1969: Debris and oil floating on the Cuyahoga River catches fire, the last of a dozen fires over 100 years of industrial development.

1970: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency created; Kent Environmental Council created, with emphasis on Cuyahoga River.

1972: Adoption of federal Clean Water Act, which aims for U.S. waterways to be cleaned up to become "fishable and swimmable." At this time, biologists can find no fish in the river between Akron and Cleveland.

1974: Creation of Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area, now known as a National Park, which preserves natural areas along the river.

1988: The 45 river miles between Akron and Cleveland named one of 43 most polluted waterways on the Great Lakes.

1991: An Ohio EPA report shows improving fish populations and water quality in tributaries to Cuyahoga.

1994: Great blue heron and bald eagles, both fish-eating birds, start returning to the Cuyahoga. Still, the Ohio Department of Health issues warnings for people to limit consumption of certain fish species caught in the river.

1997: Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District begins work on Mill Creek tunnel, a massive 5.4-mile pipe that will hold sewage and rainwater for treatment before it enters the Cuyahoga's largest tributary.

1998: White House names Cuyahoga as one of 14 American Heritage Rivers, which means that the river receives priority status in federal funding and in other government services.

2000: An Ohio EPA report shows 62 species of fish along the full length of the river and six of eight areas between Akron and Cleveland meet some or all of the goals set by the federal Clean Water Act.

2002: Akron announces a $377 million plan to correct its combined sewers, which dump sewage and rainwater into the Cuyahoga and its tributaries during heavy rains.

2003: U.S. EPA approves state report that outlines ways to improve the river.

2004: The Cuyahoga River Remedial Action Plan discusses ways to have the river removed from an international list of most-polluted sites on the Great Lakes; the Cuyahoga is rerouted around the Kent dam to give fish a better chance to move upstream.

2005: The Munroe Falls dam is removed.

2007: The Cuyahoga River Community Planning Organization develops a prototype underwater habitat basket to place along steel bulkheads in Cleveland to give aquatic plants and animals a chance to thrive in the still lifeless channel.

2008: Studies by the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District are sent to the EPA showing that much of the middle section of the Cuyahoga should meet the "fishable" standard set by the Clean Water Act. .

2009: Year of the River declared by Cuyahoga River Community Planning Organization

History now reveals the notorious fire as a messy midstream shift, a turning point in the story of the Cuyahoga. Because of the fire, legislators who had been talking about protecting the environment finally did something about it -- and industrialists who had been polluting the river since the Industrial Revolution had to change their ways.

"The fire was a bad thing, sure, but some good came out of it in the end," said Jane Goodman, a South Euclid councilwoman and spokeswoman for the river planning group. "Many people see this fire as being a catalyst for the federal Clean Water Act and other environmental laws.

"And those laws went a long way toward bringing the river back."
Life coming back
Just ask the fish. Or the scientists who count them.

When Ohio Environmental Protection Agency biologists in the mid-1980s first began counting fish in the middle to lower section of the Cuyahoga River -- the worst polluted section of the stream as it wound through Akron to Cleveland -- they would literally come back with fewer than 10 fish.

Not 10 fish species, but 10 fish -- and most of those were species like gizzard shad, which can survive in polluted water, but end up deformed or mutated. Results in subsequent years were continually better, but mostly in the upper reaches of the stream in rural Geauga and Portage counties.

But when the EPA crews went back last summer -- after hearing unexpectedly high unofficial counts from Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District officials who also tally aquatic life in the river -- they found 40 different fish species in the river in the crucial and most polluted area between Akron and Cleveland, including steelhead trout, northern pike and other clean-water fish. The entire river had more than 60 species of fish.

"It's been an absolutely amazing recovery," said Steve Tuckerman of the Ohio EPA's Twinsburg office, who made those first reports in 1984. "I wouldn't have believed that this section of the river would have this dramatic of a turnaround in my career, but it has."

The result of those fish samples could be that the important middle section of the river -- from just north of Kent in Portage County through Akron to Harvard Avenue in Cleveland -- will now meet U.S. EPA standards for aquatic life habitat -- that's both fish and insects -- under the federal Clean Water Act.

It could happen sometime this year, perhaps in time for the 40th anniversary on June 22.

"That's our goal and we think it's going to happen," White said. "The numbers are there to show that the fish have returned.

"Because fish just go where there's clean water -- they don't remember how bad it was."

Ecological costs of boom
But people do.

We now look back on the boom years of the Cleveland economy with a mixture of economic longing and ecological remorse. We may still want the jobs that came with oil, plastics, paint and steel -- but not the sludge byproducts that came with it.
In fact, because of that flammable mix, even fire was hardly a novelty on the Cuyahoga -- or any of the great industrial waterways of America over a period of about a hundred years of progress.
The Cuyahoga had burned as early as 1868 and a half-dozen times more before a 1952 fire caused more than $1.5 million in damage.
The last fire, however, started around noon on that June Sunday, and was put out in a half-hour after causing only about $50,000 in damage -- brief and cheap compared to some previous fires on the industrial waterway.
The photo that ran in The Plain Dealer on June 23, 1969, showed crews hosing down the smoldering timbers of the railroad bridge, but no spectacular flames or smoke.
The Time magazine story also said this: "Some River! Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows."
The Federal Water Pollution Control Administration was less dramatic in a report several years after the fire, but no less emphatic: "The lower Cuyahoga has no visible signs of life, not even low forms such as leeches and sludge worms that usually thrive on wastes."

The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District -- which took over sewer operations for Cleveland in 1972, right on the heels of the fire and clean-water laws -- also played a vital and multibillion-dollar role in the cleanup of the Cuyahoga.
The law forced Akron and Cleveland to improve their sewage treatment plants, add sewer lines and will soon include the treatment of storm water.
The Clean Water Act also put the EPA, and eventually the sewer district, in charge of monitoring how much pollution heavy manufacturers were putting into the river -- and levying fines up to $25,000 a day if they violated the new law.

The sewer district has civil authority over the industries and individuals that dispose into its system -- and ultimately the river -- but criminal investigations are left up to the state and federal EPA after the case is referred by the sewer district. "We put a few people out of business in the early days -- we had to," said Scott Linn of the sewer district. "There were some pretty bad players back then, but now it's more about keeping people in business, but making sure they are in compliance."

Linn showed off charts for toxic metals like cadmium, chromium and lead that were once at nearly 200 parts per million and are now almost entirely gone from the river. The absence of those poisons has led to the return of aquatic plant life, bugs and finally fish.

But the fire also galvanized environmental groups like the Kent Environmental Council, which held its first meeting soon after and its first river cleanup in 1970.

The formation of dozens of groups followed year by year, including Friends of the Crooked River in the 1990s, a group that has sponsored a cleanup along the length of the Cuyahoga.

In 1988, the Cuyahoga River Remedial Action Plan was also put in place, the precursor to the planning organization now headed by White. The group is heading the planning for this summer's commemorative events.

The group -- joined by parks, communities and other organizations -- is still putting together specific plans for the month of June, when national and even international media are likely to look in on the health of the Cuyahoga after the iconic fire.

But you can bet they won't dodge the past. "Well, we can't undo it -- so why not overdo it?" Goodman said when asked about the group's plans. "We can't go back in time and make it not happen, so let's use it to show how far we've come."

In fact, there may even be a way to "set the river on fire again," Goodman said. "Well, we'd love to use lights or fireworks or even floating something on fire on the river," she said. "The beauty of that is that the river won't catch fire on its own anymore."

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: Call 216-999-4148 or e-mail Michael Scott's E-mail