ALMOST every great city has a river. The poetic notion is that flowing
water brings commerce, delights the eye, and cools the summer heat. But
there is a more prosaic reason for the close affinity of cities and
rivers. They serve as convenient, free sewers. The Potomac reaches the nation's capital as a pleasant stream, and
leaves it stinking from the 240 million gallons of wastes that are
flushed into it daily. Among other horrors, while Omaha's meat packers
fill the Missouri River with animal grease balls as big as oranges, St.
Louis takes its drinking water from the muddy lower Missouri because
the Mississippi is far filthier. Scores of U.S. rivers are severely
polluted—the swift Chattahoochee, majestic Hudson and quiet Milwaukee,
plus the Buffalo, Merrimack, Monongahela, Niagara, Delaware, Rouge,
Escambia and Havasupi. Among the worst of them all is the 80-mile-long
Cuyahoga, which splits Cleveland as it reaches the shores of Lake Erie. No Visible Life. Some river! Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with
subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows. “Anyone who falls into
the Cuyahoga does not drown,” Cleveland's citizens joke grimly. “He
decays.” The Federal Water Pollution Control Administration dryly
notes: “The lower Cuyahoga has no visible life, not even low forms such
as leeches and sludge worms that usually thrive on wastes.” It is
also—literally —a fire hazard. A few weeks ago, the oil-slicked river
burst into flames and burned with such intensity that two railroad
bridges spanning it were nearly destroyed. “What a terrible reflection
on our city,” said Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes sadly. Cleveland's great industries have lately made efforts to dump fewer
noxious effluents into the Cuyahoga. If their record is still not good,
the city's has been far worse. Whenever it rains hard, the archaic
sanitary storm system floods the sewer mains, sending untreated
household wastes into the river. Sometimes the old mains break, as
recently happened on the Big Creek interceptor line. Each day for the
past month, 25 million gallons of raw sewage have cascaded from a
ruptured pipe, spilling a gray-green torrent into the Cuyahoga and
thence into Lake Erie. Some lake! Industrial wastes from Detroit's auto companies, Toledo's
steel mills and the paper plants of Erie, Pa., have helped turn Lake
Erie into a gigantic cesspool. Of 62 beaches along its U.S. shores,
only three are rated completely safe for swimming. Even wading is
unpleasant; as many as 30,000 sludge worms carpet each square yard of
lake bottom. Each day, Detroit, Cleveland and 120 other municipalities fill Erie with
1.5 billion gallons of inadequately treated wastes, including nitrates
and phosphates. These chemicals act as fertilizer for growths of algae
that suck oxygen from the lower depths and rise to the surface as
odoriferous green scum. Commercial and game fish—blue pike,
whitefish, sturgeon, northern pike—have nearly vanished, yielding the
waters to trash fish that need less oxygen. Weeds proliferate, turning
water frontage into swamp. In short, Lake Erie is in danger of dying by
suffocation. Scrub the Water. What can be done? The Federal Government has outlined a
$1.1 billion program for upgrading the sewage treatment plants of Lake
