Poisoned Waters (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

[Music] puget sound chesapeake bay they are america's great coastal estuaries and they are in peril i would put puget sound in the intensive care unit the situation is critical the chesapeake bay is like the canary in the coal mine it is an indicator of what we are now learning to expect in any body of water across the planet three decades after the clean water act frontline takes a hard look at why america has failed for so long to clean up the nation's waterways agriculture is by far the largest source of pollution to all of the waters in the country we're not talking about little mom pile on the farm anymore we're talking about industrial production it is industrial waste and how contaminated waters threaten not only wildlife you have frogs with six legs male frogs with ovaries but ultimately threaten our own health as well the same things that are killing the animals will kill people too in a two-hour special report frontline correspondent hedrick smith uncovers the danger to the nation's waterways tracking new threats if you were living in washington dc would you drink water coming out of the potomac probably not confronting new challenges this is sick this is sick it's like a cancer it's growing i'm discovering the ultimate problem it's about the way we all live and unfortunately we are all polluters i am you are all of us are tonight frontline investigates what's poisoning america's waters [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] chesapeake bay at dawn one of those magical moments when you feel at peace and in harmony with nature for me the chesapeake is a special place an extraordinary natural treasure over the past 30 years i've spent a lot of time on the bay sailing hiking swimming crabbing i love the water it's calm it's beauty it's majesty and i'm fascinated by its meandering shorelines in the early morning light the bacon looks so pure and pristine but that's deceiving i know that like most of america's waterways chesapeake bay is in trouble despite years of trying to save it and that worries me i wanted a first-hand look and so i headed out on the water with larry sims a waterman who's been commercially fishing the bay for 60 years in its peak time if you drained the bay the crabs and the fish and oceans and everything would probably be 10 foot deep on the bottom of the whole bay over the past several decades sims has watched the good times of bountiful harvests slip away it's about like your home waters here yeah huh yeah what is the chesapeake bay like today for a waterman the only thing that we have in abundance that we had back then was was the striped bass the rock fish other than that everything else is diminished the worcesters we used to catch 2 million bushel a year now we catch a hundred thousand bushel i never ever dreamed that i wouldn't be catching shad anymore i wouldn't be catching yellow perch anymore i wouldn't be catching tarpon anymore i never ever dreamed that that come to an end sims took me to the old fishing town of rock hall where watermen were bringing in the day's crab catch crabs have long been the trademark of chesapeake bay but the catch is now down more than 50 percent from 25 years ago so how was the catch today it dropped off a little bit today dropped off so what do you what do you come in with six seven eight bushels nine all together nine bushels ten years ago how many would you have caught on an average day who's about 30. about 30 bushels about three times as many yeah how do you feel about the bay and what's happened to it i think it's a tragedy i think a little upset that my children can't enjoy this way of life that i've chose you know any rock hall harbor was all that used to be processing houses for straight bass for oysters for clams for everything we was harvesting so a lot of people in the fish and crab and oyster business went out of business yeah you're talking about billions of dollars of economic impact with oysters crabs shad striped bass the decline in the fisheries has just been dramatic i i wouldn't have thought even 10 or 15 years ago that we would literally lose oysters as a commercial fishery we have it's it's done watermen are seeing the symptoms of decline but the deeper problem i learned is that the very dynamics of the bay's ecosystem are being fundamentally altered by human impact [Music] the bay is acutely vulnerable because its watershed is so large eleven thousand miles of shoreline and it drains big rivers from six states in all of north america it's the largest estuary we're talking a sixth of the east coast from cooperstown new york out into west virginia almost down to north carolina [Music] it is the receptacle of an enormous volume of water in a uniquely shallow basin its average depth is only 21 feet making the bay an ecological hot house it's fabulously productive but also exquisitely vulnerable to land use because it has a huge drainage basin so you you have you know the classic place for trying to determine whether humans and nature can coexist [Music] one problem for chesapeake bay is that humans have drastically overfished the resources especially crabs but scientists have also tied the dramatic decline in fisheries here to man-made pollution and a growing phenomenon called dead zones dead zones happen when too much fertilizer nitrogen phosphorus comes in it grows lots of excess algae the algae dye decompose suck up the oxygen from the deeper waters which aquatic life needs to live this is what a healthy oxygen-rich bay bottom looks like full of lush grasses where fish and crabs can grow [Music] a dead zone is completely different barren and empty the bottom of the bay when there is an algae bloom and when you have a dead zone is as dead as the face of the moon that there is absolutely no oxygen in these dead zones and nothing can live that requires oxygen for survival crabs can't make it crabs can't make it oysters can't make it fish that get caught in a dead zone will literally die if they can't get out of a dead zone they'll float up to the surface their bellies will explode and you'll see fish kills throughout the chesapeake bay in the heat of summer dead zones now occupy as much as 40 percent of the main stem of the chesapeake bay but it's not just a bay wide problem it's worldwide all across the planet dead zones have been doubling in frequency in size every decade there's one in the gulf of mexico the size of the state of massachusetts pollution is not just creating dead zones it's playing havoc with human health and recreation and those health advisories at sandy point beach are still in effect and will be every year more beaches have to close periodically because of pollution people are urged to avoid direct contact with the water on the east the unfortunate reality is that people get sick from contact with water every single day and we have information suggesting that that problem is getting worse today than it was ten years ago and this is a result of a number of different contaminants being in the water that ultimately can make people sick today we're at a point at which this system called the chesapeake bay may be on the verge of ceasing to function in its most basic capacities and what do i mean by that providing a place for people to swim recreation providing a source of seafood shellfish fin fish oysters crabs underwater grasses which support the crab populations and being a system that is absolutely wonderful to look at to support tourism to be a source of real pride to the region we are at the verge where all of those functions of the chesapeake bay that we value could be lost to the next generation unless we take dramatic and fundamental action today what leaves the bay's defenders distraught as not only its perilous condition but the public's evident loss of interest and the failure of federal and state governments to stick to their repeated promises over the past 25 years to clean up the bay there has been so much investment in science and in modeling and in monitoring we know today precisely what is necessary to save the chesapeake and now it's very clear it comes down to the question of political will you know there's a tendency to blame it on lack of political will well hell who elects the politicians and who reelects them last time i looked it was us we ran out of excuses for delaying many many years ago around the chesapeake we can afford it we don't necessarily want to pay for it but we can afford it so i have to say that collectively we don't care enough [Music] [Laughter] there was a time when we as a nation did care enough to demand action four decades ago when the country was rocked by a series of environmental disasters well i remember what it was like before earth day i remember when the cuyahoga river burned with flames that were eight stories high i remember when the santa barbara oil spill in 1969 that closed virtually all the beaches in southern california i remember when they declared lake erie dead i remember that i couldn't swim in the hudson or the charles the potomac when i was growing up we could see the pollution smell it even touch it the problem was in our faces and the public demand for action exploded on earth day [Applause] in 1970 this accumulation of insults drove 20 million americans out onto the street 10 of our population the largest public demonstration in american history there was anger at the state of the world at the state of your own backyard whether it be a water body or the air or your mountain range whatever it was you related to as the environment there was anger that we as a country had let it go and there was a very much of a grassroots rebellion saying this has got to stop it was a big issue it exploded on the country it forced the a republican administration and the president which had really never he never thought about this very much president nixon it forced him to deal with it because public the public said this is intolerable we've got to do something about it responding to congressional pressure nixon created the environmental protection agency he picked bill rucko's house a justice department lawyer with a solid republican pedigree as its first administrator and ruckelshaus quickly took charge we had to select some big visible polluters both industrial and municipal go after them make sure the public understood we were being responsive to their concerns and that would energize the agency and get us in a position to do things that needed to be done in order to address the problem congress armed ruckelsass and the epa with a raft of new environmental laws like the clean water act that imposed strict pollution limits and penalties for violators the act called for america's waterways to be fishable and swimmable again by 1983. it had strong bipartisan support in congress but not it turns out from president nixon when we finally passed the clean water act through the senate and the house nixon vetoed it and for the first time in the next administration he had a veto overridden substantially and significantly and what does that say nixon was out of step with the country nixon didn't care about the problem it was my impression and you know i'm a democrat so i've got to be forgiven for that but it was