| For Immediate Release: April 22, 2001 |
Contact: Lee Garrigan 202/833-4655 |
WIN Launches New Web Site for Earth Day - www.win-water.org
Washington, DC - The Water Infrastructure Network (WIN) is celebrating the 31st anniversary of Earth Day by launching a new internet web site to promote clean and safe water for all Americans. Visitors to the new web site at www.win-water.org can download WIN's reports, Clean and Safe Water for the 21st Century (April 2000) and Water Infrastructure NOW (February 2001). WIN supporters include local elected officials, drinking water and wastewater service providers, state environmental and health program administrators, engineers, labor, and environmentalists.WIN is a broad-based coalition of over 30 nationally-recognized organizations dedicated to preserving and protecting the health, environmental and economic gains that America's clean and safe water infrastructure provides. WIN members are calling for a renewed federal financial commitment to clean and safe water infrastructure in order to achieve the goals of the Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water Acts. WIN members are working to raise awareness of the water infrastructure financing shortfall, educate public officials, further a dialogue on investment options, and determine the necessary legislative solutions to close the funding gap.
Twenty million people celebrated the first Earth Day in 1970. Just two years later, Congress passed the Clean Water Act, which limited pollutants flowing into rivers, lakes and streams at a time when only one-third of America's waters were safe for fishing and swimming. Today, two-thirds of our water bodies support fishing, swimming and other recreational activities. In 1974, the Safe Drinking Water Act was passed by Congress, allowing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the quality of public drinking water.
The members of WIN are proud to have been instrumental in the successes of the nation's clean and safe water programs. But the progress that has been made over the past thirty years is in peril of being reversed if we continue to underfund the water and wastewater infrastructure that is the heart of every American community. Treatment plants and pipes built and buried to bring clean and safe water to homes and businesses and to remove wastewater from these same buildings are coming to the end of their useful life.
WIN's new web site will bring information to all Americans to help foster a better understanding of one of the most serious environmental challenges we will encounter in the 21st century. WIN's web site will give users easy access to the information necessary to take action and stay informed, including Congressional activity, news, and reports on water and wastewater infrastructure.
Log on today at www.win-water.org and join WIN in support of clean and safe water for the 21st century.
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Water Infrastructure Network 1816 Jefferson Place, NW Washington, DC 20036 202/833-4655