Word: clevelanders
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Each day, Detroit, Cleveland and 120 other municipalities fill Erie with 1.5 billion gallons of inadequately treated wastes, including nitrates and phosphates. These chemicals act as fertilizer for growths of algae that suck oxygen from the lower depths and rise to the surface as odoriferous green scum. Commercial and game fish-blue pike, whitefish, sturgeon, northern pike-have nearly vanished, yielding the waters to trash fish that need less oxygen. Weeds proliferate, turning water frontage into swamp. In short, Lake Erie is in danger of dying by suffocation...
...Cleveland, however, shook off its apathy last year. Much of the credit goes to Ben Stefanski, a 30-year-old lawyer-turned-urbanist, whom Mayor Stokes had just appointed to be Cleveland's director of public utilities. Making up in enthusiasm what he lacked in experience, Stefanski persuaded Stokes to start a massive effort to scrub the Cuyahoga, and hence aid Lake Erie. The proposed price tag: $100 million in bonds, to improve existing facilities and build 25 miles of trunk-line sewers plus a modern sewage treatment plant...
...double the rates to amortize our bonds." To persuade the people to pay, Stefanski enlisted newspaper support, lined up citizen groups and got 33 suburban governments to endorse the plan. "It became like apple pie and motherhood," he recalls. "No one could be against clean water." Last fall Clevelanders approved the bond issue by a vote of 2 to 1, giving it more "yes" votes than any other proposal on the ballot. In five years, Cleveland should have the best sewage system in the U.S., one capable of handling even industrial wastes...
...accomplishment, huge as it is, only fixes the price of optimism. Unfortunately, water pollution knows no political boundaries. The Cuyahoga can be cleaned up in Cleveland, but as long as other cities keep dumping wastes upriver, it will remain exactly what it is today-an open sewer filling Lake Erie with scummy wavelets, sullen reminders that even a great lake...
After that, Cleveland's Sam McDowell and Boston's Ray Culp combined to retire the next nine Nationals in a row. But the damage had already been done. The National League wound up with a 9-3 victory, its seventh straight in the series...