my impression that nixon's interest in the environment was strictly political he didn't know much about the environment and frankly he wasn't very curious about it he never asked me the whole time i was at epa is the air really dirty is something wrong with the water what are we worried about here he would warn me he said you've got to be worried about that emperor he called it epa he was the only one in the country that called it everybody epa epa he called him empa and he said those people over there now don't get captured by that bureaucracy but with bipartisan backing in congress ruggles house took strong action anyway he banned ddt imposed a tight deadline for reducing auto emissions sued several cities and big steel and chemical companies for polluting the air and water his tough approach made enemies most of the people running big american manufacturing facilities in those days believed this was all the fad it was going to go away and and all they had to do was sort of hunker down and tell the public opinion subsided public concerns subsided and it would go away when you went after the big polluters you sued them you took them to court what was the reaction of usda i didn't like it i mean i remember going up to see ed cott who was a ceo of u.s steel he told me he said you know we don't like you very much and he said we don't we certainly don't like your agency and i said well if that's your attitude then we're probably going to get in a fight over it so you had to enforce the law you had to be a tough regulator that's right you you had to reassure the public that this was a problem the government was taking seriously we had to be tough we had to issue standards and we had to enforce them one of the first big regulatory success stories came right here on the potomac river the potomac river goes up to the mountains of appalachia it comes past our nation's capital and then it enters the estuary of the chesapeake bay and what we saw in the potomac river in the 1960s was what was seen in many rivers around the country where it smelled so bad you didn't want to get anywhere near it and that odor was in large part created by poorly treated sewage if you were out sailing in a small boat and capsized you had to go in and get a shot or two i mean it was literally hazardous to your health to come in contact with the water restoring the potomac meant modernizing the sewage treatment plants along the river like this one called blue plains just south of washington blue plains handles the waste of 2 million people and it embodies just the kind of pollution targeted by the clean water act pollution coming out of a pipe and in the 1970s blue plains was the biggest single source of pollution to the potomac the blue plains was the key wastewater treatment plant that had to be modified if we were really going to make a good effort at restoring water quality in both the river and in the bay the potomac had become overrun with acres of green algae caused by excess nutrients from human waste like phosphorus and nitrogen the regulator said okay phosphorus is the problem in the potomac therefore you people running the wastewater treatment plants will upgrade to remove phosphorus and it happened in a very short period of time but the river didn't improve all that much it turned out they needed to remove nitrogen too a costly process but cliff randall found an answer a new more economical technology called biological nutrient removal or bnr the way we treat sewage is we take in the sewage and we feed it to a large mass of bacteria and other microorganisms and basically they eat the sewage they eat the sewage that's correct much much much that's right it took a billion dollars in federal and state funds to modernize blue plains with several new technologies including bnr but the effort paid off and more than a hundred sewage treatment plants around the bay adopted bnr technology how much of these early gains were not only the result of technology but of a pretty tough regulatory stick from the epa and and the state governments i mean you know that that that was a tried and true formula i mean with sewage treatment where we made the biggest gains early on and continue to make the biggest gains you have very clear laws you have penalties you have deadlines you have enforcements you have inspection i mean we know what works [Music] [Applause] but the 1980s brought a new era and the political climate on the environment changed the winds of deregulation were blowing through washington especially during the reagan years [Music] it is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed it is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment there's no question that the reagan administration in fact brought to washington a deregulatory agenda i remember back in in the reagan days of i've seen memos that would come out from the white house to the chamber of commerce and other big businesses asking them for a list of regulations from which they would want relief environmental regulation was a prime target of the reagan white house for giving relief to american business the reagan administration essentially gutted the epa they stopped it in its tracks for a period of six seven years reagan and his white house appointed people to run the environmental protection agency who were flat out opposed to the mission of the agency and were set to undo that mission the reagan administration not only handcuffed epa on enforcement it shifted to a new strategy of voluntary compliance a strategy typified by the reagan epa's new program for chesapeake bay what we created in the chesapeake bay was a grand experiment it was going to be an alternative to the regulatory approach that had swept the epa that had swept the federal system they were going to try to do this in a non-regulatory cooperative manner the new approach was long on promises and targets but short on hard deadlines and clear accountability it is a voluntary program you are never going to effectively deal with a multi-state pollution problem with a voluntary program the result was the chesapeake bay program repeatedly missed its targets leaving unfulfilled the clean water acts promised to radically reduce water pollution [Music] i saw the consequences of how deregulation has played out here on the chesapeake bay's eastern shore where huge factory scale farms now dominate the landscape and where half the pollution flowing into the bay much of it from agriculture remains essentially unregulated [Music] i'd come here to meet rick dove a professional photographer and environmental consultant who under the authority of the clean water act has been gathering information for a potential citizen's lawsuit against agricultural polluters dove took me up on a small plane and gave me a bird's eye view of his detective work on the chesapeake bay watershed you actually got a really clear picture up here it's almost like a diagram up here looking at it that's one of the interesting things about flying and that is that there are no no trespassing signs you can look straight down and you can see everything you need to see you can document it dove is investigating the pollution from big chicken farms as we fly he points out rows of long flat sheds each a couple of hundred yards long each holding up to forty thousand chickens no matter where you fly on the eastern shore it's loaded with these chicken farms the problem is where they're chickens there's manure it's everywhere we know there's bad stuff in poultry waste once it gets in those ditches and once it those ditches begin to flow down to all these rivers on the eastern shore it's on its way to the bay these rivers are delivery systems whatever nutrients are flowing in that river are being delivered to the bay chicken manure is loaded with nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus remember the dead zones in the bay they were caused by algae which is fed by nitrogen and phosphorus we'll shoot four or five 600 pictures in an afternoon and we're going to blow them up we're going to take a look at all the details because that's how you really are able to identify exactly how that poultry waste is leaving that farm and getting into the bay today some of the pictures i took we're going to go to the site and we're going to see that on the ground the aerial photos lead dove to a chicken farm he's been watching for more than a year that's lassic up there yes it is that's lessig's farm right there there's uh four barns on the right are the original barns and the last year he's added these two on the end that's a pretty big place we're talking 240 250 000 chickens there at any one time take a look dove can check on farm runoff from public roadways and the photos give him a clear map of how polluted rainwater moves from the farm to the bay this is the leicester farm this is animal waste poultry litter big piles of it yeah it is a big pile but what's really alarming about this is you can see what's happened when it's rained all this water has collected around it and it has formed some leachate and you can see how this this leachate is running down alongside in between these barns with all the stuff in it with whatever it's collecting from that poultry waste it comes out of these pipes here comes in there comes over to here and then it goes under the road and right on down to the monocon river right on out to the bay wow and have you tested this water right here this is where we've tested here there and what kind of ratings you get extremely high the e coli uh standard is 126 colonies theirs was 48 392. and nitrogen and phosphorus all elevated clearly indicating that animal waste is involved here and even arsenic at nine times what the the the normal background level would be so there's a lot happening here now you know farm owner aaron lessig did not respond to frontline's repeated efforts to ask him about the water tests which dove's team turned over to the epa so look who he's grown for lessig is growing these chickens for purdue whatever the sign advertised says it's purdue lusic farm every purdue chicken has one of these tags on it means you're getting a fresh tender tasty young chicken i make sure of that because every one of these tags has my name on it over five decades purdue farms grew from a family business to the dominant poultry processor on the chesapeake's eastern shore and as purdue grew it transformed the chicken industry there used to be 200 companies on the shore involved in the poultry industry but they were all independent so you had an independent hatchery and independent processing plant the story of the poultry industry in of purdue is vertical integration integration met a few big chicken companies controlling all aspects of production purdue mushroomed into a multi-billion dollar conglomerate small family chicken farms became chicken well i think capitalism in general stimulates efficiency and efficiency often is size and so you know i think things had to become bigger in order to keep costs lower so you could maintain you know your price structure factory-style poultry production drove down chicken prices and americans responded over the past 50 years per capita consumption of chicken has tripled but there's been another price to all those cheap