Discussion Board

On June 22, 1969, a fire on Ohio's Cuyahoga River captured national attention. "Time" magazine described the Cuyahoga as the river that "oozes rather than flows" and in which a person "does not drown but decays."

This event helped spur an avalanche of pollution control activities, resulting in the Clean Water Act and creation of federal and state environmental protection agencies.

(reported in the "New Morning Daybook", June 22, 2007)

I grew up near the Charles River. It smelled really bad and everyone knew that if you fell in you had to get a tetanus shot. The surface was shiny bright colors from all the oily chemicals. There was a hit song wrote about it ..."Down by the River" ("the dirty river Charles"). Charles River was cleaned up in the mid 70s. Of course this was also when a lot of the factories in Boston were shutting down and moving over seas. Boston is much cleaner than when I was a kid but sometimes I think we just outsourced our pollution.