Water Quality
The Androscoggin was once heavily polluted by a variety of textile mills, paper mills, and other industries located along its banks, and helped inspire the Clean Water Act. Although the river has benefited greatly from environmental work and the departure of certain types of industry from the region, recent EPA test results indicate unacceptably high levels of mercury-contaminated wastewater are still being discharged into the river from numerous paper mills. One environmentalist group has cited the results in calling the Androscoggin one of the 20 most polluted rivers in America. One 14-mile (23 km) stretch requires oxygen bubblers to prevent fish from suffocating. As of May 2007, environmental groups have a lawsuit pending, in an attempt to force the paper mills located along the river to clean their waste streams. Companies have resisted, citing cost.
Read more about this topic: Androscoggin River
Famous quotes containing the words water and/or quality:
“The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry,”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know—Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)