Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Breeding Trouble: West Nile On The Willamette?, Merilee Karr

Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies Publications

From the Roman aqueducts to Bonneville Dam, humans have built structures to moderate the extremes of natural water flow. Some of these structures, from Roman cisterns to the catch basins under modern city streets, have inadvertently supplied mosquitoes with the standing water in which they thrive and multiply. Even more mosquito habitat may have been created in the last decade by a change in the Clean Water Act. The original drive behind the Act, in 1972, was the elimination of point-source pollution: sewage and industrial discharge into waterways. In the 1990s new regulations aimed to prevent non-point-source pollution, due to …