Kim Greenwood, Staff Scientiest at VNRC gave an amazing presentation on the history of water quality in the Winooski River Wednesday morning. She enjoyed her research so much that she's planning to write up paper on what she learned which we'll hopefully put up on our website soon! In the meantime here are some tidbits from her talk:
About half of all rivers in the US still do not meet Federal Clean Water Act Standards as laid out in the 1966 bill. These standards were supposed to be achieved by 1985.
The Winooski River during the late 1800's was the dumping ground for sewage as well as factory waste, making it polluted enough to be recognized as a problem by the Secretary of the Interior.
Most point source pollution problems have been eliminated including discharges from factories and sewage treatment facilities. Today the river's water quality is determined by non-point source pollution including run-off from urban areas and farms, plus steambank destablization.
Another major impact on water quality is dams on the river. There is an interesting debate beginning about dams and their ability to provide non-carbon producing electricity vs. their impact on river habitat especially for spawning fish such as salmon and sturgeon.
There are several large electricity producing dams on the river today, but there are also several smaller dams not currently producing electricity.
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