chickens poultry farming like most animal farming has become much more intense much more concentrated where you had 50 000 chickens on a given plot of ground you've got a half million or two million now twitch produces a huge problem of what to do with the manure in 2008 delmarva peninsula poultry farms raised more than 570 million chickens and all those chickens produced massive mountains of manure 1.5 billion pounds a year that's more manure than the annual human waste from four big cities new york washington san francisco and atlanta all put together before mass production chicken farms local crop farmers used to absorb the chicken manure now there's way too much for them to absorb agriculture is by far the largest source of pollution to the chesapeake bay and it is arguably the single biggest source of pollution to all of the waters in the country so the problem isn't just manure but it's too much manure it's too much manure and arguably too many animals under the current structure now there's too many animals in one place exactly it's a problem all over the country hog farms in the carolinas and iowa poultry farms in arkansas and texas cattle farms in wisconsin and along the susquehanna river in pennsylvania in terms of just damage to the ecosystems you know the destruction of entire ecosystems of aquatic communities of fish going extinct there's nothing as bad as the as these factory farm operations nothing so to save the bay the epa says it's essential to get control over the animal manure what's made that hard is deciding just who's responsible for all that manure to understand how the chicken business is organized and how it's run i checked in with carol morrison a successful purdue grower for many years typically the farmer has a contract with the company whether it be purdue tyson whoever and you contract to raise their chickens they own the chickens they just drop them off on the farm for us to raise to a marketable age and then they come and pick up the chickens take them for processing when purdue require that morrison modernize her chicken houses at a cost of 150 000 or more she decided to get out of the business this is her last batch of purdue chickens now what's the relationship here do you bargain with one company or another as a grower there's no bargaining in the contracts contracts are designed by the company brought out to the farm and you either sign it and get chickens or sign not sign it and not get chickens and ultimately lose the farm so you're saying that the processors dictate the terms they run the show yes the processors dictate all of the terms the terms are very specific the big chicken companies own the chickens supply the feed dictate the growing regimen do all the processing they own it all except the chicken waste well anybody else who owns an animal is responsible for their waste if the company owns the animal why are they not responsible for their waste i've never understood that i have horses i have a dog that's outside i'm responsible for their mess now chicken chickens are owned by these companies like purdue and tyson how is it they're not responsible for it help me understand one thing how do you wind up by owning the chickens owning the feed and not owning in the sense of legal responsibility the manure the manure is considered a resource actually the producers want the the litter they want the chicken litter it's not a matter of who owns or doesn't own it it's a matter of what uses it being being made from it as factory farming has grown the volume of excess manure has mushroomed and there's been an increasing push to regulate farm pollution but american agriculture has fought off pollution controls for three decades the whole agricultural community has remained maybe the the last big or the biggest unregulated largely unregulated area of water pollution and it's why epa tells you across the country agriculture is responsible for for 60 percent or something like that of our water quality problems we are talking the equivalent of medium-sized cities in terms of the waste that is generated that is virtually untreated going into the chesapeake bay and so cities have their have their waste treated go through water treatment plants farming agricultural these concentrated animal raising operations they're not treated the same way that is absolutely correct the delmarva poultry industry on the bay's eastern shore doesn't see it that way it contends that there's a fundamental difference between industrial pollution or urban sewage and agricultural waste industry spokesman bill satterfield shouldn't the poultry farms be subject to the same kind of limitations that sewage treatment plants or industrial plants a small industrial site that has to have a permit knows the source of what goes into that pipe with non-point source pollution there are various ways that nutrients can get into the groundwater and maybe flow through that pipe farm fields are not talking about fields i'm talking about growers and sheds where i mean i can i've literally stood in front of farms and i've literally looked at chicken houses i've seen pipes coming into the drainage ditches coming from ditches between the chicken houses the source visibly is quite clear to know where those nutrients came in would require an investigation and if if the pipe passed under a chicken house and started over here in a field who's to say what entered that pipe on that end who's to say whether the nutrients if there are any came from chickens or fox or deer or birds or something else russell long famous senator from louisiana used to say when people gave an answer like that it's not you it's not me it's that guy behind the tree it seems to me as though every time we get to this even though the evidence is pointing to a highest concentrations right near agricultural poultry operations you're saying what could be the foxes or the geese if there were proof positive that those nutrients are from chickens then we can accelerate our programs and do a better job but we can't solve all the rivers problems with all the people all the growth all the other animals on the back of the chicken and the poultry farmers i'll be the first one to say i did it um i've said this before we're all part of it and yes i think agriculture is a big contributor to the pollution to the run the runoff in into the chesapeake bay the industry knows it what i am tired of is everyone wasting all their time and energy and saying i didn't do it i did it why can't they admit it i mean you know let's all say okay we're a part of it now let's find an answer all in favor of adopting a conference committee report signified by saying aye opposed no but finding an answer has been politically impossible 178 is on third reading in the late 1990s a bill went before the maryland legislature to require mandatory nutrient management by farmers to curb runoff from chicken manure big chicken didn't like that idea at all i think the survival of the poultry industry is at stake on the eastern shore the poultry industry among the most financially powerful lobbies in maryland pushed for a looser alternative well certainly the alternative was to have voluntary goals it was going to be cooperative it was going to have no regulatory teeth and it was going to be overseen by the maryland department of agriculture a non-regulatory agency rather than the maryland department of environment the farm and industry cannot live with mandatory nutrient regulations we've got to keep it voluntary and the industry bill won and since then the industry has been successful in blocking or tying up subsequent efforts to regulate their waste you sat in the maryland legislature for 12 years during that period did you see the big chicken companies steadily resist regulation on manure runoff absolutely big chicken companies were a presence jim perdue the son of frank perdue was a constant presence uh whether he was sitting in my chairman's office or holding a reception in the evening or whatever the the chicken lobby was and it was well represented they hired the the top guns in the lobbying community in annapolis and they made every effort to prevent us from enacting tough regulations on agriculture some people have said to us that you'd clean up the whole situation much faster if the integrators the poultry processors were responsible you got to clean it up and you all are responsible well we can only do what we can do the farmer certainly is you know is his own business man out there on the farm and i think it works better if it's a cooperative effort so purdue pioneered a process to recycle part of the chicken growers excess manure to ship it across the country and purdue launched a voluntary program to teach its growers better manure management then the programs that we're looking at are an alternative to more regulation i guess and more regulation and enforcement which which nobody likes i mean nobody likes you know somebody coming onto your farm you know without any uh warning and and those kinds of things there's no question that the influence of the agricultural farm lobby in general has had a very successful role in limiting the amount of pollution control regulations that we see in the chesapeake bay watershed or nationwide you know corporations are externalizing machines they're constantly devising ways to get somebody else to pay their cost of production and you know if you're in a polluting industry the most obvious way to do that is to shift your cleanup costs to the public make yourself a billionaire by poisoning the rest of us are you saying the market's distorted you show me a polluter i'll show you a subsidy chicken farmers bristled when the obama epa started demanding pollution discharge permits this spring the industry claims it's already doing enough the poultry industry is doing more every year we're seeing more best management practices on farms our program to put trees on poultry farms to uptake the nutrients is a very progressive thing there are more and more programs offered to help farmers put in manure storage buildings and as the science says we can do more without putting our people out of business i'm sure we will do more but environmentalists like rick dove remain skeptical now this industry says they're doing better and you know i can't say if that's true or false but i can tell you that what i'm seeing here on the ground right now is absolutely terrible so if it was worse before then i can understand why the bay is in such bad trouble while the bay is besieged by runoff from the big chicken in cattle farms along its rivers i learned about a whole new kind of pollution as i travel up the potomac as it winds its way past washington up towards the hill country of west virginia up here near the headwaters of the potomac i heard about the big new pollution threat not even known when the clean water act was passed six years ago marine biologists became alarmed at reports of massive fish kills on the rivers in this region every year smallmouth bass were being decimated by some mysterious problem spring and fall hundreds of fish would be found floating in the water belly up i caught up with vicki blazer a fish pathologist with the u.s geological survey who was trying to figure out why the fish were dying