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:
“Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism ... is more than the Roman Curia. There is a mystique as well as a politique.... Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)
“Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women—the quality of shifting from child to woman, the seeming helplessness one moment and the utter self-reliance the next that baffle us, that seem most difficult to understand. These are the qualities that make her a mystery, the qualities that provoked Freud to complain, “What does a woman want?””
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)