No group understands the importance of clean water better than Floridians. Our beaches and coastal waters are vital to our economy and way of life. Our lakes and rivers provide drinking water and recreation. We are striving to save the world's most recognizable wetlands -- the Everglades.

So it is troubling that on the 30th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, rather than celebrating its successes, we have to be concerned about its future. Before the job of cleaning up the nation's waterways is done, the Bush administration is attempting to weaken the act. In a report titled "Clean Water At Risk," the Natural Resources Defense Council details half a dozen ways the administration has put new limits on the act and created loopholes for polluters.

The act was born amid alarming environmental disasters, most notably in 1969 when the polluted Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire. By that time, the country's shrimping industry had been decimated. In Florida, contamination killed tens of millions of fish.

The national will to address the threat was so great that Congress easily overrode President Richard Nixon's veto of the act, and it became law in 1972. It effectively lessened industrial pollution by setting standards and requiring permits for discharging wastes, provided the money and incentive to expand sewage treatment facilities and put limits on dredging and filling of wetlands. When the law was enacted, more than 60 percent of the nation's waters were unsafe for fishing and swimming, the NRDC reported. Thirty years later, that number has shrunk to 39 percent of rivers, 45 percent of lakes and 51 percent of estuaries being unsafe.

After years of progress, the Bush administration wants to weaken the act.

The administration has overridden a rule protecting bodies of water from industrial dumping, so that the Army Corps of Engineers can permit coal mining operations that let excavated mountain tops clog valley streams. The administration reversed a decade-long policy on wetlands that strived for "no net loss." Last year, the corps weakened the standard, allowing "quick-fill" permits that get little review and allow no time for public comment.

One of the strengths of the Clear Water Act is that it has applied not only to large bodies of water but also to those tributaries and adjacent waters that could affect water quality. The Bush administration has indicated that it would like to remove protection for those secondary waters. The danger, of course, is that allowing pollution even in seemingly remote water bodies ultimately threatens the quality of rivers, lakes and estuaries.

Those and other assaults on the Clean Water Act run counter to the will of Americans. Rather than weakening the Clean Water Act, President Bush should get on with enforcing it to its fullest extent.

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