It was a big week for Maine’s air and water, and for Edmund Muskie.

The late governor, senator and statesman from Rumford was the driving force behind the federal Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act in the early 1970s. And nearly 40 years later, both laws are still cleaning up his home state’s rivers, lakes, coastal waters and air.

On Monday, the Portland City Council voted to spend $61 million to speed up efforts to keep millions of gallons of untreated sewage from spilling into Casco Bay every time it rains.

It will mean a 21 percent increase in sewer rates. It also will mean cleaner water for swimmers and sea life, and relief for clam flats that have been contaminated since Muskie was elected governor in 1954.

Muskie knew all about the damage from sewage along the coast.

His Clean Water Act required that Portland and others cities around the country stop using rivers and bays as open sewers. Portland built its first treatment plant in the 1970s, but that didn’t solve the problem entirely.

Because old sewers were built to also collect storm water, treatment plants get overwhelmed when it rains, and the storm water and sewage spill from overflow valves.

Now, the Clean Water Act is forcing Portland and other communities to eliminate the overflows, usually by separating storm drains from sewers. The threat of penalties under the law clearly helped persuade Portland to step up the pace this week.

Chalk one up for Muskie.

On Thursday, Maine’s Board of Environmental Protection approved a new cleanup plan for the Androscoggin River.

This one would have been especially meaningful for Muskie, whose national campaign for clean water was inspired by his upbringing near the Androscoggin, then one of the dirtiest rivers in the country.

The cleanup plan sets new limits on industrial discharges and requires the owners of two paper mills and a hydroelectric dam to pump more oxygen into the river near Lewiston and Auburn, a section that remains too polluted to support native fish.

One paper mill owner and an environmental group are considering appeals. But many along the river are glad to see it finally getting the full protection of the Clean Water Act.

Give credit to Muskie.

And, finally, on Friday, Maine and 16 others states won a Clean Air Act lawsuit to reduce mercury pollution that drifts here from coal-burning power plants downwind.

The court ordered the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to impose deeper cutbacks in mercury emissions, which settle into Maine’s lakes, contaminate fish and poison loons.

Muskie, who wrote the Clean Air Act in 1970, didn’t grow up with health warnings against eating mercury-laden fish from Maine lakes. But his fingerprints are all over that court decision.

Muskie knew that cleaning the air and water would be expensive. But he persuaded the Senate to overturn President Richard Nixon’s veto of the Clean Water Act by arguing that not cleaning them up would cost a lot more.

Muskie died in 1996. But he just had a pretty good week.

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