From Flames to Free: The Symbolic Restoration of the Mighty Cuyahoga River

Soundtrack: Burn On by Randy Newman

There must be a thousand rivers like the Cuyahoga in America, and ten thousand around the world.. it runs only 84 miles, only drops 500 feet, drains only 809 miles of America's 3 million.  On top of that it drains in the ignominious City of Cleveland, which Eddie Murphy implied many years ago in Beverly Hills Cop was not much of a place for classy execution, well before I ever got to see it with my own eyes and give it a personal judgment of coming back but hardly Paris.  Never been off the highway in Akron, but they did produce LeBron. The River Cuyahoga might be able to flow a half million CFM into Lake Erie, and it's got a reputation for some pretty scenery and ledges in it's upper reaches, so impressive they were made a National Park, but it's hardly a world class waterway. What made if famous beyond Ohio was this:

This is a picture of the Cuyahoga someplace I am pretty sure in Cleveland, on fire in 1952. It caught on fire some 13 times between 1868 and 1969 it is reported, about every 7 years it sounds like, and who knows how many minor fires were snuffed out that didn't make the broadsheets.



The Cuyahoga wasn't famous for this:

it was famous for this:

and this:

it was biologically dead from Akron to Cleveland, some 50 river miles, toxic and anaerobic, unable to support life, and more a gutter than a river as it ran between these two famous industrial cities, dredged for navigation, dammed some 9 times a sluice for pollution going out and raw materials coming in, looking like this:

but even that didn't make it famous, that wasn't an uncommon sight in America either back then, as rivers from the Delaware, to the Hood Canal, to the LA River became sad reflections of themselves, sooty industrial monstrosities.. that was about every urban river in America and a few rural ones to boot in places like coal country. What made it special was catching on fire some 13 times ( how the F@#$ does water catch on fire!?), and finally that picture above of the fire making it into Time Magazine in 1969 ( August 1, 1969 America's Sewage System and the Price of Optimism), right when America's optimism for the moon landing made it particularly embarrassing how shabby we had let things become. We had perspective now, we had photographed the world from above, and to quote the famous adage, if we can out a man on the moon, why the heck can't we fix a problem like this!



The fire and the Time article some 48 years ago have been commemorated many times, having helped launch Earth Day and mass adaptation of environmental values that were channeled by Richard Nixon into some very important pieces of legislation including the Clean Water Act..  that was the nadir, nationally even, and now things are perfect nationwide. Done and done, right?
Well, not really, because the Clean Water Act focuses on pollution, and pollution was only the most obvious problem back then.. frikin' river catches on fire, and people got some explainin' to do, right Tommy Boy, but think about it, pollution is only part of the problem, but the only part the Clean Water Act had a real mission to solve in 1972 when it passed, most publicly as a result of this event.
Sure the Cuyahoga still has pollution issues, it runs through two major cities Akron and Cleveland.  Impervious surfaces, sewage, automotive and industrial run off are just a few to mention almost anyplace people live near water, and where you find water, you almost always find man. While we have controlled the old boogie men of industrial waste and pollution, we came up with more nuanced bad guys like the aforementioned, contamination not just from major big bad factories, which they call major point source pollution, but leaky car oil pans and radiators and fecal matter from walked pets are the potent but somehow less menacing and horrifying new bad guys; fix a big problem and move onto the next one down the list, and that is what makes what is happening on the Cuyahoga so impressive, because they are moving down the list well past where anyone might expect for a river that had so many problems, nor resting on their laurels. They have blown past storm water runoff and are now taking on derelict dams! Them kids at Patagonia just told the Starbucks set that dam's were bad three years ago, but them Trump voting hard heads in Ohio have been ripping out dam's for more than ten!
What am I talking about?
 We've come a long way baby.. enter again one of my favorite new themes, dam removal, stage right.
Why I became curious to research this is I was poking around looking at data from American Rivers for a previous post on Dam Removal going Prime Time, and I kept noticing a particular river on the lists of the 60 or so dam's removed every year. it wasn't high profile projects like the Klamath or the Penobscott, where Endangered Species Act and blue state political inertia is making things happen, it was a river in Ohio with a familiar name. For one river this small, no matter what the reputation or location, to have 5 dam's removed or diverted in the last 15 years with at least one if not two more in planning might be a record, per river mile or by any measurement. To have this happen in the perennially environmentally distracted heartland is almost astounding. And the to such a iconic river. What was happening on the Cuyahoga? I had to ask myself.. a whole lot it seems, in the right direction after a whole lot of industrial might made it such a laughing stock.

