by Kevin Burton
Lake Erie catching on fire was one of the storylines of my Ohio upbringing. I laughed about it in passing, but never sought any of the details.
Turns out those details were more than a little fuzzy. The fire was actually on the Cuyahoga River, which leads into Lake Erie. The fire that broke out on June 22, 1969, was actually one of perhaps a dozen fires on the river over the years.
The city of Cleveland was seen as a national joke at the time, with that fire as part of the narrative. In a way, Cleveland was a bit unlucky in the bad press for water pollution category.
“Between January 1968 and October 1969 three different Lake Erie tributaries caught fire. The Buffalo River burned on Jan. 24, 1968, and the Rouge in Detroit burned Oct. 9, 1969. The 1969 Cuyahoga River fire was the smallest of the three,” but it got the most attention, according to a story on the Popular Mechanics website. “Randy Newman wrote a song about it. Johnny Carson joked about it on “The Tonight Show.”
Many publications have written about the fire and the myths that have grown up around it. Here is part of an account by Lorraine Boissoneault of Smithsonian Magazine.
“It was the summer of 1969, and recent high school graduate Tim Donovan needed a job to pay his college tuition. When it came to well-paid summer work in Cleveland, there was one good place to look: the steel mills. Donovan went to work as a hatch tender for Jones & Laughlin Steel, standing at the top of machines stationed along the river to help unload ore carriers.”
“It was his first real interaction with the Cuyahoga River, and the experience didn’t endear him to it.”
“The river was a scary little thing,” Donovan says. “There was a general rule that if you fell in, God forbid, you would go immediately to the hospital.”
“The water was nearly always covered in oil slicks, and it bubbled like a deadly stew. Sometimes rats floated by, their corpses so bloated they were practically the size of dogs. It was disturbing, but it was also just one of the realities of the city.”
“For more than a century, the Cuyahoga River had been prime real estate for various manufacturing companies. Everyone knew it was polluted, but pollution meant industry was thriving, the economy was booming, and everyone had jobs.”
“To the surprise of no one who worked on the Cuyahoga, an oil slick on the river caught fire the morning of Sunday, June 22, 1969. The blaze only lasted about 30 minutes, extinguished by land-based battalions and one of the city’s fireboats,” Boissoneault wrote. “It caused about $50,000 in damage to railroad bridges spanning the river and earned a small amount of attention in the local press.”
“The fire was so small and short-lived that no one managed to get a single photo of it. For Donovan, the summer ended uneventfully and he went off to school without having thought much further on the state of Lake Erie or the Cuyahoga River.”
What happened next was the real surprise.
“Time magazine published an article on the fire—with an accompanying photo from an incident in 1952 (which was the largest fire on the Cuyahoga). National Geographic featured the river in its Dec. 1970 cover story “Our Ecological Crisis” (but managed to get the date of the fire wrong).
“Congress established the Environmental Protection Agency in January 1970, for the first time creating a federal bureau to oversee pollution regulations.
In April 1970, Donovan was one of a thousand students marching down to the river for the country’s first Earth Day. The nation, it seemed, had suddenly woken up to the realities of industrial pollution, and the Cuyahoga River was the symbol of calamity.
But on the day of the fire, it had meant nothing to the masses. Only in the following months and years did the fire gain its strange significance. As historians David and Richard Stradling write, “The fire took on mythic status, and errors of fact became unimportant to the story’s obvious meaning. … Clearly this transformative fire must have been massive; the nation must have seen the flames and been appropriately moved. Neither is true.”
“Stories about the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire often combine fact and myth,” reads a story on the National Park Service website. “People generally agree about what occurred on and immediately after June 22, 1969. Myth enters the stories when people describe the fire as a primary cause of major milestones in the environmental movement.”
“Regardless, the Cuyahoga River fire has become a symbol of water pollution and the environmental movement. Today, we celebrate this symbolism, not just the facts of the story.”
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