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The Cuyahoga River was so polluted, it used to catch fire. Now it's making a comeback
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About a mile from Cleveland’s Lake Erie shore, in a stretch of water once among America’s most polluted, a team of conservationists just released a few dozen lake sturgeon into the Cuyahoga River. Each of the armor-plated fry — about the size of a human hand — is outfitted with a tiny transmitter to chart its progress. If all goes well, larger releases will follow next year.
It was a celebratory moment for the Cuyahoga — the latest sign that the river that spawned many a joke back in the day is on the comeback. For years now, blue heron and bald eagles have shared those waters with kayakers, paddleboarders and recreational anglers. Clevelanders and tourists alike dine at high-end restaurants along the banks of a river that used to epitomize industrial bleak. In recognition of its progress, the Cuyahoga was dubbed “River of the Year” in 2019.
But the release of lake sturgeon earlier this month marks a milestone, says Brian Schmidt, a fish biologist with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
Lake sturgeon need a “nice clean substrate so their eggs don't suffocate,” he says. Biologists like Schmidt believe the Cuyahoga’s improved water quality has made that possible.
Reintroduction of lake sturgeon could jump-start a “positive feedback loop,” according to Tom Kiernan, president and CEO of the conservation group American Rivers. “They then help create the environment where other species can thrive as well.”
To fully appreciate how far the Cuyahoga has come, you have to understand its troubled history. For many decades, it was a dumping ground for industrial waste from the region’s factories. By the 1960s, it had become “a completely unregulated sewer,” says Elaine Marsh, the president and co-founder of Friends of the Crooked River.
Then, in the summer of 1969, an oil slick on the river caught fire. For locals, it was nothing new. The Cuyahoga had occasionally caught fire since as far back as the 1880s, with a particularly devastating blaze in 1952. By comparison, the 1969 fire was small. But it occurred at a propitious time for the nation’s nascent environmental movement.
A mayor’s "pollution tour" captured the nation’s attention
A day after the fire, which was later featured prominently in Time magazine, Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes went on what University of Cincinnati history professor David Stradling describes as a “pollution tour” — a roving news conference during which Stokes “brought the press to point out problematic spots” along the river. The Cuyahoga River came to symbolize an environmental assault by unregulated industry and served as a catalyst for the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. The federal Clean Water Act followed two years later to regulate industrial water pollution and set standards for the nation’s waterways.
The Clean Water Act also provided a legal framework to go after companies responsible for polluting waterways. But industries weren’t the only culprits. Cleveland and Akron — the two largest cities on the Cuyahoga — have what are known as combined sewer systems that were designed and installed around the turn of the 20th century. These systems send raw sewage and stormwater down the same pipes.
“Everything works well when it's not raining, but when it's raining, it exceeds the carrying capacity of the combined system,” says John Hartig, a visiting scholar at the University of Windsor’s Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research. And the excess gets discharged directly into the river, Hartig says.
In the 1970s and '80s, Akron and Cleveland received federal funds to address their sewer issues. “That was the huge carrot that was out there” to make changes, says Patrick Gsellman, senior adviser to the city’s Akron Waterways Renewed! program. The city “eliminated all of their sanitary sewer overflows … and did some significant upgrades to the wastewater plant,” he says.
Addressing the sewage discharge and overflow issues was an important step in the push to shed the Cuyahoga’s dubious “area of concern” designation, a label it received from the Environmental Protection Agency in 1987. Other improvements have led to the removal of restrictions on fish consumption, the mitigation of undesired algae and an end to recreational beach closings. Local officials expect the river will meet all of the EPA’s water quality standards by 2030, if not sooner.
Removing dams is a boon to fish and kayakers
Another major improvement underway involves removal of a series of dams — one dating back nearly 200 years — to restore flow to the river to allow fish species, such as lake sturgeon, to recover. The process also has been a big benefit for kayakers, according to Don Howdyshell, an avid whitewater kayaker.
“From a paddler’s perspective, I can tell you that the wildlife of the river area has improved dramatically,” says Howdyshell, who helped start the annual Cuyahoga Falls Fest, a grassroots whitewater event that attracts expert paddlers from across the country and Canada.
Similarly, the annual Blazing Paddles Paddlefest has been held for the past several years in Cleveland. In a sign of the river’s improving public image, this year’s event attracted hundreds of participants from 12 states. “It's kind of become one of the big highlights of the Cuyahoga River, emblematic of revitalization,” says Kris Patterson, who is Lake Erie program administrator with the Ohio Lake Erie Commission.
Howdyshell is also a veteran organizer of volunteer river cleanups that began with dam removals in downtown Cuyahoga Falls in 2013. At first, the cleanup volunteers “were still filling dumpsters” with tires and piles of rubbish. “Someone had taken a picture of me and my dad sitting on the back of his truck, and we were completely covered up to our knees and … we had lost our shoes in the muck,” he says.
Today, Howdyshell sees muskrat, mink and otters along some stretches of the Cuyahoga.
The Gorge Dam, the biggest slated for removal on the Cuyahoga, is next on the list. But before that can happen, 832,000 cubic yards of contaminated sediment trapped in the dam’s reservoir must be painstakingly removed by a special dredge and disposed of in a secure landfill. Officials hope the process, estimated to be a three-year project, can begin next year.
“Dam removal has been an enormous effort on the Cuyahoga River,” says Amy Holtshouse, the director for connecting lands and waters in the Midwest Division at The Nature Conservancy.
It’s “kind of an incredible tool because you see the impact of it very quickly,” she says. “You see fish being able to go upstream of those barriers. Within days of dams being removed, you see the natural flow of sediment, water that gets restored through those areas.”
Climate change presents new challenges
Kiernan, of the American Rivers conservation group, says the Cuyahoga can serve as a model of sorts for the cleanup of other polluted U.S. rivers.
“In a time when people might be anxious with climate change or get depressed with the state of the environment, there are positive signs in river restoration that I think can be motivating,” he says.
Even so, he cautions of other challenges that lie ahead. “We should be proud of the Clean Water Act that dramatically reduced the pollution that led to the fires in the Cuyahoga,” Kiernan says. “However, we now face climate change, biodiversity loss and other threats to our rivers. And we need a new set of responses” to deal with that.
The removal of the Gorge Dam will bring the Cuyahoga one step closer to removal from the EPA watchlist. But in northeast Ohio, many people have already gotten past the stigma and learned to love the river again, says Samantha Martin, a spokesperson for the Cleveland Water Alliance and a member of the Cuyahoga River Area of Concern Advisory Committee.
“I think some folks, especially in the older generations, may hold on to and perpetuate fear and criticism of the river due to the stories they were told or the pollution they may have witnessed in their lifetime,” she says.
“But what we're seeing is a lot of people recognizing the value of our river — especially after visiting cities like Chicago who have invested so much into their riverfront — and thinking 'I want that too.’”
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