Topeka ? A federal judge has ordered the EPA to set the highest level of protections under the federal Clean Water Act for 1,456 bodies of water in Kansas.

“We’re slowly bringing the state of Kansas into compliance with the Clean Water Act, 30 years after Congress passed it,” said Charles Benjamin, an attorney representing the Kansas chapter of the Sierra Club.

The decision by U.S. District Judge G. Thomas Van Bebber of Kansas City, Kan., affects mostly bodies of water in central and western Kansas, Benjamin said.

The Clean Water Act assumes that bodies of water should be clean enough to fish and swim in. If they can’t reach that designation, the state must conduct a study that shows why that high standard cannot be maintained.

The dispute in Kansas stemmed from a decision in 2000 by the EPA that said the state failed to provide those studies to support an earlier state decision to downgrade the water-use designation of numerous bodies of water.

That EPA decision touched off a firestorm of criticism from agricultural interests, and eventually EPA and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment entered an agreement that said the state would perform the necessary studies on the bodies of water by 2006.

But environmental groups said under the Clean Water Act, once the EPA designated that the bodies of water should be fishable and swimmable, the federal agency had 90 days to put those designations in place.

Van Bebber agreed. “The plain language of the Clean Water Act limits the options of the court,” he said. He ordered EPA to take final action by June 30 in setting the highest levels of protection for the disputed bodies of water.

Benjamin said Van Bebber’s decision meant that the Kansas Department of Health and Environment must now conduct those required studies on the 1,456 bodies of water to demonstrate why they can’t attain the fishable-swimmable standard, and then submit the studies for EPA consideration.

Sharon Watson, a spokeswoman for KDHE, said the agency still was reviewing the impact of the ruling. “It will change some of the designations on water bodies until we have a chance to determine if they shouldn’t be that way,” she said.