at the same time the State people took river samples."
Holly is a typical example of sugarbeet processing plants, factories which are still polluting such rivers as the Arkansas, Montana’s Big Horn, Idaho’s Bear and the Mississippi. During their peak season, mid-October through December, the 40-yearold company processes 3,000 tons of sugarbeets a day. There’s lots of stuff to get rid of: lime used to purify the sugar; Steffens waste, a high alkaline substance left over from the making of molasses; flume water, used to transport and wash the beets; beet tails and chips; and waste from the plant’s washrooms. Until the Williamson campaign, everything went into the river except employee waste. That went through a septic tank estimated by health officials to be 50 percent effective.
Tests by the U.S. Public Health Service showed that total organic matter being discharged into the stream was equal to a city of 370,000 and potential disease producing bacteria increased a thousandfold as the river passed the plant’s outlet. No fish lived below the plant, and only a few hearty bottom organisms, like sludge worms and midge larvae, survived that deluge of contaminants.
The first real complaints began around 1950, when hunters claimed that because of pollution the ducks weren’t settling. The hunters probably were wrong. "Those ducks were in there in the first place because of the beet pulp," Williamson says with a big grin. "They loved it. They’d come in by the thousands and stay as long as the river was full of pulp. So the more we cleaned it the fewer ducks would be there and the louder the hunters would scream."
Anyway, the hunters went hollering to the Public Health Service and soon Williamson came charging into the Holly offices. "Cooperate? Sure we cooperated," says Plant Superintendent Croghan. "They put the screws to us. They badgered us and threatened us with injunctions. That State committee and the fish and game people and Williamson they never were satisfied with anything we did." That’s probably because the first steps the company took, expensive as they were, didn’t seem to help much.
First, Holly dug a giant pit the size of four football fields side by side. That was for the lime and it worked fine. But the river remained polluted. Then in 1956 the company bought a 55-acre pasture nearby, bulldozed a dike around it and dumped in the Steffens waste.
Still no fish. In 1961, the U.S. Public Health Service concluded that "it is evident that pollution of the North Platte River by the Holly Sugar Co. constitutes pollution of interstate waters." So the Federal Government stepped in with fanfared hearings.
Beet chips and tails it was decided at the hearing, must go. This waste was being swept away in Holly’s flume water, which carried the beets through the plant. A screen was installed. Not much effect on the river.
The problem now seemed to be what is called pulp drainings. These "squeezings" from pulp were allowed to run into the river. Reluctantly, the company installed piping to pump the draining out to the Steffens waste pond and, just to be safe, diverted the sewer drains from the employees washroom out there, too.
That almost did it. At least the fish lived most of the year -- until the sugarbeet season began again. Then they disappeared up the tributaries. The only thing left at Holly was the flume water.
Enough dirt stuck to the beets so that when the flume water entered the stream, the silt coated the bottom, killing off food for the fish. "Now it looked like a perfectly simple thing to set up a fine screen there, put a truck underneath it and haul out whatever you collect," recalls Williamson. "We suggested this to them. But about this time Holly was beginning to feel we were riding them a little too hard and they began to see that precedents were being set. So the sugar interests went to the legislature with some real high-powered lobbyists trying to put a. law through excepting that particular kind of operation from any pollution law. Well, we beat them. It was a battle, but we beat them."
Holly finally installed the screens and found that during the height of the season nearly 150 tons of dirt a day collected to be hauled off. Today, fish live in the river even during the sugarbeet season.
For its full length in Wyoming the North Platte has returned to life. Occasionally there are problems: Irrigation water run back causes turbidity; a company springs a leak in a tank containing toxic chemicals; the Bureau of Reclamation washes out a reservoir and the silt kills bottom life; an empty barrel of insecticide rolls into the river and wipes out fish for 10 miles. But these things are rare. The people of Wyoming are enjoying their river. Bottom land has risen in value from about $240 an acre 10 years ago to around $1,500 now.
Now that the citizens are happy, some companies that spent a lot of money on pollution control are finding that in the long run they may come out ahead. Rudy Stanko, for example, now processes his packinghouse waste and sells it as fertilizer. He happily hauls in an extra $1,000 a month. Les Wahl is watching his iron mine outflow settle behind those dikes. He expects that when the tanks fill, he’ll scoop them out and process the iron oxide for a nice profit. And even Ira Croghan finds that sugar waste disposal isn’t as bad as he once thought. Holly maintains a herd of 4,500 cattle on dried beet pulp.
The biggest surprise came to American Oil engineers. They expected an odiferous, lifeless mass to form from pumped wastes up in the Casper hills. What they got was a wildlife refuge.
Discharge from the plant, a sickly green, almost black substance, first floods into a small "settling" pond, then overflows into the lake. The pond reeks of spent chemicals and is lifeless except for a strange, intensely green species of alga so thick that the water is opaque.
But the lake into which it overflows, now fully grown and stabilized (intake equals evaporation) at 500 acres, is clear, with small aquatic insects zipping through it. Around the edges reeds and cattails grow and cottonwood and willow trees, now 20 feet high, thrive. The water tastes slightly brackish, but is highly palatable to animals. Fifty antelope live in the fenced off acreage, drinking the water and grazing on the new grass. According to one local ornithologist, during migration season the lake is the best place in the State to spot ducks and geese.
Meanwhile, back in Cleveland, in Atlanta, along New York’s Hudson and Maine’s Androscoggin, things are still awful. The problems in the East are vastly more complex than in Wyoming. But there is a new Federal Water Quality Act that has a lot of major industries running scared. A top steel official claims it will cost the steel companies $260 million a year to comply. A paper man estimates the paper industry will have to spend a billion dollars in the next. 10 years. Corporation bigwigs complain, but in the long run they’ll probably have to get up the money. The States, too, are beginning to act. New York voters have recently authorized the financing of a giant sewage program and others are likely to fall in line.
"The public is now largely aware of the problem," says Assistant U.S. Surgeon General Gordon E. McCallum, "and is beginning to be willing to do something about it. The environment is starting to close in on us and the problems are pinching. They can be solved, though; we can have clean water and it’s not going to bankrupt us to do it. The total solution depends on only two things: brainpower and willpower."
"And someone strong to show the way." adds Senator SIMPSON. "Someone like Art Williamson. There is no question in my mind that a dedicated Governor with good men under him can clean up any river in America. Every industry and every municipality knows that cleanup is coming. The main thing needed is someone with a strong voice to tell them when."