what do we got here so here we have this large discolored area in the liver and then you see all these little white spots here's another totally discolored area and that's a signal of some some bigger problem yes when we see a really high prevalence in a population that indicates there's some problem going on in that water and when blazer dug deeper she found a surprise one of the major and most interesting findings was intersex in the male bass when we look at the male gonads or testes what we find is immature eggs within the male testes so you get sort of feminization of male fish is that a big alarming finding in marine biology aquatic biology yes and that has certainly attracted a lot of concern and attention scientific studies have linked abnormal mutations in marine creatures like intersex to exposure to chemical compounds that mimic or imitate natural hormones in the body these chemicals are called endocrine disruptors endocrine disruptors are very very potent chemicals at infinitesimally small quantification i mean you're talking about parts per million or parts per billion they interrupt the normal way in which the body controls everything from growth and development to thyroid function to reproductive function to estrogen levels testosterone levels so they're very very important and they are a deep concern because there are so many of them now there are thousands of these worrisome chemicals that have gotten into the environment and one reason is that they're part of everything we do the list of things that bring these organic pollutants into our bodies is a long list and it ranges from home care products soaps toothpaste cleaning agents in the household to things we put on our lawns the things that we use all the time the plastic industry the rubber industry lubricants fuels the highways when you see scientists like vicky blazer cutting open fish finding intersex uh in the male fish seeing high levels of fish kills seeing immune systems disrupted seeing other damage to the fish is that a warning to you potentially about human health oh absolutely uh the warning not not just from the smallmouth bass and the potomac but from amphibians all across the country you have frogs with six legs hermaphroditic frogs male frogs with ovaries female frogs with male genitalia these are the canaries the modern canary in the mine that we haven't been playing paying enough attention to so many new chemicals have emerged lately that scientists and regulators are playing catch-up to industry trying to spot which chemicals they think pose new dangers in our water epa does not regulate any of these things yet and in many cases there isn't even the methods to measure them in the amounts that they actually have a biological effect so science and the regulators are behind the curve dealing with what industry and society is producing or wants correct in the head kidney and hind kidney playing ketchup and regulating these new chemicals may be a problem for more than just these fish the endocrine system of fish is very similar to the endocrine system of humans fish have thyroid glands they have the functional equivalent of adrenal glands they pretty much have all the same hormone systems as humans which again is why we use them as sort of indicator species so fish are having intersex or lesions that's kind of spooky it is you know we can't help but make that jump to ask the question how are these things influencing people to get a handle on that question i headed down river just above washington i found another usgs team sampling water from the potomac part of a nationwide survey checking for 300 emerging contaminants in our drinking water they were looking for well-known pollutants like pesticides and for newly detected contaminants found in pharmaceuticals body lotions soaps and deodorants in all they found 85 compounds on their watch list many of them are chemicals we're just now starting to be able to even analyze foreign water but the treatment isn't intended to remove those products what makes this a matter of concern is that this is the intake for the washington aqueduct where one million people in the dc area get their drinking water few of us may realize it but people downstream use waste water from people upstream the potomac like other rivers serves as both the place where we dump our waste water and the place where we get our drinking water it's one big continuous recycling operation from the toilet or the shower to the tap the river flows down a community takes water out of the river puts it back through a wastewater plant a few miles down out back out back and with proper regulation and proper processes at the wastewater plant and proper processes at the drinking water plant it works very well so we sort of continuously recycle this the recycling process works well for known contaminants but what about the new chemicals for which the epa has not yet set safety standards how tough is the challenge just to keep up with all that new sources of pollutants as new elements come in synthetics herbicides pesticides pharmaceuticals as those things enter the water stream in concentrations because of more advanced development more human activity more animal activity more commercial activity those things as they get into the river make it harder for us to do our job there's no question about that not just harder but actually impossible to stop all the new contaminants according to the usgs findings because the old filters weren't designed to catch the new threats we sampled the finished water at the washington aqueduct and we found about two-thirds of the compounds we detected were still detected in finished water so you're saying that that roughly two-thirds of these emerging contaminants that you found in the river water at the intakes for the washington aqueduct came all the way through the filtering system and were in the drinking water the tap water in the district and that's what we saw at all the studies that were done denver's findings mirrored what usgs has found all across the country everywhere they saw lots of new contaminants in america's drinking water even if at low doses were you surprised by the findings of this usgs study or did you did that fit what you thought was probably going on i was surprised by the number of different compounds that were detectable i knew we were swimming in a sea of chemical soup but i didn't realize the soup was quite as concentrated you talk about a soup some people have used the term toxic cocktail is there a danger that if a level of a particular compound were acceptable and another one were acceptable that you start to put a bunch of them together and then that's no longer a safe level you put your finger on one of the real concerns about toxicology it may be safe to have a little bit of compound a or a little bit of compound b but when the two of them are together they're synergism and they become really deadly if you were living in washington dc would you drink water coming out of the potomac probably not because because we really don't know what what all is in there today i drink the water with great confidence because our water meets the regulations but of course the question is do the regulations match the threat were there endocrine disruptors chemical compounds in the washington aqueduct intake water that were of concern to you in terms of their potential impact on human health are there chemicals of concern yes i think at this point the levels are very very low so i don't have a great deal of concern that something needs to be done imminently but it would certainly be nice to reduce what's getting into the water we can show that people with higher levels of some of these chemicals may have um a higher incidence of a certain kind of effect than people with lower levels of these chemicals what kind of effect there are associations with what's called male testicular dysgenesis syndrome that's a big term but it means lower sperm count lower sperm count are we facing a long-term slow motion risk that we don't recognize because it's not readily apparent we are there are five million people being exposed to endocrine disruptors just in the mid-atlantic region and yet we don't know precisely how many of them are going to develop premature breast cancer are going to have problems with reproduction going to have all kinds of congenital anomalies of the male genitalia things that are happening we know they're happening but they're happening at a broad low level so that they don't raise uh the alarm in the general public do you know what the safe levels are in most cases we don't know what the safe levels are and some of the new science is suggesting that levels that we used to think were safe may in fact not be safe for humans for humans so we're finding in certain cases that much lower levels than we previously thought were a problem may in fact have the potential to harm at least some segment of the population do we have an adequate system of of regulation or should we be regulating on a different standard i'm not a regulator i'm a researcher but in my personal opinion i would like can i would like to know that a chemical is unlikely to cause harm before we expose our population to it [Music] it's our failure to control toxic chemicals before they cause trouble in the environment that haunts our waters all across the nation places like puget sound which i've come to know well in recent years [Music] the sound which lies off the coast of seattle is a place i've come to cherish as a phenomenal resource [Music] a gorgeous natural playground gateway to the pacific [Music] and historically a treasure house of fish and wildlife but today the sound is in peril [Music] i would put puget sound in the intensive care unit the situation is critical we've known for decades that puget sound had serious issues but we're at a point now where the the species that are almost extinct are telling us we've got some real bottom line problems here take these regional icons the killer whales or orcas they're a major tourist attraction but increasingly puget sound orcas are being closely studied by scientists as a barometer of the health of the entire sound to see what scientists are learning i headed out with brad hansen a team leader with noah the national oceanic and atmospheric administration up over there hanson and his colleagues have been studying the orca population for several years why study these whales well they're the the top predator in the food chain so they're essentially accumulating all the contaminants they're the you know the last stop and in the food chain and so they're a laboratory in a way well there's a conservatory that tells you what's going on in the whole ecosystem the orca story is troubling in one year seven local orcas died their population is now down to 86 so low that in 2005 noah listed puget sound orcas as an endangered species to figure out why the orca population is in decline hanson's team goes out after biological samples they get up pretty close to these uh whales in order to take samples at some point right and we get within just four or five meters or five meters so that's up close yep they shoot blunt-nosed darts into the orcas and extract small samples of blubber that blubber is sent to