Today Clean Water Network members from Clean Water Action, Earthjustice, Environment America, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and the Southern Environmental Law Center released Courting Disaster: How the Supreme Court Has Broken the Clean Water Act and Why Congress Must Fix It. This new report details how muddied Supreme Court decisions and misguided policies by federal agencies have threatened water quality in many rivers, lakes, streams and other waters across the country.
This report contains numerous specific examples of waters that have lost protections or where safeguards were called into question, including an example in California. Caliente Creek is a 20-mile ephemeral stream that flows into a series of waterways and into a wetland “highly likely” to have a subsurface flow to the Eastside Canal, a diversion of the Kern River. Apparently because the direction of the flow in the canal is away from the Kern River, the Army Corps concluded that flow from Caliente Creek would not substantially affect the health of the river.
Click here to learn more about this case and to read the full report.