Understanding the Past
Narrator
Development in the Tualatin basin began more than 150 years ago. Early settlers logged timber from the hillsides to build homes, businesses, and towns. They drained wetlands and removed native vegetation, as they prepared the land for agriculture. Over the years, Oregonians dammed and diverted the Tualatin and its tributaries and dumped all kinds of pollutants into the river.
 These practices continued into the early 1940s, when Oregon’s State Sanitary Authority discovered the Tualatin’s oxygen content was too low for fish and other aquatic life to survive. The report blamed pollution from sewage treatment plants and canneries.
Cities and industry worked to clean up their discharges and water quality stabilized for a while. But in 1969, the Department of Environmental Quality concluded that pollution from more than two dozen small, inefficient sewage treatment plants was choking the life out of the Tualatin river system.
One year later, voters created the Unified Sewerage Agency to address the problem. John Jackson recalls the situation. He is the agency’s planning director.
John Jackson, Unified Sewerage Agency
We had aquatic life that was threatened. We had a tremendous public health problem because of the hundreds of thousands of fecal coliform and total coliform bacteria that we had in these tributaries and the main river.
Narrator
The Unified Sewerage Agency assumed responsibility for what we now call point-source pollution. That means the source can be traced to a specific point. It phased out the most inefficient sewage treatment plants, improved others, and built new facilities—like this one. But that wasn’t the end of the problem.
The 1980s brought continued population growth—and greater stress on the Tualatin.
Continue.
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