WOTUS Explained
by Gene Franks
When my grandfather built a house on his farm in Oklahoma just before the Great Depression he decided to leave behind the outdoor toilet and washtubs of his family’s previous home and go with modern indoor plumbing. Indoor plumbing was not yet common in farmhouses at the time.
The new house was in the middle of a 160-acre farm and there were no nearby neighbors, so he saw no problem in simply letting the raw sewage and grey water from the home discharge from a pipe into an empty field that sloped down to a small creek. Except on the days when the wind came from the wrong direction, it was easy to forget that raw sewage was collecting just a few feet down the slope. Conveniently, rain washed everything down the hill and eventually into the creek.
My grandfather built his new house about 50 years before the 1972 Clean Water Act when the concept of WOTUS, which stands for “Waters of the United States,” came into being. He followed the prevailing logic that since the land was his, it was no one else’s business where he discharged his sewer water. In 1972 the initial understanding of what the “Waters of the United States” consists of applied mainly to navigable water so my grandfather’s pasture and the tiny creek his sewage eventually washed into were not a great concern.
In 2025, defining WOTUS has become a complicated on-going political dilemma. The scope of WOTUS changes depending on which party is running the EPA. In broad terms, those who value private property ownership over public wellbeing and water quality, most often Republicans, take the view that my grandfather was within his rights to dump his sewage and his leftover farm chemicals and the used crankcase oil from his tractor on the side of his hill and let the rain wash it into “his” little creek. The other side, the radical lefties, take the view that the “Waters of the United States” concept includes the water on a farm in Oklahoma regardless of who owns the land, that all water is part of the Waters of the United States, just as McElligott’s little pool is part of an underground stream which is part of a river which is part of the oceans.
Under President Obama, WOTUS was broadened and more restriction was placed on what could be done on private land and by private businesses. Greater restrictions were placed on private activities that had an effect on the public water supply. The current administration is now working to redefine WOTUS and thus loosen restrictions on private individuals and businesses. Most recently, the new EPA administrator is seeking to remove wetlands, an essential component of nature’s water management system, from control under WOTUS.
Redefining WOTUS according to the way the political winds blow is now expected. Today’s rural homebuilders have accepted that they have to have an approved septic system for disposal of sewage. That’s progress. The battle today has shifted to do land developers have to be burdened by bothersome WOTUS rules about draining wetlands to build apartments.