the lab to be tested for a slew of contaminants especially telltale toxins like pcbs the lab results have been alarming our research over the last 10 to 13 years has been able to demonstrate that these killer whales are the most pcb contaminated marine mammals in the world so we're very very concerned about what that might mean to their health pcbs are cancer-causing chemicals so toxic that congress banned them three decades ago but they keep showing up pcbs are probably the number one persistent contaminant of concern anywhere in the northern hemisphere they bioaccumulate in food webs you mean they build up they build up in food webs and in organisms we have trouble getting rid of them we have a lot of trouble getting them out of our system when i say we i mean humans rats killer whales harbor seals doesn't really matter increasingly scientists worry that pcbs are a problem not just for orca whales these animals are eating wild fish wild fish is good for us too but if there's contaminants in it it's going to have an adverse impact on us so you know that's that's the thing is that that's why these animals are important sentinel species not just for the ecosystem in general but also for him [Music] at the center for whale research director ken balcom has been keeping records for three decades on the whales that make puget sound their regular home fewer whales are making it to maturity the population is declining we are seeing probably the next 20 years we'll be witnessing the departure of this population you think they're gone they're going to die out i've already told our government folks that we can go through this for about 20 more years if we don't provide a remedy and we will see the end of this population okay malcolm and his staff know these whales so well by sight that they can track them from birth to death what are these charts these are the family trees of all the whales we've been studying for the past 32 years and we just put in the tombstone markers balcom told me underscore a worrisome trend among the youngest most vulnerable orcas these older whales up here they died that that's kind of normal but to have so many down here these younger whales dying is that a bad sign that's the distressing part is the mortality pattern we're seeing now is that young whales are dying way before they even mature so these he's alarmed at the high levels of pcbs that hansen's team found in younger whales which absorb pcbs from their mother's milk are there enough parallels between the way the human body works the chemistry and biology of the human body and the whales so that we can actually take lessons from them yes we can take lessons from not only the whales but the seals and the fish and it's been demonstrated in the health statistics in especially arctic environments cold environments where there's a high fat diet the children of these high arctic people are suffering these same problems immune deficiencies reproductive problems all of these are affecting humans as well as the other mammals at noaa testing labs like this one scientists have established that king salmon and puget sound are much more heavily contaminated with pcbs than salmon in other pacific coastal waters everything we see points to puget sound being a hot spot for pcbs and a persistent problem we've seen contamination of animals we've seen no improvement in the levels of pcbs in the last 20 odd years despite regulations implemented in the 1970s and that to me indicates there are continuous inputs from land-based sources from the sediments and delivering them right into that food web one big reason pcbs are a persistent problem is that it takes so long to clean up places like the duwamish river seattle's industrial corridor some of seattle's heaviest industries settled here decades ago and today it's the region's largest hot spot for pcbs [Music] my name is bj cummings i represent the duwamish river cleanup coalition uh we're a community bj cummings leads tours of the river but this isn't your typical tourist outing it's an environmental wake-up call the epa did an investigation here on the duwamish river about 10 years ago and concluded that the industrial history here had left behind such a legacy of toxic pollution that the river was declared a federal superfund site in two thousand one superfund is one of epa's big sticks it was the regulatory program created in 1980 to clean up america's worst pollution problems your typical superfund site used to be factory pipe superfund site right at the bottom of your pipe that's not what we have here we have what's called a mega site we have a five five and a half mile stretch of river end to end that's being investigated for cleanup this is one of the largest superfund sites in the country the river was listed as a superfund site because of an accumulation a legacy of toxic pollution that has built up in the mud at the bottom of the river there's a direct link between contaminated sediments in certain areas and contamination of the food web above those sediments in fact one might even think of the pcbs riding an elevator up from the sediments up into plankton up into little fish big fish harbor seals killer whales eagles humans the toxic buildup in the duwamish river bottom is the product of more than a half century of industrial development along the river boeing for example the area's biggest corporation had its main operations here during world war ii we are the builders we are the builders of the b-17 with our hands a million strong we milled and drilled and share and saw the success of boeing mirrored the 20th century boom in the american economy in the euro when industrial progress brought unprecedented expansion powers are the hands that build the queen the b-17 the fortress but that progress also left behind an unprecedented amount of pollution or what's called legacy pollutants the term legacy pollutants is when it's historical practices what what was acceptable in the 40s and 50s we would find very un objectionable today in the 90s in the 80s and beyond [Music] people did not know the damage that some of these materials caused at the time they did not know the long-term effects of them that we do today pcbs are a classic legacy pollutant found here at boeing a toxic chemical once widely used by industry often as a high stress lubricant in power stations and also in building materials frequently it takes a lot of detective work to find hidden pcbs so steve you found a contamination problem in the flight line out here yeah it's um the this material that we see between the concrete panels is called joint compound material that was installed in the in the late 60s contained on very high levels of pcbs and you know since we made this discovery you know in the late 90s we've now removed about um 50 miles of this throughout 50 miles throughout all boeing this black car looking stuff yeah this material um throughout all of the boeing facilities here in the northwest is that right why was it so hard to find well it wasn't obvious to us and it was you know normally when people talk about pcbs you think about electrical equipment you think about hydraulics that's where normally pcbs are used the fact that they were used in something that was right in front of us was difficult it was really difficult that we we overlooked it making sure that boeing doesn't overlook any of its legacy pollutants is the job of sean blocker a former marine who has been epa's point man on the cleanup at boeing what i want to talk about today is basically some additional data that we have that's on the sediments outside the current boundary the cleanup for the boeing plant too and the significance of the boeing facility is the number of contaminants that originate from the facility it has over 24 things in the ground water 40 some odd different things that are in the soil that are above cleanup levels so it's the biggest accumulation of contaminants in that area from the get-go boeing and epa have clashed over how to clean up those legacy pollutants and the arguments have led to long delays when were you first ready to go with a cleanup plan we submitted a plan to epa in 1999 when um you know to dredge we call it an interim measure to take what is adjacent to boeing and and excavate that material boeing says that over a decade ago it was ready to clean up and all that held it up was bureaucratic red tape from the epa i would disagree with that from my review of what they were going to do i didn't think they had fully defined where all the bad stuff was they didn't know the totality of what the contamination was either groundwater soil but you obviously had a higher threshold for let's get to the bottom of how bad this pollution is then boeing did boeing is doing what they're asked to do no more no less so time and again blocker pressed boeing to do more more work and more tests by now boeing has spent 80 million dollars on testing and interim cleanups there's over 500 sampling locations at this facility that have been drilled over time and if we came here 10 years ago how many would there have been 50 okay so hundreds more have been drilled because of this back and forth with the epa that's correct not only has boeing been feuding with the epa but it's been locked in a fierce battle with the city of seattle which used to operate a steam plant next door to boeing field so typical of superfund sites these two powerful neighbors have been wrangling over who's responsible for pcbs flowing through this ditch or flume when it rains the flume runs from the now defunct steam plant through boeing's territory to the river boeing says it's the city's pcbs so it was this just the city steam plant or did boeing and other people put storm drains into this and use it pretty much it was just for the cooling water from the steam plant the city flat out disagrees and it has taken boeing to court pcbs are coming by connections of other people to our ditch they come through line drainage lines that come from other properties most specifically boeing's property so boeing was attaching its drainage pipes to your flume sending some of its dirty stuff down your flume to the river there have been over 20 lines attached to our ditch that came from the boeing property 20 lines so it's got to be an endless argument with boeing over whose line put the dirty stuff in that flume it's a continuing argument and that argument is holding up the big cleanup on the duwamish river jay manning who heads washington's department of ecology which helps epa supervise the cleanup showed me the cost of this continued delay to puget sound we're looking at four very large outfalls of drainage pipes that carry storm water from more than 30 square miles of this area you can see the one there to the right this is an industrial dumping ground in effect this is this storm water drains a very large industrial area are you all still finding pcbs and other contaminants in that water unfortunately the storm water coming out of those drain pipes we're still detecting pcbs this is going to cost millions to clean up maybe tens of millions and owning 90 of that liability is not a place you want to be so these folks who are not stupid are busy trying to prove that it's somebody other than them that is everybody's