It was cool for an early summer Sunday, with temperatures only in the mid-sixties. The sky was overcast, but clouds were thickening.
In the heavily industrial Cleveland Flats, a locomotive lumbered and squeaked innocently across the trestle of the Norfolk and Western Railroad, throwing a spark on the Cuyahoga River below. At 11:56 a.m., an alarm sounded, transmitted by the Cleveland Fire Department’s Box 4218.
What happened next would transform our city and the world forever.
As actual fires go, the Cuyahoga River Fire of 1969 was hardly remarkable. According to a report supplied by the Western Reserve Fire Museum and Educational Center’s Historian Paul Nelson, flames from the creosote-coated trestle did shoot up to 100 feet in the air at one point. But the surface area of the river involved in the fire was estimated to be only about 300 feet in diameter. And it was quickly extinguished.
With Battalion Chief Bernard E. Campbell in charge, box alarm companies and the 7th Battalion worked their way out onto two trestles involved in the fire. The Fireboat Anthony J. Celebrezze, used its deluge guns on the bow to battle the blaze. By 12:20 p.m., it was all over.
The trestle and tracks of the Norfolk Western Railroad had damage estimated at $45,000, while the trestle and tracks of the nearby Newburgh and South Shore Railroad’s damage was estimated at $5,000.
Locally, it was hardly front page news, only garnering a mention on page 11-C of The Plain Dealer, without a reporter’s byline. After all, industrial rivers around the country were catching fire. And the Cuyahoga River had caught fire 14 other times in the past, the worst being the fire on Nov. 1, 1952, which caused an estimated $1.5 million in damage, without national attention.
It was a photo of that conflagration that Time Magazine used in its reporting of what is now the “Cuyahoga’s Most Famous Fire.” While that story would plunge our city into a seemingly never-ending abyss of comedic punchlines and songs, it would also cause serious reflection about the environment and the protection of our city’s greatest natural resource: freshwater.
To be certain, the story only worsened our city’s reputation because there was national concern about the pollution of Lake Erie and the streams and rivers that emptied into it, especially the Cuyahoga.
“Water issues generally involve quality and quantity,” says Denis Hayes, president and CEO of the Bullitt Foundation, a world renowned environmentalist who spoke at a Cleveland City Club Forum earlier this year. “Cleveland’s problems, historically — like those of most industrial cities before water pollution — were with quality.
“For decades, the mantra ‘the solution to pollution is dilution’ was common. When rivers catch on fire, Mother Nature is sending you a hint that dilution isn’t working. You have to stop these wastes at the source.”
Back in 1969, something definitely needed to be done.
Tim Donovan, executive director of Canalway Partners, was in college at Cleveland State, working summers on the Cuyahoga as a hatch tender on the docks unloading iron ore freighters for Jones & Laughlin Steel.
“I went to work that day,” recalls Donovan, who worked a swing shift on the J&L dock. “They said, ‘not today son. There’s been a fire down river.’”
The fire really came as no shock to Donovan, who knew the river was in bad shape, describing it as a “cauldron with large oil slicks and oxygen bubbling up from underneath. There were rats the size of small dogs floating with debris on top.
“It was other-worldly,” adds Donovan, who lived in the Jefferson Park area of Cleveland back then. “You would look down in the river and get freaked out by it. The rule was that if you fell in the river, you went right to the hospital.”
Eventually, there would prove to be a serious upside to our city and region’s national embarrassment.
“The Cuyahoga River fire was integral to the start of the national environmental movement. It led to the Clean Water Act and US EPA and provided the foundation for years of environmental progress since 1969,” says Kyle Dreyfuss-Wells, CEO of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.
“The Cuyahoga’s burning captured the public’s imagination and ignited a growing environmental movement. More than a century after the river’s pollution was first noted, the Cuyahoga River became an international symbol of environmental neglect.”
Cleveland’s mayor at the time, Carl Stokes, a longtime advocate for environmental responsibility and environmental justice, criticized the federal government and vowed to fight for a cleaner river, says Dreyfuss-Wells.
Indeed, Mayor Stokes and his brother, Congressman Louis Stokes, rarely get enough credit as pioneering champions of the environment, both locally and across our nation. Just months after the fire, Cleveland held its first Earth Day. The brothers also led an environmental charge that helped create the Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Water Act of 1972.
While it’s still a working river, the Cuyahoga is the centerpiece of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Throughout our city, kayakers, scullers and rowers share the waterway with lake freighters.
Today, it all seems like ancient history, especially in an era when a weekly news cycle has been reduced to a day or even hours. But the importance of the events of June 22, 1969, cannot be understated.
“We often forget the condition our Great Lake and River was in back then,” says John Mitterholzer, senior program officer for the environment of the George Gund Foundation. “The Cuyahoga River Fire is one of several events that caused people in this town to say ‘enough is enough.’”
We also have to acknowledge the fact that our city helped to catalyze environmentalists and pioneer the modern environmental movement, says Mitterholzer.
“We should pat ourselves on the back for what we have done,” he says. “Today, we are one of the best examples of river restoration and water restoration in the world.”
But where exactly do we stand right now?