On Tap for Next Fifty Years
Mary-Anna Holden is a former New Jersey Commissioner. Butch Howard is a former South Carolina Commissioner.
The year 1969 saw President Kennedy’s aspiration of a moon landing achieved, along with other highlights, such as the music and art fair, Woodstock; the premier of the Sesame Street Muppets; and the cheers of crafters and box sealers alike with the glue stick’s invention.
Few remember that a short-lived fire on Cleveland Ohio’s Cuyahoga River that year would birth the environmental movement and lead to the Clean Water Act of 1972 and subsequent Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, which fiftieth anniversary we now celebrate.
June 1969 was not the first time the Cuyahoga had caught fire. Beginning in 1868, three times in the nineteenth century it had caught fire from the murky soup of oil waste from many refineries along its banks that saturated the ground and discharged into the Cuyahoga, along with debris and industrial waste from steelmaking to paint to paper milling.
From Akron to Cleveland, there were no fish. In fact, the Cleveland mayor characterized the river as, “An open sewer through the center of the city.”