Like the Spokane Riverkeeper, one of my favorite Spokesman Review features is the "Then and Now" series, where they take an old image of Spokane and contrast it with a current photo at the same location and angle.

The Riverkeeper was recently reminded of this series when he was tipped off to to a picture located on the the US National Archives Flickr account. The photo is a nasty one with raw sewage bubbling up in to the Spokane River as you can see to the left. It was taken in 1973, a year after the Clean Water Act was signed.

According to the Riverkeeper: "I shared the picture with some of the team at the Spokane Wastewater Treatment Facility to get their take on the picture, but more than anything to see if they’d share with me a little narrative about how our wastewater is treated now a days. A lot has changed since the Clean Water Act was passed, maybe most noticeably has been treatment technology. Needless to say, we are treating wastewater to levels prior generations probably never thought possible."

You can read the response by Spokane Wastewater HERE from the Living River. Also, check out my post on what happens with Combined Sewer Overflow after a heavy rainfall. There's been a lot of progress but 2017 is fast approaching- and that's the deadline that’s been set for Spokane to stop nearly all discharges of raw sewage into the river.

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