Читать книгу Industrial Environmental Management - Tapas K. Das - Страница 80

The Cuyahoga River is in the United States, located in Northeast Ohio, that feeds into Lake Erie. The river is famous for having been so polluted that it “caught fire” in 1969 (Figure 2.3). It was the disaster that ignited an environmental revolution. On that day, 22 June 1969, the Cuyahoga River burst into flames in Cleveland when sparks from a passing train set fire to oil‐soaked debris floating on the water's surface. By 1969, the Cuyahoga River was not a unique experience in the United States. A river flowing into Baltimore, Maryland, caught fire on 8 June 1906 (CPD 1926). In Philadelphia, the Schuykill burned in the 1950s (Kernan 1958). The Buffalo River in upper New York state burned in the 1960s (UPI 1984). The Rouge River in Dearborn, Michigan, repeatedly burned (US 1974).

Figure 2.3 Cuyahoga River caught fire.

So, why is the Cuyahoga River fire a seminal event in the history of water pollution control in the United States? Because it was a catalyst for change in federal government's role in water pollution control. Although the federal government had powerful tools to control water pollution, for example, the River and Harbors Act of 1899 and the Water Quality Act of 1965. States and cities were left to fend for themselves. The flaming Cuyahoga became a figurehead for America's mounting environmental issues and sparked wide‐ranging reforms, including the passage of the Clean Water Act (CWA) (1972) and the creation of federal and state environmental protection agencies.

But the episode itself did not quite live up to its billing. It was not the first fire, or even the worst, on the Cuyahoga, which had lit up at least a dozen other times before. And industrial dumping was already improving by the time of the 1969 blaze. The reality is that the 1969 Cuyahoga fire was not a symbol of how bad conditions on the nation's rivers could become, but how bad they had once been. The 1969 fire was not the first time an industrial river in the United States had caught on fire, but the last. The event helped to spur the environmental movement in the United States (Adler 2003).