What will the Trump administration's WOTUS proposal mean to our waterways?
 
Broad categories that would lose protection:

• Interstate waters, one of the three key categories of protected waterways under the Clean Water Act. Stripping these waters of protection makes it harder for states to protect their drinking water.
• Ephemeral” streams that flow in direct response to precipitation; other ephemeral water features that contain water only when it rains.
  • Nearly two million miles of the nation’s streams outside of Alaska are intermittent or ephemeral.
  • This would be devastating for the arid West. In Nevada, 85 percent of streams are ephemeral; in New Mexico, 66 percent; and in Arizona, 51 percent, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
    • Possibly excluded:
    • New Mexico’s Chaco River, a 100-mile tributary to the San Juan
    • Nevada’s Las Vegas Wash, which carries 180 million gallons of treated wastewater a day into Lake Mead, which supplies drinking water for California.
• “Closed basin” lakes, such as the namesake of Oregon’s Crater Lake National Park, which, despite their size and importance, do not connect to waters defined as “traditionally navigable.” Crater Lake is the deepest lake in America and one of the cleanest in the world.
• Tributaries and streams that don’t connect to “traditionally navigable waters” directly
  • Possibly excluded:
  • The 50-mile-long Little Lost River in Idaho, which discharges into the Snake River Plain, going subsurface before reaching the Snake River.
• All wetlands that don’t have surface connections to traditionally navigable waters. Among the types of wetlands that appear to be excluded are many prairie potholes, western vernal pools, Carolina and Delmarva bays, Texas coastal prairie wetlands and pocosins.
  • There are approximately 20 million acres of “isolated” wetlands in the continental U.S.
    • Possibly excluded:
    • Wood River Wetlands in Oregon, isolated from adjoining water bodies by levees and water-control structures, and known for having some of the best trout fishing in the Klamath Basin.
• Groundwater
• Stormwater control features constructed in upland to convey, treat, infiltrate, or store stormwater
• Ditches and ditched streams, which are of particular concern at point source polluters, including industrial animal operations.