pointing their finger at everybody else and they are trying to prove probably that not that they have no liability because that's pretty hard to do but proving that they have very little compared to their neighbor that's what it's about and it's about money ultimately the issues of cleanup time and money are tied to a larger question for all of us that is how clean do we expect our waterways to be here on the duwamish the state has posted warnings not to eat local fish and shellfish because of pollution and so the fight now is over whether the river can be cleaned up enough to let the locals fish the river once again without risk what we determined was that the most sensitive population we had out there were our native americans that eat the fish out of the dwamish and they eat a lot more fish than most of us they do and so that was the standard you wanted to set clean it up so the tribes can eat the fish safely without getting poisoned from pcbs yes okay and boeing objected to that basically they don't feel that that stretch of the river can ever be returned to where you could harvest these kind of uh fish and shellfish we disagree with that i think people need to understand is that there are going to be certain uses of the duwamish river that aren't going to be possible in the future and i'll give you an example i don't think people are going to be able to subsistence fish out of the species that are in the duwamish i think we have to set reasonable expectations for cleanup in industrial areas where do you come down on that how clean is cleaned i mean do we need to get rivers back to where people can fish and safely eat the fish without fear to their health that's the goal that is the goal that has to be the goal because every one of those rivers and streams are going into puget sound so it's not as if it's about that river or that stream alone it's about the whole ecosystem just across the river from boeing the threat of legacy pollution and the question of how clean is clean became personal right here in south park where in 2004 the community was rocked by news that some of its streets and people's yards were contaminated with pcbs people in south park particularly people with with families with small children got incredibly nervous i mean out and out scared um about what this might mean i pushed my kid's stroller down that street every day you know i go down there and i fish my dog runs along that waterfront you know what does this mean for me what does this mean for my health i mean you try to do the best for your kids and all of a sudden something like this comes and it feels so scary what you're saying she's talking about pcb's cancer-causing microbes banned in the 70s but taking an emotional toll on the residents of south park today the city of seattle realized it had a crisis and moved quickly to pave the contaminated streets clean up the polluted yards and tell people how to take safety precautions suddenly south park a largely immigrant working class neighborhood surrounded by industry was galvanized into action residents demanded a long promised cleanup of an abandoned industrial site called malarkey asphalt malarkey asphalt for years operated directly across the street from homes in south park and was a really really dirty business for many years there was open dumping on the riverbank there was waste oil that was sprayed in the area to keep the dust and the unpaved streets down and that contaminated the roads and yards right in people's gardens around the property years earlier the old malarkey site had been bought by the port of seattle which did a pcb cleanup on part of malarkey's property but people in south park suspected there were still many more undiscovered pcb hot spots upland from the riverbank at malarkey so the neighborhood said go take some tests there tell us what's there epa and the port said oh no no we did the upland it's finished we eventually were able to succeed in getting just a few more tests just assure us show us it's okay we were finding numbers that were higher than any of the doug hotchkiss the port's manager for the malarkey site ran tests and what he found surprised everyone what was the hottest spot you found how high was it the hottest spot for pcbs was right in this area here and it was about 9 000 parts per million nine thousand and the federal limit is 25 i mean this is a really hot spot yeah and luckily it was under asphalt but it was still something that even under asphalt you couldn't just leave there so hotchkiss drafted a plan to clean up malarkey but it backfired we would be cleaning up to 25 parts per million which was the cleanup level that that epa had accepted before and how did the community take that how did they react they were they were not happy with it they didn't find it acceptable in fact south park was up in arms insisting on a clean up to the residential standard of one part per million river cleanup coalition residents from south park started calling up port commissioners and explaining the problem to them they got in vans and buses and went down where the port commission was meeting and one after another got up and told the port commission that they were worried about their health and that the port commission had the responsibility to the community to make sure that that cleanup would be safe for the entire community to use well it was a very emotionally charged meeting i wouldn't necessarily say it was confrontational but it was a lot of emotion in the room and i remember a particular episode where a young mother came up to the stand and said you know if it's only a question of money how can you forsake the children of south park and that was something that really hit home to me so the elected port commissioners sensitive to public opinion backed down they adopted the more protective residential standard at twice the cost i think that this effort has been successful because this community has been uncompromising in speaking up for itself and in insisting that people listen we essentially have a community here that has been on the fringes of any kind of economic or political power in the city of seattle for many decades so it's a community that has only recently and refound its voice by finding its voice south park redefined the meaning of clean and the community is now at work developing riverfront habitat zones at malarkey and elsewhere along the duwamish in the absence of a b.j cummings or somebody like her who is out there on the water knowledgeable aware of what's happening and poking and prodding and asking us the hard questions we would not be making the progress that we're making [Music] the greatest threats to our waterways are often invisible to the naked eye evidence crops up in unlikely places like alki beach across elliot bay from downtown seattle it's a favorite spot for scuba divers but taking to the water here isn't for the faint of heart temperatures in the puget can be in the 40s [Music] but for the adventurous underwater exploration offers a unique perspective on the marine environment today we saw a giant pacific octopus underneath the honey bear which is a little boat that sunk out here lives underneath the bow of the boat it also provides a close-up view of the hidden threat to puget sound [Music] like this drainage pipe one of the main outfalls for seattle's rainwater runoff we swam by the end of the storm water drain and it's pretty dramatic the end of the pipe creates a brown noxious soup of nastiness that is unbelievable and kind of dramatic and a little bit scary unbelievable because the water looks so good from up here so we're looking at something we think is clean and underneath you can see diving there it's it's not clean it's dirty it's not clean when we when we see that thing running in in full flow we turn around and we swim the other way quickly there is just this unbelievable gunk gun coming out of the end of this pipe this is our front yard would you allow your front yard to be sick this is sick this is sick doesn't look sick but it is sick what's making this water so sick is what scientists have now labeled the number one menace to our waterways storm water runoff in seattle peak time for storm water runoff is during fall and winter when the rain comes down in torrance everywhere that rain falls and hits the ground it's going to pick up something it might be nothing more hazardous than dirt or it might be pcbs it might be some toxic pesticide and it will travel along with the water into the nearest drainage ditch into the nearest swale into a creek into a river and ultimately into puget sand and whatever pollutants that water picks up on its journey to puget sound it's going to deposit in puget sound we put in about 150 000 pounds a day of untreated toxics into puget sound we thought all the way along that it was like a toilet to be honest with you which put in you flush out it goes out to the ocean it gets diluted we know that's not true it's like a bathtub so what you put in stays there the pollution in storm water runoff in major cities like seattle or in suburban and urban areas across the country is massive yet until recently it was little control the original clean water act didn't regulate storm water at all though some limits have been adopted since but the problem remains poorly understood because so much of the pollution is invisible people go nuts over a 50 gallon oil spill because you can see it and it's really nasty looking when you see it on the water it is impressive how horrible it looks and so oil spills aren't invisible they're highly visible and they galvanize people like nothing else what about the invisible what about the auto traffic what kind of coat oil spill is there from our ordinary living based on actual sampling in the puget sound basin we've estimated that the volume of oil that is carried into puget sound by storm water runoff is equal to the oil spill and prince william sound but the exxon valdez spill every two years storm water in puget sound carries that volume of oil into puget sound the heart of the problem is concrete asphalt streets sidewalks buildings shopping centers suburban housing rooftops hard surfaces what scientists call impervious surfaces that block the downpour of rain from naturally sinking into the ground how the land is developed how intensely will have a direct impact on the quality of storm water you take down a forested area and replace it with pavement or a rooftop and instead of almost all of the water slowly moving through the forest canopy and down to the ground and infiltrating down into groundwater where it will move slowly that water the day it lands within minutes of it hitting the ground it's going to be gone and so scientists environmentalists and regulators all say that combating pollution is not just a matter of regulating industry but the key to stormwater runoff is land use how we develop and use our land king county i learned has become a laboratory for testing the politics of land use it's an area bigger than the state of rhode island home not just to seattle and 1.8 million people but two-thirds of it is still forest so it's an area where environmentalists want to strictly control the pace of development and the man who has been leading the charge his long-time