The 1952 fire on the Cuyahoga River was the largest in the river's history
Chapter ONE FIRE Fire Fire Bells clanged and sirens blared as fire engines raced to the scene of a huge five story blaze on June 22 1969 But this was no ordinary fire This time a river was burning Oily debris in northern Ohio's Cuyahoga River had been ignited by sparks from a passing train It burned for 20 to 30 minutes and caused approximately 50 000 in damage before firefighters got it under control This was not the first time the Cuyahoga River had caught on fire in fact it was the thirteenth time since 1868 Some of the previous fires were considerably larger The 1952 fire caused more than 1 3 million in damage and the 1912 blaze resulted in five deaths
THE MAKING OF A DISASTER It's hard to imagine a body of water catching fire However in the 1800s and early 1900s most people thought nothing of dumping industrial waste and other pollutants directly into lakes and rivers which are closely connected within freshwater ecosystems Surely the water would dilute everything and make it harmless they thought No Swimming and Polluted Water signs were a common sight In the 1960s a northern Ohio resident described the Cuyahoga River as being as green as pea soup In an article about the Cuyahoga Time magazine wrote Some river Chocolate brown oily bubbling with subsurface gases it oozes rather than flows After decades of this treatment the river was damaged almost beyond repair Polluted water signs were seen all over the country including in California near the Mexican border in 1978 where a young boy got sick from swimming in dangerous water
Trash and oily waste floating on top of the polluted water created the perfect conditions for a fire RIVERS OF FIRE The Cuyahoga River feeds into Lake Erie which In the late 1800s and early 1900s rivers in the was in similarly bad shape By the 1960s it had been United States frequently caught on fire The declared a dead lake Slimy algae covered the Cuyahoga River burned at least 13 times and rivers in Detroit Michigan Baltimore Maryland beaches and the surface of the water As they decayed Philadelphia Pennsylvania and Buffalo New York also caught fire Fires on the Chicago River they sucked all the oxygen out of the water leaving provided frequent entertainment to spectators little for fish and other organisms The lake literally While the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire was the last river fire in the United States other countries stank and heavy metal pollution made its fish unsafe with more lax environmental laws still experience them The Meiyu River in China caught fire in 2014 for human consumption People began calling Lake likely sparked by a cigarette butt A section of Erie North America's Dead Sea Bellandur Lake in India caught fire the following year and the fire quickly spread to nearby apartments It is unlikely to be the last such fire NOT SO GREAT LAKES unless stronger laws are put in place around the world The Great Lakes hold more than 65 quadrillion gallons 246 quadrillion L of water approximately 18 percent of all freshwater on Earth's surface They are incredibly large their combined area is approximately the size of the entire United Kingdom But despite their size the Great Lakes have suffered serious damage as a result of human activities By the time the Cuyahoga River caught fire the Great Lakes had been worsening for a long time As the populations of major cities such as Cleveland Ohio Detroit Michigan and
