MENU
SECTIONS
OTHER
CLASSIFIEDS
CONTACT US / FAQ
Advertisement
The shoreline along western Lake Erie's Maumee Bay, across Bay Shore Road from the University of Toledo's Lake Erie Center, was thick with algae on the afternoon of Aug. 14, 2019.
3
MORE

50 years later, Toledo area continues to reap benefits of Clean Water Act

THE BLADE/TOM HENRY

50 years later, Toledo area continues to reap benefits of Clean Water Act

One of America’s most important environmental laws turned 50 on Tuesday, one that ushered in the modern era of sewage treatment nationally and used for improving Toledo-area waterways and others throughout the Great Lakes region.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan marked the anniversary with a special event in Cleveland that commemorated that city’s comeback from an infamous 1969 fire in which the Cuyahoga River was so filthy that it burned.

But that wasn’t the only time the Cuyahoga burned. And three other Great Lakes tributaries, the Chicago River, the Buffalo River, and the Rouge River, were so inundated with oily pollution in the past that there are times they burned, too.

Advertisement

Closer to home in the Toledo area, the Clean Water Act was used for getting the Ottawa River and its legacy of cancer-causing pollutants known as PCBs, short for polychlorinated biphenyls, removed after the U.S. EPA sued multiple industries in federal court for past discharges.

Lucas County commissioners Tina Skeldon-Wozniak and Pete Gerken, along with Lucas County Commission President Gary Byers, made a plea for more public involvement at a news conference Wednesday.
Tom Henry
Lake Erie needs '60s-era activism now, commissioners say

The act was used as justification for the recently completed Toledo Waterways Initiative, a $520 million overhaul of the city’s sewage network that took about 20 years to build and came in response to almost 12 years of litigation with the feds in U.S. District Court.

And now, the same law is being used as the basis for a landmark case before senior Judge James Carr of U.S. District Court in Toledo. It’s one in which the Chicago-based Environmental Law & Policy Center has been working with the Lucas County commissioners to compel more action from state and federal regulators in hopes of slowing down or eliminating toxic algal blooms that have been in western Lake Erie nearly every summer since 1995.

Historian provides context

Advertisement

Noted historian Douglas Brinkley, who grew up in Perrysburg and attended schools there, said the Clean Water Act figures prominently into his latest book, Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, and the Great Environmental Awakening, which is being published by HarperCollins and scheduled for release Nov. 15.

“The Clean Water Act of 1972 was an epic environmental law,” Mr. Brinkley, a 1978 Perrysburg High School graduate now teaching at Rice University in Houston, said in an interview Tuesday. “It was a game-changer for Lake Erie, the Ottawa River, the Maumee River, and the Rouge River.”

President Richard Nixon, who created the U.S. EPA and signed the 1972 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement with then-Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau that spring, tried to kill the Clean Water Act but did not succeed. Congress overrode the veto.

Although Mr. Nixon claimed to be in agreement with the law’s general concept for modernizing sewage treatment, he thought it would be too costly. But there also were personal reasons, according to Mr. Brinkley: He hated the act’s chief architect, then-U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie (D., Maine).

Ed Moore, Director of Public Utilities, helps unveil a memorial bench to honor former Department of Public Utilities Engineer Julie Cousino, Tuesday, at International Park in Toledo. The bench will be installed in a Toledo Metropark.
Tom Henry
Toledo meets all requirements in 20-year-old EPA agreement

Mr. Nixon got along reasonably well with the other two Democrats heavily involved in the act’s passage, U.S. Rep. John Dingell (D., Detroit) and U.S. Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D., Wash).

But Mr. Muskie “annoyed him,” Mr. Brinkley said.

“He hated Muskie,” he said. “Nixon and Muskie were toxic.”

Key Republicans such as former U.S. Sen. Howard Baker (R. Tenn.) and one of Mr. Nixon’s closest White House aides, John Ehrlichman, supported the Clean Water Act.

But once Mr. Nixon realized his opponent in the 1972 general election would be George McGovern, a U.S. senator from South Dakota known as a Vietnam War dove, he knew he could cruise to re-election without upsetting his business interests.

“He didn’t need it,” Mr. Brinkley, an author of more than 20 history books, said. “He was going to win the biggest landslide in American history.”

Challenges remain

The Clean Water Act isn’t perfect. One of its biggest weaknesses is uncertainty over whether it has any power over agricultural runoff in the western Lake Erie basin and other parts of the country, where nutrient-enriched water has been leading to more algal blooms in recent years.

But several people interviewed agree there was so little sewage treatment back then that the law forced billions of dollars of improvements to sewage systems while also bringing direct industrial discharges of chemical waste into rivers and streams down to a barely detectable trickle.