Cuyahoga River Dam Status

Upriver to Downriver:

1. Lake Rockwell Dam  no plans.. upriver of Akron, and provides the city with it's drinking water

2. Kent Dam   removed 2004  Kent
3. Munroe Falls Dam   Removed 2006

Cuyahoga Falls Dams:
4. LeFever  removed 2013
5. Sheraton Mill Dam 2013

6. Gorge Dam ( AKA First Energy) removal 2019 ( waiting for funding)   Akron
7. Brecksville Dam  State moving to remove it in 2017 or 2018

multiple tributary dam's have been removed as well.

What's powerful about this from a narrative perspective is that there are large water falls behind the Gorge Dam, just yards behind it. If it is removed, they will be restored in some form!

If that dam is taken down, there will be something like 60 miles essentially wild flowing river running from Lake Rockwell Dam all the way down to Lake Erie.. this would be a huge benefit to the Lake, which is experiencing horrible algae blooms in part due to the increased water temperatures that come with stagnant waters.
State Government and the EPA have so much momentum to fix this river to a bar set high for water quality scores that they seem to be heading towards a wild restoration, which no one would have dreamed of so long ago when the river was dead and on fire less than 50 years ago. It's like going from Quadruple Bypass to Marathons.. turning Calcutta into Copenhagen ( if that's progress...). Making William Hung actually sing and dance like Ricky Martin, it's almost seems implausible. If you figure on the 30-80,000 dams nationwide that the greenies keep trumpeting about, there are very few free running stretches of anything, especially this close to population sources, industry, and agriculture and east of the Mississippi & Rockies, all situations that demanded river control in the old school tradition.

Mayor Carl and Cong.Lewis Stokes of Cleveland

What also impresses is that you have a state with a politically adept and not foolhardy Republican There might be a thread of inevitable progress here. Ohio is pretty far east.. it's a place where people have made mistakes and had time to move away from them.. while the west stumbles into the reinvention of the wheel, perhaps Ohio is joining the east coast in acts of societal maturity, watching aging infrastructure through it's decrepitness impose something different, and a place so long from it's wild roots somehow recognizing intuitively what might change it's moribund economic state, a return to a pre-industrial environmental state. While so may rivers in America languish without momentum fighting runoff, dam's, diversion, and neglect, the Cuyahoga seems to be benefiting from how bad it got, but in some ways it isn't.. It is benefiting from how bad it got that it might have contributed to laws and programs that fix the problem, but they weren't intended for it. The US and Ohio might recognize the symbolic significance of this river but they don't necessarily account for it's momentum. If you talk to those involved as I was able to do a few busy months ago, they will tell you that the laws and efforts that are setting the Cuyahoga free as as much from the regular band of state employees and local activists as from any celebration. It all supposedly started with a pair of power brothers, the mayor of Cleveland and his brother a long serving US congressman Carl and Louis Stokes. When Carl became mayor a year before the '69 fire he was on fire himself and talented to do what the city needed to recover from strife and decay brought along by so many things from pollution to racial issues to urban decay and steelbelt economic woes. He saw the river as a worthy way to turn the town around and his emphasis flowed not only up river but around the country. The Cuyahoga as the symbol of pollution became the focus of improvement, and guys like his brother pushed those ideas in Washington as well. A framework built locally but to the benefit of all.

Gov.John Kasich signing a bill to give ODNR more power in Lake Erie 

Governor in John Kasich who hasn't tried to strip or hamstring these efforts as happens out west, where water going anywhere but into a dam or onto a plant is argued as wasted by a cranky contingent of industrialists. While Ohio DNR might have cash flow issues like any well meaning state bureaucracy is bound to, it's still doing it's job, it hasn't been politicized or stripped bare so much that Dam Removal projects couldn't happen on his watch. Fish don't know party, and clean water doesn't only impact one side or the other, and it's neat to see the wheels of government doing what they are supposed to in such a famously contested state. In the traditional narrative so espoused right now by partisans, African American Politicians aren't known for prioritizing the environment no more than Republican Governors are. It appears that a cleaner Cuyahoga has become a shared value.
And don't forget the activists. Their work progresses, to the point of celebration, and is now moving through hurdles to an almost pristine state that barely any other river this size could imagine benefiting from east of the Mississippi, let alone west of it.
This river, diminutive though it may be, runs through so many populations, rural and urban, left and right, green and rust colored, that it's great to see it as a uniting force in a better life for all than a source of contention.. it's about two visions of America experimented with and now redeemed.. industry exchanged for beauty as time and circumstances allow. From a fiery symbol of what was broken to now almost a model of the pristine. Something is working here other than the steel mill.
What can I say.. Cleveland ( and Kent, and Akron) Rocks!