Here and there we have dramatic evidence of the presence of these chemicals in our streams
and even in public water supplies. For example, a sample of drinking water from an orchard
area in Penns ylvania, when tes ted on fis h in a laboratory, contained enough insecticide to kill all
of the test fish in only four hours. Water from a stream draining s prayed cotton fields remained
lethal to fis hes even after it had pas s ed through a purifying plant, and in fifteen s treams
tributary to the Tennes s ee River in Alabama the runoff from fields treated with toxaphene, a
chlorinated hydrocarbon, killed all the fish inhabiting the streams. Two of these streams were
s ources of municipal water s upply. Yet for a week after the application of the ins ec ti c i de the
water remained poisonous, a fact attested by the daily deaths of goldfish s us pended in cages
downs tream.
For the mos t pa rt this pollution is uns een and invis ible, making its pres ence known when
hundre ds or thous ands of fis h die, but more of ten neve r detected at all. The chemis t who
guards water purity has no routine tes ts for thes e organic pollutants and no way to re move
the m. But whether de tected or not, the pes ticides are there, and as might be expected with any
materials applied to land surfaces on s o vas t a s cale, they have now found their way into many
and perha ps all of the major river s ys tems of the count ry.
If anyone doubts that our wa ters have become almos t unive rs ally contaminated with
ins ecticides he s hould s tudy a small report issued by the U nited States Fis h and Wildlife Service
in 1960. The Service had carried out s tudies to dis cover whethe r fis h, like warm-blooded
animals, store insecticides in their tissues. The first samples were taken from f orest areas in the
West where there had bee n mas s s praying of DDT for the control of the s pruce budworm. As
mi g ht have been expected, all of thes e fis h contained DDT. The really s ignificant findings were
made when the inves tigators turned for comparison to a creek in a remote area about 30 miles
from the nea res t s praying for budworm control. This creek was ups tream from the firs t and
separated from it by a high waterfall. No local spraying was known to have occurre d. Yet thes e
fis h, too, contained DDT. Had the chemical reached this remote creek by hidden unde rground
s treams? Or had it been airborne, drifting down as fallout on the s urface of the creek? I n s till
anothe r comparative s tudy, DDT was found in the tis s ues of fis h from a hatchery whe re the
water supply originated in a deep well. Again there was no record of local s praying. The only
pos s ible means of contamination s eemed to be by means of groundwater.
In the e ntire water- pollution problem, the re is probably nothing more dis turbing than the
threat of widespread conta mination of groundwate r. It is not pos s ible to add pes ticides to
water any whe re without threate ning the purity of water everywhere. Seldom if ever does
Nature operate in clos ed and s eparate compartments , and s he has not done s o in dis tributing
the earth’s water s upply. Rain, falling on the land, s ettles down through pores and cracks in s oil
and rock, penetrating deeper and deeper until eventually it reaches a zone where all the pores
of the rock are filled with water, a dark, s ubs urface s ea, ris ing under hills , sinking beneath
valleys. This groundwater is always on the move, sometimes at a pace so slow that it travels no
more than 50 feet a year, sometimes rapidly, by comparison, so that it moves nearly a tenth of
a mile in a day. It travels by unseen waterways until here and there it comes to the surface as a
s pring, or perhaps it is tapped to feed a well. But mos tly it contributes to s treams and s o to
rivers. Except for what enters streams directly as rain or s urface runoff, all the runni ng water of
the earth’s surface was at one time groundwate r. And s o, in a very real and frightening s ens e,
pollution of the groundwater is pollution of water eve ry where....
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