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Water: Now you know the rest of the story

Henrik Ibsen may not bring a lot of recognition to many people. Hearing the name, I may have recognized only that I heard Ibsen mentioned in relationship to literature or possibly more specifically the theater.

When a little more information is added I probably came up with a statement like, “Oh, now I remember.” That bit of information needed may have been the mention of a play, “A Doll’s House” or “Hedda Gabler.”

Years ago requirements for earning a bachelor’s degree at Ohio’s Denison University required taking two of three courses (appreciation of) visual arts, theater arts, music. I avoided music, though I have for years regretted at least not opting to take all three. Even as a non-musician I enjoy all three areas, particularly music, as shown by season tickets to the Minnesota Orchestra.

My reacquaintance with Ibsen was just a week ago at the Guthrie Theater production of his play, “An Enemy of the People” – written in 1882, albeit a new adaptation of Ibsen’s play by Brad Birch. A synopsis: Dr. Tom Stockmann discovers that water from a special spring in the surrounding mountains has been piped to be used at a proposed and almost finished spa. The water so piped is poisonous. The community’s investment would be lost. Stockmann’s brother is the mayor and he and other relatives and leaders do not want Tom to reveal the problem.

Thus the moral dilemma: Tell the truth or let the prospective users from other towns use the spa? Does that sound like some of the politicians in the Flint, Michigan, drinking water debacle?

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Sometimes it has seemed that water and air are so abundant that we take them for granted not recognizing that they can be degraded. In the United States when communities were small and far enough apart, it seemed like an easy way to dispose of human or animal waste was to flush it down one of the rivers that flowed through or by the community.

Indeed in simpler times, the streams, in a sense, did purify themselves thanks to sedimentation, aeration, the sun, and various microbes. So if the polluters were far enough upstream from the next bit of civilization, the water could be used again.

The folly of such thinking is easily recognized by what happened in Chicago where the community found itself not far enough away from the disposal in the river system to allow getting “clean” water for drinking and other uses.

The rivers in which Chicagoans could dump their waste were fairly short because they flowed into Lake Michigan, the source of their “clean” water. One possibility that worked for a while was to extend the pipes to get “clean” water farther out into the lake.

Obviously there was a limit to that sort of disposing. So Chicago decided to really change nature around and came up with a solution by digging a channel that instead of having the rivers flow into Lake Michigan, Lake Michigan waters flowed south into the Illinois river. Of course that merely passed the problem on to southern Illinois and eventually to St. Louis and beyond.

In order to accomplish this process, the disposal of the wastewater had to flow downhill so sewage pipes were constructed above ground running down the middle of streets directing the wastewater instead of flowing into Lake Michigan from both the Chicago River and the Calumet River, it went through the pipes to channels that connected to the south-flowing Des Plaines River hence into the Illinois River. This happened in the mid-1800s.

To accommodate the flow from buildings meant, in many cases, raising the buildings above the sewage pipes. That was not just simple, one story buildings, but in some cases brick buildings of several floors. (See: “The Source, How rivers made America and America remade its rivers,” by Martin Doyle ©2018)

Ultimately, of course, the need became evident for wastewater treatment plants for all cities and regulations to prevent pollution of water sources. In 1948, the first such legislation became law in the U. S., called the Federal Water Pollution Control Act.

Unfortunately, the law did not cover much of the industrial pollution. In the early 1960s, Edith Marie Cates Chase took up the fight with the League of Women Voters of Kent because of severe pollution of the Cuyahoga River running through Kent and Cleveland and into Lake Erie. She was born in Minneapolis, received her bachelor’s from Antioch College in Ohio, a master’s in organic chemistry from the University of Minnesota and was a determined League of Women Voters member in Kent, Ohio.

The LWV had already won some small victories, but the big break came in several weeks in the summer of 1969. Three events happened in that period: The Apollo 11 astronauts were welcomed home from the moon, Ted Kennedy drove off the bridge at Chappaquiddick, and (what many thought was a minor story) the Cuyahoga River caught fire.

Those three events were reported in a Time magazine issue of Aug. 1, 1969. Surprisingly the Cuyahoga story became a nationwide rallying point, partially because of the background work of the LWV of Kent and because of a picture of the Cuyahoga River in flames with a small “fire engine” boat fighting the flames. The rally brought on the revising of the above mentioned Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1948, then renamed the Clean Water Act of 1972. It also led to the Clean Air Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

A Paul Harvey “and now you know the rest of the story” is that the picture in the Time magazine article of August 1969 was actually taken in 1952. Rivers catching fire from pollution were not new. According to Doyle’s The Source, the Cuyahoga had at least a dozen such fires from the Civil War to the present and other industrial-lined rivers had also caught fire, notably the Buffalo River in New York, the Schuylkill in Pennsylvania, and the Rouge River in Michigan.

Until next time: Oh, Fiddlesticks!

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