king county chief executive ron sims you have to protect our forests you have to in our agricultural areas you must because if we don't protect them our water quality will be significantly diminished and why sacrifice clean water for growth harvest already simms says his mission has been to save puget sound by protecting critical areas like forests way up here 45 miles east of seattle he paid 22 million dollars in tax money to buy development rights on 90 000 acres of forest now the nature meaning that no developer could build on that land twenty thousand we have a hundred people are going to build their homes here they were going to have the supermarkets here there are gas stations here we stopped it and we stopped it forever what is saving this timberland have to do with puget sound the waters that come off this 90 000 acres flow into the snoqualmie river which flows into lake washington which flows into pigeot sound we need pristine waters coming from this timberland into the pidgeot sound and so this property is absolutely critical to it washington state's growth management act directs local government leaders like sims to concentrate new growth in cities and to prevent sprawl in lightly populated rural areas for king county sims pioneered a critical areas ordinance that limits just how much forest and woodland property owners can cut down sims targets places like this a five-acre one-family plot of land that belongs to howard and patty van laken back in 2004 king county passes critical areas ordinance that takes away the usage of 65 of your property if you don't have it cleared off and we didn't have ours cleared off at the time so we're we cannot touch 65 of our property so why would you want to clear more than 35 percent of this wonderful forest what what we originally did planned when we were in 1980 when we bought it was that we could subdivide and maybe give our kids a parcel land to build a house on or and or sell off part of the property for the proceeds to be able to keep our house and retire how do you feel about that rather angry very angry very angry it's our property we have been paying taxes on this property since 1980 and we can't even plant grass angry at whom angry is what i'm angry at the king county government because they more or less took away our property rights without any compensation for our property we're getting the shaft we're they're putting the burden on the small land owner not on everybody the van lincoln's problem actually stems from a zoning ordinance passed in the early 1980s that barred subdividing properties under five acres but to many rural landowners sims new ordinance was the last straw and they formed the citizens alliance for property rights i met with several of them one evening over a beer in issaquah we're in the same position that the blacks were in the in the 1950s absolutely we are calling we are crying we are doing everything we can to talk to those who have their hands on the levers and they aren't listening one throbbing refrain was resentment against political domination by the urban majority which outnumbers rural voters nearly five to one we talk about critical areas ordinance like it's a nice little one page thing we're talking about over 400 pages of amendments to existing law 400 over 400 pages how how much of the frustration out here is a matter not just of a single ordinance but of a series of regulations that that feel onerous i mean how much of this has built up over time much of it is built up it started in 88 with the sensitive areas ordinance in 2000 we had a gigantic down zoning fight and then the coup de gras was the 2004 critical area ordinance so it's an accumulation very much an accumulation of regulations they told me people were so steamed up that ron sims rarely dared to come to their part of the county people on his staff say he's gotten threat often for us i bet somebody would have gone for 30 odds six of them they would go for 30 odd sexes guns i'm not saying they would i'm saying they're terrified i'm saying there are people who are so angry if we didn't have a way to to direct that to get some results i know there are people in this county that probably would have shot a few key people they are so angry we have been involved in the timber did you get any threats i always get threats i mean serious threats i always get serious threats do you take them seriously i cannot restrict my life and what i do based upon people who are angry and people who wish to threaten me but in this particular case it wasn't pleasant people were yelling at me we got a lot of nasty phone calls and emails and it wasn't fun being on television and and quite frankly i was abandoned by a lot of people even the environmental community at the time for saying ron it might be too heavy-handed but sims has not backed down he asserts that the county ordinance was prompted by scientific analysis of runoff water flows and he gets solid political backing from an overwhelming majority in king county what do you say to critics who say or to people who say look they've taken my land in effect i can only use a third of my land two thirds of my land i've got to leave in forests and bushes no one has lost the value or use of their land there's not one case in king county where anybody's been able to show that you mean nobody's come forward and said i want to do this on my property and you've turned them down what people have found is that we're not going to allow them to develop their land in terms of building a lot of homes on it but the use of their land they still enjoy it to this day the rural people are saying this burden all falls on us there the city people don't have any burden on them how do you respond well the city people have far more burdens and restrictions on their land than anyone in the rural area has far more and they have far more regulation on the land folks stay tuned this thing with another round on the lawsuit and the enforcement some angry rural property owners filed suit and a state appeals court has struck down part of sims critical areas ordinance that issue is now before the state supreme court if the supreme court upholds the court of appeals decision it will be the abandonment of everything that this state has voted on consistently which is they want environmental protection here [Music] while the legal drama plays out the lesson for ron sims is unmistakable we will never recover puget sound if we don't get a hold of the storm water i mean i never imagined that that body of water would just fundamentally be unhealthy for whales and for salmon all the things that make it a rich wonderful environment we made in the next couple of decades and when i'm 80 years old if we don't do anything people will say you your generation you lost it you weren't willing to step up and save it [Music] back on the east coast near chesapeake bay the problems of development sprawl that king county is fighting have played out in the suburbs of washington dc [Music] already 17 million people live in the chesapeake bay watershed in recent years ten thousand more moved in every month and every month three thousand acres of forest were lost to development [Music] virginia the outer loop heading toward tyson's corner reporting very heavy traffic the sprawl took off decades ago here in northern virginia about five miles south of the potomac river in a suburb of washington called tyson's corner today tysons is a case study in the harmful impact of unchecked growth but 60 years ago tysons was just a rural crossroads with a country store as world war ii ended it was a land of dairy farms and truck farms and abandoned farms and relatively little development and it was wide open the government then the political leaders then the business leaders were all in favor of doing what was necessary to accommodate the growth that was coming and for growth to happen what developers needed was infrastructure sewers and roads and especially a highway around washington dc called the beltway when you put the beltway at exactly the location it was which which created about 1800 acres in the center of those in the convergence of those roads you had a fabulous development site with taxpayers footing the bill for infrastructure tysons became a transportation hub a commercial center and a multi-billion dollar bonanza for developers the basic approach of most land speculators who are the site developers is to buy a piece of land that's farmland and is owned as farmland a taxed as farmland so it's cheap it's cheap and then get it replanned and rezoned as a subdivision with some retail and commercial components and the land value will go up dramatically so the formula is buy land cheap from farmers get the county and the state to put in the roads the sewers the schools all the stuff that makes it attractive and then turn around and sell it for commercial residential at 30 40 times the cost that's correct the formula worked like magic for tysons over the next 45 years it became one of america's largest commercial developments and most successful retail centers now and twenty thousand people work at tysons every day tyson's is the size of downtown boston or phoenix there is nothing in this country of the scale and size and complexity of tysons tyson's corner is one of the most successful office centers in the country one of the most successful retail centers in the country and the combination of those two factors make it the economic engine for fairfax county and really northern virginia an economic engine driven by america's love affair with the automobile in tysons corners you drive in for breakfast and you get in your car and you drive to your first meeting then you drive to the next meeting and then you know if i have to take some checks to the bank even though it's a for a good golfer uh of barely a long nine iron you got to get back in your car and drive that there's no way in tyson's corners that anybody gets around without a car the car built tyson's it also built gridlock that is now strangling tysons we're about halfway through the afternoon rush hour maybe almost no one lives here practically everyone commutes extremely heavy traffic that extends way beyond the beltway the highway system is uh choked and we can't sustain the model of sprawl uh in support of the economic engine that has happened over the last 20 years so can't sustain the model you mean tyson's corner has sort of reached the limit tyson's corners is about as built out as it can be if dependent on the automobile because it exacerbates what's already a a complicated but troubling environmental future environmentalists call tysons a nightmare for the potomac river and chesapeake bay it's a fortress of impervious surfaces if you look at tysons and there is now today as we're sitting here today there's about 46 million square feet of development in tysons in addition to that there is 40 million square feet of parking 40 million square feet of parking so the amount of development and the amount of parking is about equal and that translates into close to 170 000 parking spaces and when we talk about impervious surfaces i mean that's just unbelievable when you put down this endless amount of concrete parking lots and rooftops rain hits it it washes really quickly