The Rejuvenated Ohio

In its virgin splendor, the Ohio River awed the French explorer, La Salle, and all who came after him. The French called it La Belle Riviere, meaning, as Poet Carl Sandburg explained, "a woman easy to look at." Raft-riding settlers from the colonies called it "Ohio," after the Iroquois word for "thing of beauty." For a century and a half, while nursing the frontier's commerce and industry, the Ohio continued to be a 981-mile-long showcase of nature's charms. Rising at the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers at Fort Pitt (now Pittsburgh's "Golden Triangle"), the Ohio wound through coal-rich mountains to reach the seven hills of Cincinnati, cultural center of the new West. Alive with bass and blue gill, it foamed bright white at Louisville's limestone falls, poured clean blue into the Mississippi's brown waters at Cairo (pronounced care-oh), in Illinois' Little Egypt.

Asparagus Upstream. As a key U.S. waterway, the Ohio thrived; the distinctive old steamboat whistles gave way to the diesel-powered towboats' raucous horns, and each year the towboats nursed some 80 million tons of cargo up through the 46 locks. But as a thing of beauty, the Ohio ran downhill; the sprawling, river-fed cities fed back a byproduct of civilization--raw sewage and industrial wastes --until the great stream became an open sewer. Game fish bellied up and died; riverfront Manhattan Beach, near Bellevue, Ky., was covered with a foul slime; Louisville's water system doused river water so heavily with chemicals that the citizens howled; on its best days, the river gave off the medicinal odor of phenol poured out of coke ovens. For decades the river cities and towns complained to each other about the mess coming from upstream, contributed to the mess downstream. Then a determined Cincinnati pressagent, rushing in where poets refused to paddle, launched a 25-year cleanup drive that is only now beginning to restore the Ohio's purity and beauty.

Indiana-born Pressagent Hudson Biery had always considered the Ohio one of his charity clients. In 1935 he got the backing of the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, was made chairman of a committee that set out to sell a cleanup program, shocked regional audiences and newspaper readers with crude, graphic facts. One quart in every gallon of Ohio water was raw sewage, equal to "700 dead horses floating by Cincinnati every day," he said. "We in Cincinnati can always tell when people in Pittsburgh have had asparagus for dinner."

The New Treatment. By 1936 Biery & Co. stirred Congress to pass a resolution that enabled eight states (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois. Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York and Virginia) to make a united attack. But World War II and other delays prevented them from raising their annual river-policing budget (now $130,000 from the states, $110,000 from U.S. funds) and going into business until 1948. By then the basin's 17 million residents had few sewage-treatment plants, and 5,000,000 dumped raw sewage directly into the river system.

As the plan got going, Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission Director Edward J. Cleary, ex-editor of an engineering magazine, set up headquarters in Cincinnati. With his tiny staff (now eight) he set out to persuade about 1,000 basin towns and cities to build sewage-treatment plants that cost up to $150 per capita. Junior chambers of commerce, boy scouts, newspapers and other civic-minded organizations moved behind local bond-issue campaigns. Cincinnati invested $60 million; Pittsburgh's $100 million plant opened last year. With smaller cities often taking the lead, the total outlay mounted past $500 million. Today, treatment plants serve 8,400,000 residents (total basin pop. 20 million), and new plants will soon serve another 900,000. Sole city-sized holdout: Huntington, W. Va. (pop. 93,000), which wants to dawdle with its sewage plant until 1969.

Retreat from Slime. Sanitation commissioners, fortified by readings from 44 river-testing stations and airborne inspection teams, also won active cooperation from industry. By last week 80% of the 1,442 plants in the Ohio Valley--among them atomic energy installations scattered from Shippingport, Pa. to Paducah, Ky., and an electric-power plant at Indiana's Clifty Creek, which use more water than all New York City--had established controls on the waste they discharge into the river.

The results of the Ohio cleanup are slow but measurable. Bellevue's Manhattan Beach can already see half a mile of clean sand ready for next summer's swimmers, expects the slime to retreat about 1,000 ft. a year. Boating is booming on the Ohio and its branches as never before--and even water skiers dare to chance it.

Sportsmen get occasional bass strikes downriver, take special hope from the Pittsburgh sanitation board's report of the first game fish sightings at the headwaters in decades. The Ohio, river named for its beauty, is becoming itself again.

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