“It made sure that every company considered what they put into our rivers and lakes. The federal government demanded data on discharges,” Mr. Brinkley said. “By and large, it’s been quite effective in making sure our rivers and lakes don’t die. The fact we can’t swim in many rivers and lakes, though, shows you the shortcomings of the act.”

Joe Cotruvo, a former Toledoan who went on to become one of the top scientists in U.S. EPA’s drinking water division after that agency was formed, said he remembers “when there were oil slicks on the Maumee River and the fish tasted oily.”

The act’s requirement for secondary sewage treatment went a long way in improving water quality, but he agrees it hasn’t done enough to address some of today’s issues. 

“The CWA has been much less effective in controlling surface [nonpoint source] water runoff,” said Mr. Cotruvo, a longtime Washington-based consultant and World Health Organization scientist with University of Toledo ties.

An example of nonpoint runoff is agricultural runoff.

Ken Kilbert, UT College of Law professor and director of UT’s Legal Institute of the Great Lakes, said the Clean Water Act “has been instrumental in transforming the lake and river from what were basically open sewers teeming with industrial and human wastes into huge assets for the city and region, both economically and in quality of life.”

Toledo “is a water town, and our future is brighter as a result of the federal Clean Water Act,” he said.

Other efforts highlighted

John Hartig, a Great Lakes historian who spent years as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife scientist, is the author of Burning Rivers: Revival of Four Urban-industrial Rivers that Caught on Fire, a book that chronicled fires along the Chicago, Rouge, Buffalo, and Cuyahoga rivers.

He said the federal government’s Endangered Species Act that came along in 1973 was an important followup to the Clean Water Act’s passage a year earlier.

The Endangered Species Act led to the recovery of many bird species, including the bald eagle in northern Ohio and other parts of the country.

“They’re not fully healthy yet,” Mr. Hartig said of birds in general and the legacy of insecticides that eventually got banned, such as DDT. “But back then, they weren’t producing [offspring].”

Equally as important as the many federal laws and agencies that were created after the first Earth Day in 1970 is the plethora of nongovernmental groups, such as environmental groups.

“That is a sign for me there’s hope, that there are so many nongovernmental organizations taking the next step,” Mr. Hartig said.

Howard Learner, Environmental Law & Policy Center executive director, said 50 years of progress is worth celebrating. But he cautioned more work needs to be done to solve the runoff riddle.

“We still have far to go to protect our lakes and rivers as agricultural runoff pollution from manure and fertilizers plague Lake Erie, resulting in toxic algae outbreaks almost every summer impairing fisheries, enjoyable outdoor recreation, and safe clean drinking water,” Mr. Learner said.

His co-counsel at the center, Rob Michaels, said he believes that proper management of manure generated by large livestock facilities known as concentrated animal feeding operations is one of western Lake Erie’s biggest environmental issues.

“This is on some level just a question of will and resources,” Mr. Michael said while imploring state and federal regulators to do more testing.

‘Pivotal act’

Fritz Byers, the Lucas County commission’s attorney in the case before Judge Carr, calls the Clean Water Act a “pivotal act in the history of the environmental movement in the United States.”

It set up a system of federalism, in which federal agencies such as the U.S. EPA are supposed to serve as a backstop when state agencies such as the Ohio EPA don’t go far enough to protect public health and the environment, Mr. Byers said.

When the U.S. EPA doesn’t serve that function, citizen-driven litigation can follow, Mr. Byers said.

“A lot of important work has been done and a lot more is left to be done,” he said. “The case pending before Judge Carr is an example of that. It is an example of what Congress wanted if the [state-federal] partnership did not work as intended.”

Mr. Byers and Mr. Michaels said the Clean Water Act’s “untapped potential” lies in how nonpoint source pollution could be regulated under it someday.

First Published October 18, 2022, 10:53 p.m.

RELATED
SHOW COMMENTS  
Join the Conversation
We value your comments and civil discourse. Click here to review our Commenting Guidelines.
Must Read
Partners
Advertisement
The shoreline along western Lake Erie's Maumee Bay, across Bay Shore Road from the University of Toledo's Lake Erie Center, was thick with algae on the afternoon of Aug. 14, 2019.  (THE BLADE/TOM HENRY)  Buy Image
A view of Lake Erie from the Gibraltar Island shoreline.  (THE BLADE/TOM HENRY)  Buy Image
Douglas Brinkley, during his April 3 talk at the Houston Arboretum on the closing day of the national Society of Environmental Journalists conference.  (THE BLADE/TOM HENRY)  Buy Image
THE BLADE/TOM HENRY
Advertisement
LATEST local
Advertisement
Pittsburgh skyline silhouette
TOP
Email a Story