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Sarah Gardner  Summary: In Memphis Tennessee a broken piece of equipment has sent 694 gallons of untreated waste water every second gushing into the Mississippi River. The pipe ruptured during a routine inspection causing a short circuit and the shutdown of the entire plant. Memphis doesn’t get its drinking water from the Mississippi so residents are mainly safe. Crews are working to fix the problem and may be done by Tuesday.

Relevance: Water pollution can lead to many problems in society and our well being. Worldwide it kills more than 14,000 people a day (Water). Water pollution can happen in many different ways. Point and non-point are the two different categories. Point pollution, like the example above, is when the pollution comes from one identifiable source (Water). Non-point pollution is when there is not one source for pollution, an example of this would be any type of runoff. Non-point pollution is much harder to indentify and stop (Water). Many people think water pollution is a new concept but it’s been happening since almost the beginning of time. Humans have been polluting since they have had trash. It got worse after World War I when manufacturers started using more chemicals such as plastics, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and inorganic pesticides like dichlorodiphenyl trichloroethane (DDT) (Histroy). Other than being hazardous these chemicals are also not biodegradable so they won’t go away naturally. Around this time there were increased rates of cancers, physical birth defects, and mental retardation, and a loss of biodiversity (History). As the industrial period went on the worse pollution got. It got so bad that in the 1930’s the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught on fire several times due to oil slicks and excessive chemical dumping. In 1972 the Clean Water Act was passed (History). The CWA stops pollution in navigable waterways and greatly improved the US’s water quality. After World War II there was another increase in technologies and industries which lead to an increase in water pollution too (History). From there on we’ve been trying to clean up our act.

Evaluation: When we think of the topic of the environment many things come to mind. We think of going green, saving energy, and cleaning up our planet. One of the things I think that is overlooked when we think of the environment is water pollution. So many people in the United States have fresh and clean drinking water but they don’t even stop to think about where it comes from or how one day it might be gone. Clean water is the one thing people really take for granted. In many developing countries people die from not being able to get water or from the diseases they get from drinking contaminated water. If we don’t stop polluting our rivers and water ways, in the future we might have trouble getting fresh water to drink. Everyone can help stop pollution by doing simple things by not dumping chemicals into their yard, not using fertilizer, trying to stop excess run off, and protesting against companies who pollute our water ways. If everyone would help out just a little we could stop water pollution and our environment would be so much healthier. Questions
 * 1) How many places in the United States don’t have fresh drinking water?
 * 2) How many places worldwide don’t have fresh drinking water?
 * 3) Are we doing enough to make sure we always have clean water?
 * 4) Will we one day run out of fresh water?
 * 5) How many companies are illegally polluting our water without us knowing it?
 * 6) How often do accidents like the one from the article happen?

"History - water, effects, environmental, disasters, pollutants, United States, chemicals, industrial, wells, toxic, world, human, power, sources, disposal, use, life, health."//Pollution Issues//. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Mar. 2012. . "Water pollution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." //Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia//. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Mar. 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_pollution>.