Disturbing Photographs Show Pollution in the Great Lakes Before the Clean Water Act
Disturbing Photographs Show Pollution in the Great Lakes Before the Clean Water Act
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Caption from LIFE. Erie's curse of the Cuyahoga, which snakes through Cleveland carrying a load of detergents, sewage and chemicals to the lake.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
In 1968, two years before April 22 was first celebrated as Earth Day, LIFE magazine dispatched photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt to the Great Lakes to capture a crisis that required no national awareness day to make itself known.
“Lake Erie, the smallest and shallowest of the five lakes, is also the filthiest; if every sewage pipe were turned off today, it would take 10 years for nature to purify Erie. Ontario is a repository for Buffalo-area filth. Michigan, where 16 billion small fish, called seawives, mysteriously died last year, is a cul-de-sac without an overflow pipe, and if Michigan becomes further polluted, the damage may take 1,000 years to repair,” the magazine explained. “Huron and Superior are still relatively clean, but they are in danger.”
And, statistics aside, the photographs Eisenstaedt produced told the story in lurid browns, oranges and grays, punctuated by the vivid iridescence of the occasional oil slick. As many in the United States were starting to realize, pollution of the American environment seemed to be reaching a point of no return. From that, there was some hope. “For selfish as well as civic reasons, more has been done in the past three years to clean the lakes than in the preceding 30,” the article reported.
Though federal water-protection laws did exist already (the Federal Water Pollution Control Act was 20 years old at that point) they were only just starting to get teeth, and technology that would facilitate a clean-up was improving. In 1972, the law was revamped as the Clean Water Act, and the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency made the lakes a priority. They still are, just as they are still under threat from a variety of sources. Though progress has been made on some fronts — Lake Erie has come back from the “dead” — the words of one teenager who wrote to the Secretary of the Interior in the 1960s, and who was subsequently quoted by LIFE, still read as a warning.
“I was truly amazed,” he remarked upon visiting a polluted lakeshore, “that such a great country should not solve this problem before it’s too late.”
Caption from LIFE. Down Ohio's Cuyhoga River glide iceberglike masses of dirty soapsuds. Shimmering in sewage, they are bound for Lake Erie, which is so polluted that scientists say it is almost dead. This crisis of man made cretinism threatens the very existence of the inland seas, which are five of our natural wonders.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Eyesores abound at rivers edge, in the Cleveland port itself, where left-over litter is used to build unsightly breakwaters. Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. The big port has only one commercial fisherman, and Fred Wittal, shown cleaning a meager perch catch, is leaving too.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Erie's curse of the Cuyahoga, which snakes through Cleveland carrying a load of detergents, sewage and chemicals to the lake.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. The oil melange is waste from the U.S. Steel Corp. It is shown on the Grand Calumet River, a Lake Michigan tributary where even worms can no longer survive.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Another problem is natural pollutants such as the red clay inflexibly delivered by the Big Iron River.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. On the Canadian shore, a slaughterhouse pipe is the best place to fish for what fish are left.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Only a shade cleaner is the Detroit River, flowing into Lake Erie.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Beside the deep, clear waters that inspired Longfellow to write "By the shore of Gitche Gumee," a waterfall of taconite tailings from the Reserve Mining Co.'s plant at Silver Bay, Minn. spills into Lake Superior at the rate of 20 million tons a year.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Looking like a giant glob of beer foam, pulp wastes from the Hammermill Paper Co. stain Lake Erie's Pennsylvania shore. The white mess is penned by a dike built of old tires and oil drums, but residue seeps through to foul open waters. Hammermill promised action, either by routing waste to an existing sewage plant or by building a new facility.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Lake Erie's Sterling State Park has been dangerously polluted by septic-tank wastes for eight years, but—despite warning signs—the state of Michigan still permits swimming.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. White Lake, a five-mile-long catch basin on Lake Michigan's eastern shore, is covered by sewage-fed weeds. Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. At Green Bay, Wis., paper mill refuse helped turn the municipal beach into a marsh: there has been no swimming here for 25 years.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. The beach at Whiting, Ind., 20 miles from Chicago, was closed 10 years ago. Whiting has a problem in common with other lake communities: it has only one sewer system for human refuse and storm waters. Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. The lake's (Michigan) big polluters are steel mills and refineries, some of which are clustered along the Indiana Harbor ship Canal, an oily caldron running through East Chicago.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCity sewer dumping into a Great Lake.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. On the U.S. side of Niagara Falls, nearly raw sewage—71 million gallons a day—gushes into Niagara River. To the fury of Canadians, it then pours into Lake Ontario.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
