California State Water Pollution Control Board

The CWA has also established the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) program which regulates discharges to surface waters. The California State Water Resources Control Board and its 9 regional boards carry out the NPDES program in California. 

CohenDB. 1986. Ground water contamination by toxic substances, California Assessment. Pollutant Investigations Branch, State Water Resources Control Board, Sacramento, CA American Chemical Society. 

Legislative activity at the state level was widespread in this period. Some states followed New York s approach of setting water-quality standards and issuing permits others adopted the method of case-by-case analysis that chemical manufacturers favored. Pennsylvania strengthened its controls in 1945 and then retreated under industry pressure two years later. Ohio emulated California in 1951 the state created a Water Pollution Control Board whose seemingly vast powers were so encumbered by procedural fetters and technical hurdles that it was rendered impotent in practice.37... 

Banks was not the only water pollution specialist who worried about these chemicals. One of California s newly established Regional Water Pollution Control Boards in 1952 forbade a Sacramento rocket-fuel plant to discharge wastes containing TCE or PCE in a manner which will permit their entry into either the ground water or the waters of the American River. 11 In early 1953, the board asked the state Department of Water Resources to help monitor any effect of chemical wastes from the plant upon ground water in the area. The investigation included TCE and PCE.12... 

McKee s compendium was published by the state board in 1952. Entitled Water Quality Criteria, it was deeply infused with the policy that the chemical industry had advocated since the 30s and California had enacted in the Dickey Act—to promote waste disposal as a beneficial use of public waters. The deterioration of water quality, McKee later wrote, was a trend that cannot be stopped or reversed... unless the industrial and agricultural development of this Nation is to be curtailed. 25 Water Quality Criteria, and through it the philosophy of the Dickey Act, came to influence water pollution control practice far beyond California s borders. Yet this publication owed its official imprimatur and the influence that flowed from it not to its scientific merits but to a political decision of the California legislature. 

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