The 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga was not the first. Flames broke out somewhat often on the water in Ohio in those days, sparked by oil and other contaminants dumped into the river.
“I remember watching blood and animal parts pouring out of the outfall and into the river,” Bob Wysenski, former assistant chief of the EPA’s Northeast Ohio District office, told Cleveland.com, referring to the regular dumping that occurred in the 60s.
Source: Cleveland.com
“There were other days that the river was just orange from the pickling acid used by the steel mills," Wysenski said. "Depending on the day, you would routinely see oil slicks on the river."
Source: Cleveland.com
“But the really amazing thing was that no one really noticed much,” he added. “Today those would be considered a major spill. Then, it was a regular thing.”
Source: Cleveland.com
At least 13 fires broke out on the river between 1868 and 1969. The largest river fire caused more than $1 million in damage to boats and a riverfront building in 1952.
Source: US EPA
There were no fish to be found in the stretch of water from Akron to Cleveland in the 1950s and 1960s.
Source: US EPA
Foam can form on water naturally as a result of fats and oils deposited from dead plants. But that wasn't the case on the Cuyahoga: The foam was from detergent chemicals and factory discharge.
But in 1969, the river caught fire for the last time. No one knows for sure what started the blaze, but sparks from a passing train might have lit oil in the water on fire. The flames were extinguished in about 20 minutes, before any photos (that we know of) were taken.
Sources: Time, "Not Enough to Drink"
But the nation took note. "It jelled people," Bill Zawiski, an environmental scientist at the Ohio EPA, told ABC News 5 in Cleveland in 2014. "It was the right place at the right time historically and the environmental movement, many say, started here."
Source: News 5 Cleveland
So in 1970, President Richard Nixon proposed creating the EPA. "We still think of air as free. But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water,” Nixon said in his 1970 State of the Union address. “The price tag on pollution control is high. Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called."
Source: Business Insider
The US Clean Water Act, which the EPA says "established the basic structure for regulating pollutant discharges into the waters of the United States," was passed in 1972. But things didn’t get better immediately. Plenty of air pollution was still visible on the Clark Avenue Bridge above the Cuyahoga River in 1973.
Source: EPA
And contamination in rivers and air wasn’t limited to Ohio, of course. Here's a look at other industrial areas of the US in the 1970s. The image below shows orange-ish water in a drainage ditch in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In Maine, effluent gushed from the International Paper Company Mill into Allen Brook, near its intersection with the Androscoggin River.
Toxic sulfur fumes continued to pour out of a chemical plant on Lake Charles in Louisiana in the summer of 1972 ...
The EPA recently announced that people can now safely eat fish caught in the area from Gorge Dam to Lake Erie on the Cuyahoga River. “If you safely can eat the fish, we know that’s a great indication that water quality is improving,” Ohio EPA Director Laurie Stevenson said.
Source: Ohio EPA
But the work isn’t done. “We need to continue to invest in our water resources so that we can see additional improvements,” Ohio Governor Mike DeWine said.
Source: Ohio EPA