One of the water board’s initiatives in the early ’70s was to establish regional offices across the state. Durwood H. Willis, now a waste program manager with DEQ, recalled that these new offices gave the public “points of focus.” They also enabled the regional staffs to work with “more flexibility to be understanding to the local needs,” he said, “and to work with the citizens of the community. They knew the citizens, they knew the economy, and they knew the ins and outs” of local environmental issues.

 

As the population of Northern Virginia began to grow, especially in Fairfax and Prince William counties, there came an increase in domestic discharges from wastewater treatment plants and increased storm water runoff from land development. The Occoquan Reservoir was the principal water supply for a large portion of the population. Numerous problems were noted in the water quality of the reservoir: algae blooms, fish kills from low dissolved oxygen, sulfide presence and the detection of active viruses. Because the reservoir was an important regional water supply, the State Water Control Board commissioned a study in 1968 of the reservoir and its tributary streams. The results showed that wastewater treatment plants were the primary cause for the degradation of water quality.

 

In 1971, the board adopted the Occoquan Policy, a regulation to restrict the number of sewage treatment plants in the watershed between Fairfax and Prince William and to protect drinking water. The policy, the first of its kind in Virginia, also established strict treatment requirements and set up an independent monitoring program for the reservoir.

 

R. Bradley Chewning, a former DEQ regional director who helped implement the Occoquan Policy, remembered that “by 1970, all the local treatment plants in that area were overloaded.” The water board, under Director Noman Cole, decided “to take the plants off line and build a treatment plant discharge into the reservoir that would have very high quality.”

 

Establishing a regional treatment plant system “was a big plus,” Chewning said, because it kept local governments from allowing new residential and commercial developments when the sewage treatment system did not have the capacity to handle them. “The policy was pretty significant because it was something very, very new in Virginia. Getting those local governments to agree to lose control over their wastewater treatment and buy into this regional system was pretty significant.”

 

The regional approach was important elsewhere in the state as well. Dallas R. Sizemore, now director of DEQ’s southwest regional office, recalled that in the early ’70s, “We always stressed, ‘go regional.’ The Clean Water Act is not designed for little plants; it’s designed for plants with plenty of money and a huge, huge base. But we were trying to apply the Clean Water Act to these little facilities, so we tried to get them to go and expand the service area and serve as many people as they possibly could serve. This allowed more income, it allowed them to build a better facility and hire operators who knew how to get the job done.”

 

Waste management in Virginia had a quiet beginning in 1971. On April 1, the state Board of Health’s regulations on the disposal of solid waste took effect. This was the first statewide regulation of solid waste, and administration was handled by the Bureau of Solid Waste and Vector Control in Norfolk. The program issued permits for disposing of solid waste in landfills, though there were few controls on landfill construction and handling of waste.

 

Perhaps the most significant event in Virginia during this era of environmental awareness was the adoption of Article 11 of the newly revised Virginia Constitution. It took effect July 1, 1971, stating that the policy of the Commonwealth is “to conserve, develop, and utilize its natural resources, its public lands, and its historical sites and buildings [and] to protect its atmosphere, lands, and waters from pollution, impairment, or destruction, for the benefit, enjoyment, and general welfare of the people of the Commonwealth.”

 

According to Gerald P. McCarthy, executive director of the Virginia Environmental Endowment, Virginia’s was one of the first state constitutions to include a natural resources protection article. “At the time, there was a groundswell of attention towards the environment that hadn’t been seen —ever. So putting an article like that in there was a lot easier at that time than it would have been earlier, or later.”

 

Governor Linwood Holton established the Council on the Environment in 1970, and in 1972 the Virginia Environmental Quality Act established the staff to the council as a state agency. The council became Virginia’s coordinating agency for environmental quality issues, implementing the Commonwealth’s environmental policy by promoting the wise use of air, water, land and other natural resources, and protecting these resources from pollution or impairment. The council provided advice to the governor, program development and coordination, environmental impact review, and environmental information and education.

 

At its formation the council had three citizen members, plus the head of each of the state agencies that had environmental responsibilities. These included the air and water boards, the Department of Conservation and Historic Resources, the Commission of Game and Inland Fisheries, and the Marine Resources Commission. It also included the Health Department, and the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. W. Tayloe Murphy Jr., a former member of the House of Delegates and secretary of natural resources, noted that the council was designed “to establish good, sound environmental policy and then go back to the agencies for implementation, or to the General Assembly. It was a very valuable council, in my judgment.”

 

Meanwhile, there was more federal progress in pollution control. The original Water Pollution Control Act was amended in 1972 as the Clean Water Act. The law was expanded to focus on point source pollution controls and to initiate funding programs for upgrades to wastewater treatment plants. This was the beginning of a massive push from the federal level to get states to implement and enforce ground-breaking changes in water pollution control programs.

 

Similar action occurred with air quality. Congress amended the Air Pollution Control Act in 1970 as the Clean Air Act. The law further developed air quality and emission standards and increased enforcement authority, setting in motion far-reaching changes to air quality programs in each state.

 

In 1973, Virginia took steps to control over-utilization of ground water resources with the adoption of the Ground Water Act. It authorized the State Water Control Board to designate ground water management areas, helping to control large withdrawals in at-risk areas. The Eastern Shore and eastern Virginia later received that designation. A fish kill in Franklin County’s Pigg River in 1975 established a legal precedent for the water board to recover fish kill investigation costs and costs for replacement fish. And on July 1, 1978, the State Water Control Law was amended to expand the board’s ability to handle oil spills. With this amendment, the board was able to recover the costs of materials and equipment to contain spilled oil, as well as investigative costs.

 

The 1970s also saw the federal government broaden its scope to recognize solid waste issues. On October 21, 1976, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act took effect. Administered by EPA, this was the first comprehensive amendment of the federal Solid Waste Management Act of 1965.

 

And, unfortunately, the ’70s also meant Kepone.

 

The James River Kepone crisis will go down as one of the worst environmental disasters in Virginia’s history. This toxic insecticide used in ant and roach killers was released into the James River from 1966 to 1975.

 

“The pesticide Kepone was one of those thousands of substances released into the air, water and land that nobody knew about,” McCarthy said. “People down the James River had a little gasoline station-turned-chemical-plant in Hopewell, and the workers started getting really sick—shakes, nervous tics, reproductive problems, and all kinds of things. They were being poisoned. They would go to the doctor and most doctors couldn’t find a reason for it and disregarded it. One doctor had the presence of mind to take a blood sample from one of these workers and he sent it off to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta for analysis, and the CDC immediately called him and said, ‘you have a public health emergency on your hands here.’

 

“The Kepone disaster wound up shutting down commercial fishing in the James River for years. So the economic loss was substantial. A lot of people were permanently put out of work, and there were also significant health issues experienced by the workers who manufactured this terrible insecticide.” It took more than 25 years, well beyond 2000, before DEQ could say that Kepone levels in fish were no longer at detectable levels.