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
Chicago Illinois skyrocketed their sewage systems did not keep pace In the mid 1800s many of these cities built sewage systems that emptied untreated wastewater directly into the Great Lakes In the 1870s for instance Cleveland's dumping of sewage into Lake Erie made the city's water supply which came directly from the lake unsafe to drink The city tried moving IS IT A LAKE OR A POND the sewage pipes farther out into the lake When that Lakes and ponds are both bodies of standing water The water may come from glaciers did not help it began adding chlorine to its water rivers seepage of groundwater or runoff from supply in 1911 and filtering incoming water in 1917 surrounding areas So what is the difference Surprisingly it's not the size of the pool it's the This cut down greatly on diseases such as typhoid and depth Sunlight can reach the bottom of a pond but not a lake This affects the amount and type cholera but it did not improve the health of the lake of plants that can grow in each habitat and the animals that feed on them Chemical companies paper mills steel mills oil refineries and other industries also began dumping their waste into the Great Lakes and surrounding rivers during World War I 1914 1918 This waste contained high levels of phosphorus and nitrogen which are both natural chemical elements found on Earth along with other chemicals Perhaps because it was the shallowest and most heavily industrialized Lake Erie suffered the most The excess nutrients in the wastewater caused algae to grow rapidly As the algae died off they used up oxygen in the lake Much of Lake Erie's floor became a dead zone starved of oxygen The gooey algae made the lake water unfit for fishing swimming or drinking Mats of algae washed up on the beaches making them unappealing as well
A TURNING POINT By the 1960s people were beginning to complain about Lake Erie Activists started campaigns to save the lake and the media increased coverage of the issue Gradually the situation began to get the attention of state and federal officials Lakes can be found on every continent on Earth even buried under the Antarctic ice sheet Seventy percent of lake water is found in North America Africa and Asia For many the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire was the last straw National outrage over this and other environmental issues prompted Congress to pass the National Environmental Policy Act NEPA on January 1 1970 The Environmental Protection Agency EPA was founded as a result of this act In 1972 Congress passed the Clean Water Act It required that all US rivers be clean enough for swimming and fishing by 1983 and that discharge of pollutants be ended by 1985 In 1978 the United States and Canada signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement Its purpose was to restore and maintain the chemical physical and biological integrity of the waters of the Great Lakes Under this agreement the two countries began working together to reduce the amount of phosphorus in the lakes and thus reduce algal blooms With the new legislation in place and the public's growing awareness of pollution issues change began to happen The US Justice Department sued a number of major polluters of the Great Lakes and forced them to stop dumping their waste into the lakes
