Pandora's Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway

06/ FATAL ERROR

81 81 Why have federal efforts to prevent new introductions of species by ships been so anemic? —Allegra Cangelosi, Northeast-Midwest Institute policy analyst, 2002 06 FATAL ERROR A mong landmark environmental events, a disastrous incident on June 22, 1969, lived in infamy. That was the day the Cuyahoga River caught fire near Cleveland, Ohio. An oil slick on the river ignited—water turned to flame—and burned for 24 minutes. So polluted was the Cuyahoga with chemicals, oil, and grease, a spark was the only ingredient needed to trigger a fire. A train passing over the Cuyahoga produced the ingredient that set the filthy river ablaze. The 1969 fire wasn’t the first time the Cuyahoga burned. There were much larger fires on the river in 1936 and 1952. The 1952 conflagration was the most destructive, causing more than $1 million damage to boats and a riverfront office building. But it was the 1969 blaze that captured national attention, a phenomenon due in part to an article in the August 1, 1969, edition of Time magazine. 82 C H A P T E R 6 82 Some river! Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows.” the article said. “‘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. The magazine’s portrayal of the river was harsh but, sadly, accurate. That a river could be so polluted as to burst into flame was more than the American public would tolerate. The Cuyahoga fire became an icon of the United States’ abuse of its surface waters—a seminal moment that sparked public outrage. The timing of the fire, seven years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, added fuel to a growing environmental movement sweeping college campuses. Carson’s book exposed the harmful consequences of rampant pesticide use. Silent Spring may have been the genesis of America’s modern environmental consciousness, but the Cuyahoga River fire focused public outrage on the wanton fouling of land, air, and water. No longer were the masses content to sit by and watch industries and municipalities use lakes and streams as toilets for all manner of household and industrial wastes. Just as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor drew the United States into World War II, the Cuyahoga fire galvanized public opinion and forced politicians to address the abuse of America’s surface waters. The U.S. Congress responded with remarkable speed, passing the National Environmental Protection Act by the end of 1969. President Nixon signed the legislation—the first comprehensive federal law regulating pollutant discharges—on January 1, 1970. That was followed by a series of unprecedented actions: The first Earth Day was celebrated four months later, on April 22; Congress pressured Nixon into establishing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1970; and the first EPA administrator, William D. Ruckelshaus, threatened to sue Cleveland, Detroit, and Atlanta if those cities didn’t reduce water pollution within four months. In 1972, Congress and President Nixon approved amendments to the Water Pollution Control Act of 1948. Those amendments, which led to the law that became known as the Clean Water Act in 1977, established the nation’s first specific and enforceable limits on water pollution. 83 FATA L E R R O R 83 The Clean Water Act revolutionized water-pollution control by limiting the amount of waste that industries and cities could discharge into surface waters. Prior to 1972, state and federal agencies regulated pollution based on water quality. If a lake or stream became too filthy, government agencies ordered industries and cities to reduce discharges of chemical and biological wastes. The 1972 rules imposed the nation’s first enforceable discharge limits on every company and city that sent waste into surface waters. The EPA assigned each city and industry a volume of waste that could be released into lakes and rivers. Every permittee had to meet its discharge limit, using the best available control technology, or face fines of up to $25,000 per day. The limits prompted the development of better treatment technology, which led to tighter discharge limits, which led to even better...