into the streams it's going to cut away at those stream banks it's going to pick up sediment it's going to be carrying all kinds of pollutants in it it's going to go flying down into the potomac and the potomac feeds into the chesapeake bay and everything starts in these little streams so every time you lose a little stream you lose one more healthy piece of the chesapeake bay ecosystem what many see is the ecological disaster of tysons epitomizes the collision of development and clean water nationwide more than three-quarters of americans live on or near our waterways the plague of tyson-style sprawl has recently threatened neighboring loudoun county but here in loudon environmental leaders fashioned a new tactic to counter aggressive development and to protect chesapeake bay [Music] getting up in front of a crowd and saying the bay is in tough shape and and the pollution's getting worse and we've got to change our lifestyles to to save it really doesn't get you anywhere but you can get people to do the things that we need to do to save the bay if we can frame them in ways that correspond to what they really care about in loudoun what people care most about is traffic and taxes two issues the environmentalist leveraged to launch a political campaign against developers in 2006. how do big developers plan to deal with our traffic problems they want to build more homes and apartments in our area 33 000 more that'll mean thousands of more cars and more traffic tapping into local concerns citizen activists organized to carry the fight it resonated a lot with residents when we spoke about transportation issues we spoke about tax increases that would occur and when we spoke about schools how our children would constantly have to change boundaries i think a lot of us got involved just for the whole quality of life issue it went from the the 33 000 homes meant an additional 300 000 car trips on on the local roads it meant higher taxes the schools that had to be built the roads that needed to be built it was suburbanizing an area that was never meant to be suburbanized did all this public outpouring of outrage stop or slow down this aggressive growth the public response was so overwhelming that even a board of supervisors that was elected with the support of the development community ended up turning down the proposals that they the board had submitted in the first place so they backed off totally they backed off totally and then in the election that immediately followed that decision to back off they all lost every one of those candidates was voted out officers wiped out wiped out that victory in loudon underscored that land use is a key to protecting the environment when people talk about saving chesapeake bay and you get organizations that are talking about let's have a campaign bay wide but listening to you the nuts and bolts of this thing sounds as though they have to be fought out on the local basis county by county i think the conservation movement has to move away from wholesale ideas to to retailing what we're talking about things that people deal with every day traffic schools the lack of access to the the kinds of parks and open space that people want on a day-to-day basis uh rising taxes uh to pay for the costs that developers weren't paying for and the bay is going to benefit but it's not the opening argument it's all about making the protection of the bay a retail issue what we need to market is the solutions and market in a way that people will embrace them not market the problem [Music] to help save vulnerable waterways like the potomac river in chesapeake bay environmentalists are also touting a new eco-friendly development model known as smart growth [Music] one of the nation's showcases for smart growth is right here in arlington virginia a short subway ride across the potomac from washington and just a few miles from tyson's corner smart growth is making suburban living look a lot more like city living with a human touch i mean what's fascinating is where are we look look up here for crying out loud you're in a downtown a new downtown in arlington county i got a tour from smart growth advocate stuart schwartz it's a suburb that's grown up into a city an extension of dc's downtown arlington had no choice but to build up to compete with the outer suburbs and from an environmental perspective we love this sort of place because we're building here on old parking lots instead of building out in forests and farms arlington's strategy is to focus development not around the car but around washington's mass transit system known as metro around each of the stations we've called a network of livable communities and increasingly the world cities are being built this way using transit as the spine for development what's been the track record in arlington county in terms of jobs development congestion on the streets they've had an explosion of development in the corridor over the last 30 years they've had tripling and quadrupling of the number of residents the number of jobs in the corridor and it's all been achieved without an increase in traffic the key to smart growth is high density living combined with mixed-use development commercial retail and residential all mixed together you know looking at this there are high-rise buildings here i mean to a certain extent this kind of looks like tyson's is it's our image of it lots of concrete or brick or whatever but very different great public spaces here like this park you have shopping you can walk to right there a great bus stop here outdoor cafes probably two to three times the number of people living here as do live in tyson's corner and in fact the future of tysons is going to be in having more people live in tyson's corner and to make tyson's corner look a lot more like arlington in fact at tysons there's been a tectonic shift in the mindset of business leaders with a commercial luster of tysons fading they're now banking on the planned arrival of metro's rapid rail to spur a new kind of redevelopment we can't continue to accommodate cars and the number of cars that we have in the past i mean the choice moving forward is you do more of the same and get what you got or you change what you did and build to a new a new goal if you will in a new culture and that culture will be focused on mass transits in essence designing a place that's much more at a human scale pedestrian friendly that'll be the key to the success of tysons for the next 20 years it's a welcome change to advocates of chesapeake bay remaking tyson's corner gives local government a chance to fix the stormwater system create parks and restore green zones and local streams feeding into the potomac and the bay so growth is happening and we have to accommodate it but we can do it better we can plan it better we can put it in better locations we can put it in places where we can deal with the impacts in the the most effective way are you saying we have a choice always we have a stark choice we have a very dramatic choice if we do it right the the effects on the environment are reduced by half or more if we do it wrong the the possibility actually losing the chesapeake bay goes up dramatically we do have choices to make and from what i saw and heard on my journey time is much more urgent and the stakes are much higher than i had once realized we are not going to make it the way we are going now i mean if if you ask me for today's grade failure doesn't mean we can't redouble our effort you know we can re-enroll try again but yeah it's a it's a failure [Music] there's no question that the condition of the chesapeake bay is like the canary in the coal mine it is a symbol it is an indicator of what we are now learning to expect in any body of water nationwide and across the planet the danger signs are everywhere dead zones dying young whales intersex and male fish the growing risk of serious health problems for humans the 70s were a lot about we're the good guys we're the environmentalists we're going to go after the polluters and it's not really about that anymore it's about the way we all live and unfortunately we are all polluters i am you are all of us are [Music] success is possible but the lesson driven home to me again and again is that the key is public engagement [Music] if the public is not engaged in puget sound for example we will fail we will fail i have no confidence whatsoever we can get the job done unless and until everybody steps up accepts responsibility and becomes part of the solution [Music] you can't expect the clean water act alone to do the job for puget sound or chesapeake bay or any other water body you have to piece together clean water clean air and taking care of the land and at this point in our history we have to restore what we've screwed up [Music] water pollution has slipped off our radar screen in the face of other seemingly more urgent crises but pollution is a ticking time bomb it's a chronic cancer that is slowly eating away natural resources that are vital to our very survival the estuaries in the wetlands are worth vastly more money than we have acknowledged i mean if we could calculate and persuade the public about how valuable the wetlands are in terms of the web of life we would be guarding them like the family jewels instead of using them as our our great sewage dump [Music] we have a window of time where is if if we do not succeed in taking action in the next 10 to 20 years on a whole range of issues we are in fact putting our planet on a trajectory that it will be very very hard to undo and i say that because the decisions we make are going to have a profound effect as to our planet's future over the next hundred years [Music] next time on frontline i swallowed a cassette walkman they are schizophrenic bend my head back and push it down my throat out of prison a needle a feather and a rope with nowhere to go we came homeless for two years that was rough frontline examines the crisis of mentally ill offenders cycling in and out of prison psychiatric treatment for those that are coming out of incarceration is very poor the released what front line [Music] frontline's poisoned waters is available on dvd to order visit shoppbs.org or call us at 1-800 play pbs frontline is made possible by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you with major funding from the john d and catherine t mcarthur foundation committed to building a more just verdant and peaceful world and additional funding for frontline and for poisoned waters from the park foundation major funding for poisoned waters is provided by the seattle foundation your gift your community the russell family foundation the wallace genetic foundation the morris and gwendolyn k fritz foundation the keith campbell foundation for the environment the merrell family foundation with additional funding from the able foundation the bullet foundation the roush foundation and by the following a complete list is available from pbs and by disney nature films presents earth in movie theaters this earth day wednesday april 22nd [Music]

Channel: FRONTLINE PBS | Official

Views: 7,254,924

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Id: pAghNloeD5Y

Length: 112min 28sec (6748 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 23 2022