Cleveland Rocks!

I came across this article on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland in the Sacramento Bee today. I know it sounds very weird, but that river actually burnt! I can remember drinking beer watching a man win a $500 bet by swimming the width of the river in a wetsuit. Randy Nueman wrote a song about it. We can owe much of our environmental regulations at the nationwide disgust at the way the industrial corridor in the Akron/Cleveland area treated the river. Sewage plants dumped barely settled sewage into the river and its tributaries!

As a kid, we were not allowed to play in the river or any of the creeks that fed it. I can remember a storm sewer burning and discharging an oily goo into the area we played ball and picked raspberries. Fish did not go up the river to spawn from Lake Erie for over 18 years, and then it was clean enough for one pike and one bluegill. Now, my little brothers catch steelhead trout, salmon (both transplanted breeds) on the river and its tributaries. They can catch fish in Lake Erie and keep the little guys with less mercury (coal-fired power plant gifts) to eat. Now there are 40 species of fish! It is pretty cool.

and silliness from today's paper--

rojo