links for 2009-07-05

Images of Fires on the Cuyahoga (CSU Press Collection)
Images of fires on the Cuyahoga River from 1949, 1951, 1952 and 1961.


Cuyahoga River fire galvanized clean water and the environment as a public issue (cleveland.com)
"'The fire did contribute a huge amount to the new environmental movement and it put the issue in front of everyone else, too,' said Jonathan Adler, environmental historian and law professor at Case Western Reserve University. 'Water pollution became a tangible, vivid thing -- like it had never been on a national level. 'There was a sense of crisis at that point. It was: "Oh, my God -- rivers are catching on fire."'"
(tags: Cuyahoga Cleveland Ohio Cuyahoga.River EPA)

Cuyahoga River Fire - Ohio History Central (Ohio Historical Society)
"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."
(tags: Cuyahoga.River Ohio Cleveland Cuyahoga)

Ohio's Burning River In Better Health 40 Years Later (NPR)
"Forty years ago Monday, a train crossing a low bridge over the Cuyahoga River sparked, igniting oil-soaked debris in the water. It wasn't the first time there was a fire on that heavily polluted waterway, which flows through the cities of northeast Ohio. Nor was it the biggest. But it was 1969, and the environmental movement was looking for a symbol. The fire was just that."
(tags: Cuyahoga.River Cleveland EPA Ohio)

A New Take on the Lake: 40th Anniversary of the Cuyahoga River Fire (WCPN.org)
"The river fire helped spur the environmental movement and led to the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972. Well talk to people who worked on river before and after the fire, those who pushed for the clean-up, and local officials who are working on sustaining the worlds largest single freshwater resource, the Great Lakes."
(tags: Dan.Moulthrop Sound.of.Ideas Cuyahoga.River EPA Cleveland Ohio)

Letters: Cuyahoga River (NPR)
"A rest to the controversy over the pronunciation of Northeast Ohio's Cuyahoga River. Melissa Block and Robert Siegel read from listeners' e-mails."
(tags: Cuyahoga Cleveland Ohio Cuyahoga.River)