Coöperative State Control of Phenol Wastes on the Ohio River Watershed

Abstract

Excessive rainfall on the watershed of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers has at this time brought about the most disastrous floods in history of the valley of the Mississippi River. Loss of lives and destruction of property mounting into billions of dollars will focus the attention upon the need of flood prevention measures to forestall another such disaster. On the Ohio River, a large tributary of the Mississippi, great damage to certain public water supplies was imminent five years ago, not from excessive floods, as is now the case on the Mississippi River, but on account of a new type of industrial waste pollution discharged in increasing amounts into streams on the Ohio River watershed. The phenol and tar acid wastes from by-product coke plants had a power of enormous penetration and in extraordinarily great dilution caused offensive tastes and odors in public water supplies taken from the streams into which these wastes were discharged. In the State of Ohio alone in 1922 this new type of trade waste pollution bid fair to damage 40 per cent of the public water supplies and to affect detrimentally more than 50 public water supplies in the six states down stream. The purpose of this brief paper is threefold: