Local and State Responses to Pollution

Public responses to water pollution differed markedly from those to air pollution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Local and state governments adopted organizational and institutional responses to water pollution and safeguarded public health by World War I. In contrast, local efforts to control air pollution failed until the 1940s, and the states of the United States became involved only after the federal government forced them to take action.

In the United States, local governments considered water pollution a problem of public health. Their earliest responses included the establishment of local boards of public health and the enactment of public health ordinances. At first local boards of health were temporary divisions of local government or ad hoc civic organizations established to fight an epidemic.

However, epidemiological studies and sanitary surveys laid the foundations for sanitary reform in the mid-nineteenth century. Such reform included the establishment of permanent local boards of public health and more elaborate local ordinances. Yet, the enforcement of local ordinances remained sporadic before the late nineteenth century, mainly taking place in response to an epidemic. The courts usually endorsed the local use of police power in these circumstances.

The capability of local boards of public health to control water pollution was, however, limited. The new understanding of the relationship between environmental degradation and disease suggested that the supply of clean water and the construction of sewers for the disposal of human wastes could improve public health.

Cities increasingly invested in water supply and sewer networks after the Civil War. Paradoxically, they reproduced the problems that they were supposed to resolve at even grander scale: A community that discharged its wastes into water spoiled the water supply of downstream cities and endangered public health downstream. Local boards of health were powerless when the source of pollution was outside of their jurisdiction.

Local governments first sought to resolve their conflicts over the pollution of water supplies in the courts under common law. However, the courts usually refused to protect water supplies of one city by constraining the sewage disposal of other cities. Instead, the courts directed water companies to use their eminent domain powers to take land and water rights to protect their water supplies. As a result, watershed management became an important tool of water quality management.

Other areas of litigation had a greater impact on water pollution control. Numerous property owners brought private nuisance actions against municipal polluters. The courts did not hesitate to endorse their complaints, creating incentives for the construction of sewage treatment plants. Water companies in turn faced negligence suits because they sometimes delivered contaminated water that caused illness and death.

The courts did not require a high standard of care from water companies in the late nineteenth century. In the Wisconsin case of Green v. Ashland Water Co. (1898), the court denied compensation because of the contributory negligence of the deceased person Green: He had drunk tap water knowing the prevalence of typhoid in the area. However, when water treatment methods such as filtration and chlorination became available, the courts fostered their adoption by tightening the standard of care they required from water companies.

In the United States, state involvement in water pollution control began when Massachusetts established a state board of public health in 1869. Other states followed in the 1870s, all having a public health organization by World War I. The state boards were almost immediately vested with the task of studying water pollution because it was considered one of the primary threats to public health. The mandates of state boards were gradually expanded to include the review and authorization of plans for waterworks and sewers.

The boards also researched the treatment of water and sewage. For example, the Lawrence Experimentation Station of the Massachusetts Board of Public Health developed the first effective methods for water filtration and sewage treatment, which are still used today. The state boards also made recommendations for the improvement of public health such as initiatives for new water pollution legislation.

A number of states took up these suggestions at the turn of the twentieth century, when many cities, such as Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts; Chicago; Ithaca, New York; Pittsburgh and Scranton, Pennsylvania; and Cleveland, suffered from typhoid epidemics.

The water pollution control statutes of the early twentieth century often prohibited sewage discharges into watercourses that supplied the public. The statutes could also require water companies to submit plans for waterworks for review and approval by the state board. Similar requirements could exist for sewers.

The statutes could also require water companies and polluters to report periodically to the state board. However, the statutes often exempted the most polluted industrial rivers, all industrial discharges, or discharges of the industries that were most important for a state's economy. Moreover, the state boards simply did not enforce these statutes vigorously after the typhoid epidemics at the beginning of the twentieth century were overcome.

The state boards of public health could ignore the enforcement of water pollution control statutes in the early twentieth century because they had technological measures for the protection of public health. Slow sand filtration had proven effective in safeguarding water in the end of the nineteenth century, and the effectiveness of chlorine was demonstrated in trials in the first decade of the twentieth century. State boards opted for the filtration and chlorination of drinking water because these measures protected public health at a lower cost than the abatement of sewage discharges.

The state boards fostered the adoption of these measures by water companies via their review and approval procedures. Filtration and chlorination of drinking water reduced typhoid mortality and morbidity in many cities to 1 percent of what they had been a few decades before. Indeed, most residents of U.S. cities had safe drinking water by World War I. However, the success extended only this far. Nothing was done to improve water quality of streams, and the success in making drinking water safe for public health had rather negative than positive effect on it.

Local efforts to control air pollution began in the mid-nineteenth century. For example, in 1869 in Pittsburgh the city council prohibited the use of bituminous coal and wood by railroads within the city limits. In the next year the city council prohibited beehive coke ovens, which were used to convert ordinary coal to coke used for the manufacturing of steel. However, as was usual at the time, these ordinances were seldom enforced.

Cities could encounter other problems if they did enforce their ordinances. For example, in 1893 the board of aldermen of St. Louis, Missouri, passed an ordinance that declared dense black smoke a public nuisance and created a commission to establish permissible smoke emissions and to test smoke prevention devices.

After some initial success, the Missouri Supreme Court declared the city ordinance unconstitutional because the city did not have an authority to determine what constituted a public nuisance. The state legislature used its authority to make such a determination and passed legislation that would have enabled St. Louis to continue its policy, but this did not reinvigorate local activism.

Despite its early difficulties in smoke control, St. Louis ultimately became the first city in the United States to clear its skies. The board of aldermen of St. Louis adopted in 1937 a smoke control ordinance that regulated acceptable smoke and ash emissions as well as the maximum size and quality of coal, mandating use of the Ringelman chart in the measurement of smoke. The Ringelman chart displayed different tones of gray for comparison with the color and density of smoke, providing an important tool for the enforcement of smoke ordinances.

The St. Louis ordinance also established a division of smoke regulation with a smoke commissioner and smoke inspectors. Another ordinance passed in the same year established the basis for regulating fuel supplies within the city. After experiencing the worst smoke event in its history in 1939, the city amended and implemented these ordinances under public pressure. The result was a dramatic improvement of air quality within a year.

Pittsburgh adopted the same model for resolving its smoke problem in the 1940s, and other cities followed suit later. The role of local civic organizations such as businessmen's and businesswomen's organizations was central from the mid-nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century for the establishment and enforcement of local smoke control programs. Cities did not encounter legal obstacles in the enforcement of their smoke ordinances after World War II.

For example, the Supreme Court of the United States endorsed the authority of Detroit, Michigan, to enforce its smoke ordinances in Huron Cement Co. v. Detroit (1960). However, the success of cities in clearing their skies was largely based on changing technology and fuels. In industry and transport, coal-fired boilers were being replaced by diesel engines and electric motors after World War II. Oil and natural gas in turn became fuels of choice for residential heating, one of the main sources of smoke pollution.