RSS
Home
A river burns: Remembering the Cuyahoga 40 years later
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
It was the summer of 1969 and the Cuyahoga River was burning. Which seemed normal to me in a place crowded with smoke stacks from steel mills and chemical plants. What I remember most about the city of my birth after all these years is the smell of rotten eggs and a dingy grayness everywhere – gray skies, gray trees, gray buildings – as if thick smoke had rolled over Cleveland and into Lake Erie.
Nobody else in Cleveland cared much about the June 22 fire either, not even William Barry, chief of the Cleveland Fire Department. “It was strictly a run of the mill fire,” he was quoted as saying. The regular crew had it under control within a half an hour.
But when Time magazine ran a story about a month later, it spread across the country like a raging wildfire. “Some river! Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows.” (Time, August 1969)
Randy Newman wrote a song about it:
Cleveland, city of light, city of magic
Cleveland, city of light, you're calling me
Cleveland, even now I can remember
‘cause the Cuyahoga River
goes smokin’ through my dreams
Burn on, big river, burn on
Burn on, big river, burn on
Now the Lord can make you tumble
and the Lord can make you turn
and the Lord can make you overflow
but the Lord can’t make you burn.
What most people don’t know is that the fire was one of a dozen similar incidents when oil and chemical-soaked debris ignited on the Cuyahoga. And it didn’t happen only in Cleveland – rivers flowing through urban centers often served as sewers for industrial waste.
It turns out the fire did have a purpose, other than giving Cleveland a dirty name. After the EPA was created in 1970, federal clean water legislation soon followed. The Clean Water Act, enacted in 1972, required waterways to be cleaned up to become “fishable and swimmable.”
When Ohio EPA biologists began counting fish in the Cuyahoga River in the mid-1980s, they returned with fewer than 10 individual fish, which were deformed and mutilated. By the year 2000, there were 40 species of fish thriving in the water. Aquatic life came back.
Although I fled Cleveland in my early twenties and have since lived in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and now Washington D.C., I visit my hometown almost every year. Cleveland is a different, more vibrant place, thanks to the cleanup.
Now the lake and river draw thousands of people each year for the natural beauty and recreational activities. I did read, though, that a Russian visitor recently asked a Cleveland official to show him the spot where the river had caught on fire.
I'm dedicating this tribute to two great fathers: my late father-in-law Oliver D. Blake, a geologist; and to my own father, John DuBelko, a native Clevelander and avid sportsman who hung in there long enough to fish in Lake Erie.
Related Articles:
Comments
