Indicator Bacteria - Addressing Bacterial Water Quality Problems

Addressing Bacterial Water Quality Problems

In the US, individual states are allowed to develop their own water quality standards based on EPA’s recommendations under the Clean Water Act of 1977. Once water quality standards are approved, states are tasked with monitoring their surface waters to determine where impairments occur, and watershed plans called Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDLs) are developed to direct water quality improvement efforts including changes to allowable bacteria loading by point sources and recommendations for changes to practices that reduce nonpoint-source contributions to bacteria loads. Also, many states have beach monitoring programs to warn swimmers when high levels of indicator bacteria are detected.

Read more about this topic:  Indicator Bacteria

Famous quotes containing the words addressing, water, quality and/or problems:

    A writer who writes, “I am alone” ... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.
    Maurice Blanchot (b. 1907)

    Just as we are learning to value and conserve the air we breathe, the water we drink, the energy we use, we must learn to value and conserve our capacity for nurture. Otherwise, in the name of human potential we will slowly but surely erode the source of our humanity.
    Elaine Heffner (20th century)

    We’re headed for collapse, if you want my opinion, Missy. I can see it in the fallin’ off of the quality of vagrants. There was a time you could find real good company in almost any jungle you’d pick, men who could talk, men who’d read a book now and then; and now, what do you find, a lot of dirty little guttersnipes no decent tramp would want to associate with.
    Well, it’s been that way all through history.
    John Dos Passos (1896–1970)

    The problems of the world, AIDS, cancer, nuclear war, pollution, are, finally, no more solvable than the problem of a tree which has borne fruit: the apples are overripe and they are falling—what can be done?... Nothing can be done, and nothing needs to be done. Something is being done—the organism is preparing to rest.
    David Mamet (b. 1947)