Celebrating Progress

Looking Ahead

See information about the Clean Water Act and its effects in Kentucky at the following Web sites:
CWA in Kentucky Home Page  
History and Background  
Successes (KPDES / Nonpoint Source / State Revolving Fund)
Trends  
What We Are Doing
Challenges for the Future  
Calendar of Events  
National Water Monitoring Day  
National Youth Watershed Summit   
World Watershed Summit

Kentucky Division of Water programs related to Clean Water Act activities

Watershed management

In 1997, a coalition of state agencies and other organizations adopted the Watershed Management Framework as a new approach to protecting human and ecosystem health.

The goals of the framework are to enhance cooperation among resource agencies, to develop stronger partnerships among state and local governments and other stakeholders and to encourage broadly based local participation in watershed planning.

The major river basins in the state are grouped into five management units. The watershed management process is a five-year cycle, and each management unit cycles one year apart from the next one. In this way, resources of all partner agencies can be better focused on any given activity.

This map shows Kentucky's basin management units:

See information about Kentucky's Watershed Management program.

See U.S. EPA's Surf Your Watershed Web site.

Water Quality Monitoring

The Kentucky Division of Water has conducted water quality monitoring of the waters of the Commonwealth since the early 1970s. The level of sophistication and breadth of coverage of water quality monitoring have improved greatly over the past 30 years.

Monitoring occurs at numerous fixed core stations on rivers, streams and lakes and at random and targeted locations based on program specific needs. Parameter coverage includes:

• Chemical and physical criteria contained in the water quality standards.
• Biological assessment, such as fish, macroinvertebrates, algae and habitat.
• Bacteriological assessment.
• Fish tissue and sediment assessment.

See more about Kentucky's water quality programs.

Pretreatment

The CWA required the elimination of the discharge of pollutants into the nation’s waters and the achievement of fishable and swimmable water quality levels. EPA’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) Permitting Program represents one of the key components established to accomplish this goal. 

To address "indirect discharges" from industries to Publicly Owned Treatment Works (POTWs), EPA established the National Pretreatment Program as a component of the NPDES Permitting Program. The National Pretreatment Program requires industrial and commercial dischargers to treat or control pollutants in their wastewater prior to discharge to POTWs. 

Since 1983, the Pretreatment Program has made great strides in reducing the discharge of toxic pollutants to sewer systems and to waters of the U.S.  The Pretreatment Program, implemented as a partnership between EPA, states and POTWs, is a notable success story in reducing impacts to human health and the environment.

In Kentucky, 66 municipalities have required pretreatment programs.  Those cover a total of 681 industrial users.

See information about the U.S. EPA pretreatment program.

Stormwater management

Phase I of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) storm water program was promulgated in 1990 under the CWA. Phase I relies on National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit coverage to address storm water runoff from: (1) "medium" and "large" municipal separate storm sewer systems (MS4s) generally serving populations of 100,000 or greater, (2) construction activity disturbing 5 acres of land or greater and (3) ten categories of industrial activity.

The Storm Water Phase II Final Rule is the next step in EPA’s effort to preserve, protect and improve the nation’s water resources from polluted storm water runoff. The Phase II program expands the Phase I program by requiring additional operators of MS4s in urbanized areas and operators of small construction sites, through the use of NPDES permits, to implement programs and practices to control polluted storm water runoff.

Phase II is intended to further reduce adverse impacts to water quality and aquatic habitat by instituting the use of controls on the unregulated sources of storm water discharges that have the greatest likelihood of causing continued environmental degradation.

See more about Kentucky's stormwater management program.

See information about U.S. EPA's stormwater program.