I'm in Cleveland at the moment, which is wonderful I suppose, so I decided to do a little research on the Cuyahoga River. That's the one that drew national attention because it caught fire almost forty years ago because it was so polluted. Fun times. Anyway, the great thing about the 1969 fire is that it wasn't the first time it caught fire. Not even close.Fires occurred on the Cuyahoga River in 1868, 1883, 1887, 1912, 1922, 1936, 1941, 1948, and in 1952. The 1952 fire caused over 1.5 million dollars in damage. [ohiohistorycentral.org]But the fire in 1969, though it only lasted five minutes, drew some serious attention. The same website I quoted above quotes Time magazine, which said
Some River! Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows. "Anyone who falls into the Cuyahoga does not drown," Cleveland's citizens joke grimly. "He decays". . . The Federal Water Pollution Control Administration dryly notes: "The lower Cuyahoga has no visible signs of life, not even low forms such as leeches and sludge worms that usually thrive on wastes." It is also -- literally -- a fire hazard.Gross. But, on the plus side, the attention the river brought to environmental problems that it helped spur action, which in part pushed the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the creation of the Clean Water Act. So there's that.takepart to visit the Natural Resources Defense Council's page on how to clean up our water.
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