The 40th anniversary of the last fire on the Cuyahoga River (June 22, 2009) is an opportunity to tell the story of what occurred before and after the fire. Ed Kelley was there at the inception of the modern environmental movement as one of the first professionals to work on cleaning up the Cuyahoga River after its infamous conflagration in 1969. An employee of the City of Cleveland Division of Water Pollution Control from 1969 to 1976, Kelley recounts those early days and how a group of young engineers and biologists turned around one of the worst environmental disasters in the modern age.
It was this last fire that stimulated environmental action in Cleveland and across the country. I was part of a group of City of Cleveland employees and professional engineers dedicated to cleaning up the river. As early water quality professionals, we developed a remediation program that would assist in reversing the course of the pollution of the Cuyahoga River. I was fresh out of school and working alongside folks like Lamont W. Curtis, Mr. James Shafer, John Moore who would lay the groundwork for a water pollution control program initially implemented by the City of Cleveland.
The links below are stories Kelley collected from those involved in the early chapter of reducing the pollution of rivers and streams and tributaries of the lake.
Mr. Kelley's & others recollections are all factual and correct
Marc Lefkowitz Says:Marc H,
While your theories and comments are correct about the water quality of the Lake, what Ed Kelley and the others have collected here are their recollections, particularly of the events in the aftermath of the 1969 fire. All of what they reported is true. Seeing as how they didn’t go back to report what others did or thought before 1969 and only reported their views based on their experiences, I’m not sure why your message is pointed in their direction. In my opinion, what you’ve done is added to the information that Mr. Kelley, Mr. Curtis and the others have provided.
Historical Memory of the Cuyahoga Fire is Wrong
MarcH Says:Respectfully,
While Mr. Kelley has most likely done many good works on behalf of the Cuyahoga River, his memory of events surrounding the environmental movement in Cleveland are a little off. I did my thesis on the environmental movement in Cleveland surrounding the river and the "death" of Lake Erie, so it's something I'm familiar with.
Anyways, I'm afraid Mr. Kelley's memory of what was going on in Cleveland is off. Reporting about the "death" of Lake Erie began in 1961 when reports about the disappearance of the Canadian soldier, the huge swarms of lake-born insects that the shore used to be well known for, began to circulate. As this insect is a vital portion of the Lake's foodchain, biologists and fishermen became concerned, and began to look more into the health of the Lake and what they discovered was large "dead" anaerobic portions of the Lake, caused by overfertilization and large blooms of cladophora. Cladophora has the side effect of being nasty to swim in, and clogs public beaches in the summer time as it washes on shore. So, already by the early 60's the academic, commercial and sports fishermen and beach going public was beginning to rise the alarm.
The death of the lake was largely blamed on municipal polluters on the rivers feeding into the Lake, of which Cleveland was the worst. In 1965, a local car dealership owner decided to do something about it, and kicked off the "Save Lake Erie" campaign, garnering over a million signatures for petitions. The movement was entirely Cleveland based - almost all the signatures collected from people from Sandusky to Painesville and south towards Akron, and largely focused on cleaning the Cuyahoga. Around this time major municipal figures started making a stink about it, like when the Cleveland city fire chief publicly declared the river a "fire hazard" and it became a talking point for then candidate for mayor Carl Stokes.
In 1968, a municipal bond item to clean up the river was put up for a referendum and passed. The bond item was for $100 million dollars, the single largest state or local environmental bond item in history up until that point, voter approved. It was in fact, a little over half the size of the federally approved cleanup funds for the entire country! So, prior to the fire even happening, environmentalists were already celebrating a victory.
When the fire happened it was small, much smaller than previous Cuyahoga river fires, was put out immediately, so fast no one even had time to take a picture of it. Cleveland press barely covered the story. It wasn't until months later when TIME magazine decided to run a story on pollution across the country, that they picked up the story and made it a national event. The piece they did, while important to environmentalism, was actually a bit of yellow journalism. They ran a full page picture of the wrong fire, one that happened in 1952, and billed it as the 69' fire.
When Mr. Kelley got on the scene, the Cuyahoga River Fire was being used as a symbol in the Clean Water Act debate and within the Earth Day movement, but it hardly initiated environmental action in the Cleveland, and to the extent that it's a symbol, it is only so do to poor reporting at the time.