Imagine Casco Bay as an open sewer, feces floating around beaches and piers, odors thick enough to make ferry passengers queasy.

Of course, if you’ve been around Portland long enough, you probably don’t need much imagination. You remember it.

Up until the late 1970s, Casco Bay was the sewage treatment plant for Portland and surrounding communities. Everything flushed down a toilet or sink, washed into a storm drain, or discharged by a factory made its way into the bay.

It was so gross that a national magazine advised boaters to stay away from Portland Harbor.

The pollution wasn’t limited to Casco Bay. The Presumposcot River was so polluted it made people vomit and peeled the paint off nearby homes. Maine’s other industrial rivers, including the Androscoggin, were routinely infused with mercury and other toxins.

And Maine was a relatively clean place. Rivers in other parts of the country caught fire and burned. Lake Erie was pronounced dead.

All that started to change soon after the passage in 1972 of what would become the Clean Water Act. The champion of that law, Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie, argued on the U.S. Senate floor 35 years ago this week to overturn President Nixon’s veto.

“Can we afford clean water? Can we afford rivers and lakes and streams and oceans which continue to make life possible on this planet? Can we afford life itself?” Muskie said. “These questions answer themselves.”

Muskie won that argument, and by the late 1970s, Portland and other communities had real treatment plants. Paper mills and other industries soon had limits on toxic discharges. Eventually, the law led to protections for wetlands and fish ladders to get alewives, shad and salmon over dams and back upstream.

The difference in Casco Bay alone, 35 years later, is striking. Clam flats closed for decades have been reopened. Portland’s waterfront attracts tourists instead of repelling them. People go to the Maine State Pier to fish for mackerel and striped bass. And national magazines urge boaters not to miss Casco Bay and Portland Harbor.

All that is why groups like the Friends of Casco Bay have been celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Clean Water Act this month.

“If Sen. Muskie hadn’t written that landmark legislation, where would we be now?” said Joseph Payne, Casco Bay Baykeeper, and a Portland native who rembembers when the floating sewage was “in your face and in your nose.”
That group’s formal celebration will be held Sunday at the University of Southern Maine. You can find out more about it here.

That’s just the glass-half-full side of the story, however. The other side is that the law has fallen short of its original goals by two decades, and counting. Those goals were zero discharge of pollutants by 1985 and water quality across the country that was both “fishable” and “swimmable” by mid-1983.

Environment Maine, an advocacy group, released a report this week saying 71 sewage treatment plants, factories and other dischargers around the state – more than 80 percent of Maine’s licensed facilities – exceeded their Clean Water Act discharge permits in 2005. The national average was 57 percent of licensed facilities, according to the report.

And those discharges don’t include the untreated sewage that regularly overflows out of sewer systems whenever there’s a steady rain.

As the cleanup continues, meanwhile, the priorities have evolved beyond factories and sewage treatment plants. Pollutants in the stormwater that washes off streets and farm fields and airborne pollutants that ride east on the jet stream before settling on the bay are big emerging concerns.

Portland Harbor is still home to toxic sediments and clam flats that have been closed since the Eisenhower administration and aren’t likely to produce an edible mollusk for a long time, if ever. Seals swim around the bay carrying industrial chemicals in their blubber. And green algae covers mud flats next to the South Portland side of the Casco Bay Bridge at low tide.

The slime-covered mud flats are tell-tale evidence of nitrogen pollution washing off fertilized lawns and farms and leaking out of septics and sewers. Nitrogen, as well as increasing acidity, is linked to widespread declines in coastal water quality, sick manatees and sea lions, expanding dead zones and a growing abundace of jellyfish in some places, including parts of Casco Bay.

“There are more jellyfish now than there ever have been. They’re here earlier and they stay longer,” Payne said.

Maine regulators are studying new standards for nitrogen in coastal waters, a step that would use the Clean Water Act to attack the problem.

Green mud flats and jellyfish drifting around Casco Bay are a definite improvement over sewage. But imagine what Casco Bay will be like in another 35 years.

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