An Oregon Story:
From Rivers to Reservoirs:
The Last of the Lumbermills:
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Cleaning Up the Willamette
In 1938 Portland Mayor Joe Carson (center) joined 4,000 school-aged children as they rallied for clean rivers.
Courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society, Negative Number cn001253.
Additional calls to clean up the Willamette came in the late 1930s. In 1937, the Oregon legislature proposed a bill that would curtail the dumping of industrial wastes directly into the river, targeting the five paper mills that lined the shores. In response, the paper industry threatened to close its plants, jeopardizing hundreds of jobs. As a result the legislature passed a weakened version of its orginial bill. Even that measure went too far for Oregon's governor Charles Martin who vetoed it. Martin would later urge the development of dams along the Willamette and its tributaries.
In 1938, Oregon voters approved two plans that would help clean up the Willamette. An initiative petition required the treatment of municipal sewage; another proposal created the Oregon State Sanitary Authority, an agency authorized to work on the health of the river. Even with these legislative improvements, a 1943 report found that the Willamette River was the main polluter of the Columbia River.
The Oregon State Sanitary Authority proposed dilution as the strategy for dealing with water pollution and avoided the politically explosive issue of industrial waste. Instead, it demanded that the river's flow be altered to dilute the effects of pollution from the waterway. This solution justified dams and the human-directed regulation of the Willamette.
