Portland Water Bureau
[3] In 1843 or 1844, William Overton and Asa Lovejoy, while traveling by canoe from Fort Vancouver to Oregon City, stopped to rest on the west bank of the Willamette River and agreed it would be a good place for a town.
[7][9] A committee meeting in early 1887 selected Bull Run with only Simeon Reed opposing the development, who favored continuing to use the Willamette.
A five-month survey trip led Smith to conclude that a gravity-flow system could deliver clean water from the river to Portland.
[7] It was vetoed by Governor Sylvester Pennoyer in early 1889, which led Deady to state "in view of his impracticable, cranky nature and conduct he ought to be called Sylpester Annoyer.
One exception was a civil engineer who, based on his own investigations, had bought land and water rights along the river in hopes of re-selling them to the city.
In 1891, the Oregon Legislature authorized the city to sell bonds to pay for the Bull Run project, which began delivering water to Portland in 1895.
This law prohibited settlement in the 142,000-acre (570 km2) reserve and made it easier for the committee to acquire private land and water rights in the basin.
The committee sought further restrictions, and in 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law the Bull Run Trespass Act to further protect the reserve and the water.
However, by the mid-1950s, the City of Portland and the United States Forest Service began to strongly disagree about logging in and public access to the watershed.
[10] Ruling on a citizen lawsuit, Miller v. Mallery, Judge James M. Burns agreed in 1976 that logging in the reserve violated the Trespass Act of 1904.
Senator Mark Hatfield introduced such legislation, which led in 1977 to passage of the Bull Run Watershed Management Act.
[11] It established the Bull Run Watershed Management Unit (BRWMU) and removed Portland's control over the fraction of the reserve that had been opened to recreation in 1959.
While the City and the Forest Service worked on water-quality standards, logging continued on a smaller scale, including a 1983 operation to salvage about 1,700 acres (6.9 km2) of trees downed by a windstorm.
[10] Subsequent legislation affecting the watershed included federal designation in 1994 of about 75 percent of the BRWMU as a reserve for protecting the Northern Spotted Owl and other species dependent on old-growth forests.
[11] Although the BRWMU is generally closed to the public, the Portland Water Bureau offers tours of the watershed, usually in the summer or fall.
[14]: 132 Portland City Council commissioner Will Daly instituted much reform from 1911 to 1917, including the unmetered water and free supply.
Henry Gross and a local Reverend Johannsen began the effort to recall Mann and Baker, primarily over the highly indebted Water Bureau.
By then, Mann, Mayor Baker, and Earl Riley were embroiled in accepting bribes for locating the Portland Public Market.
Akin was murdered the day before he was slated to present Port evidence to the Oregon state legislature, when he was only a month into his Water Bureau investigation.
Commissioner Jake Bennett was documented to have the only other copy of it; a year later, he claimed to have returned it to the auditor's office, which The Oregonian dutifully reported.
[16] Water from the lake seeps through the ground into the river at a rate of 20 to 25 million gallons (76,000 to 95,000 m3) a day and flows into artificial reservoirs at two points further downstream.
[15] Starting at an elevation of about 860 feet (260 m) above sea level,[19] Bull Run water flows by gravity from the headworks through three large pipes to an underground reservoir at Powell Butte Nature Park in east Portland.
In 2006, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) granted $3 million to the city for seismic upgrades to pipes where they cross trestles above streams.
[25] Its storage capacity is meant to offset the loss of the five open reservoirs at Mount Tabor and Washington parks, which will be disconnected from the water system by 2015.
Under provisions of the SDWA, the bureau monitors the levels of disinfectant byproducts to ensure that they remain under the maximum limits set by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and enforced by the Oregon Department of Human Services (ODHS).
[30] Since 1997, in response to targets set by the ODHS, the bureau has been adding sodium hydroxide to the water to reduce its potential for corroding lead and copper in home plumbing.
In the Bull Run watershed, sources of giardia and fecal coliform bacteria are limited to wildlife such as deer, elk, cougar, and North American beaver.
This supplement to the Clean Water Act of 1996 was designed to reduce illness linked to Cryptosporidium and other microbes in drinking-water systems.
A legal challenge was denied in 2007, and Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley informed the water bureau in June 2009 that a legislative approach had little chance of success.
[36] Tests of the groundwater in October 2007 found extremely low levels (25 parts per trillion or less) of acetaminophen, caffeine, ibuprofen, and sulfamethoxazole.
