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| The single largest pollution constituent in our rivers,
streams, and lakes is sediment. Sediment is soil erosion from agriculture, construction
sites, logging sites, and any place where the natural vegetative cover is removed near a
body of water. There are two sources of water pollution: point source and non-point
source. |
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 | Point sources include discharges through
pipes from municipal
waste water treatment plants, manufacturing operations, and smaller
package waste water treatment plants, raw sewage. Even the best
waste water treatment plants do not remove 100% of all contaminants.
Substandard waste water treatment plants will sometime discharge
raw, untreated sewage directly into fresh water sources. |
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| Non-point sources include agricultural
runoff, parking lot and road
runoff, lawn chemical runoff, nitrogen deposition produced by the
ammonia vapor from large animal operations, leachate from hazardous
waste sites, oil spills, storm sewers, illegal dumping. |
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| Surf Your Watershed - North Carolina
portion of this web site by
the EPA has an environmental profile of the state featuring data
collected by the EPA. Locate your watershed area on a map, click and
you have a remarkable range indicators of water quality. For each
watershed, you can find a chart of larger streams, the concerns, and
sources of pollution. |
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| U.S. Water Quality -
State by State - This web site by The
Evergreen Project reports using EPA data that "about 70% of the State's
surveyed freshwater rivers and streams have good water quality that fully supports aquatic
life uses, 25% have fair water quality that partially supports aquatic life uses, and 5%
have poor water quality that does not support aquatic life uses " in North Carolina. |
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| Fresh Water Ecosystems - a
very educational site with fundamental concepts explained such as water cycle, watershed,
aquatic life, and aquifers; educational games included. |
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