Comments on watercrunch: The Cuyahoga River Fire Myth

The one thing that was different about the 1969 fi...

2010-07-30T15:38:04.807-04:00

The one thing that was different about the 1969 fire was the mayor. Carl Stokes was the nation's first black mayor of a major city. He inherited a municipality that was in decay. The white middle class had fled, leaving the poor and disenfranchised. Stokes saw the intimate connection between environmental and social conditions. The 1969 fire may not have been the Cuyahoga's worst fire, but he was determined it would be its last fire. So he shone the spotlight of the national press upon the Cuyahoga instead of hiding what was happening.

Hi! Fellow water engineer here, just discovered yo...

2010-04-22T13:18:43.995-04:00

Hi! Fellow water engineer here, just discovered your blog via Michael Campana's WaterWired.

I'm not sure if I get your point here... That the fire wasn't so bad because it only lasted for 30 minutes and only caused $50,000 in damage? The river was ON FIRE! There were oil slicks on the river every day. That sounds bad enough to me.

Perhaps I should write a post about the great Santa Barbara offshore oil spill myth? As far as I know, none of the oil that washed up on the beaches caught fire, so perhaps it wasn't as bad as people make it out to be!