Time for Transfusion

Lake Erie is critically ill, and the symptoms are there for all to see. Beaches that once were gleaming with white sand are covered with smelly greenish slime. The lake's prize fish--walleyes, blue pike, yellow perch and whitefish--have all but disappeared, and the fishing fleets along with them. After surveying their sludgy waters last year, over 1,000,000 irate Ohio citizens petitioned Governor James A. Rhodes to ask for remedial action, and thousands have sent in letters. Wrote one Clevelander: "Our lake is a wastebasket for factories. It is unfit for fish to live in and for people to enjoy."

Such complaints have echoed all the way to Washington, and at Ohio's request, representatives of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare gave the lake a complete medical checkup. They plumbed its depths, studied its surface, tested its water and measured its oxygen. With its findings in hand, the department held a two-week-long hearing for the five states that form Erie's watershed. The proceedings began with a grim conclusion: the lake has been brought to its deathbed by the citizens and industries that surround it; only a massive transfusion of money and effort can save it from becoming a North American Dead Sea.

Fertilizing Algae. Major reason for the lake's pollution is that most of its larger tributaries have turned into little more than open sewers. Detroit alone pours 1.5 billion gallons of waste a day into the Detroit River, which flows directly into Lake Erie. The Cuyahoga River, which runs through the middle of Akron and Cleveland before spilling into the lake, is so clogged with logs, rotted pilings, flammable chemicals, oil slicks and old tires that it has been labeled a fire hazard. Adding to the scum and stench are thousands of dead fish that were smothered by the pollution. On a cruise up the Buffalo River last summer, Buffalo Mayor Chester Kowal slid past islands of detergents, pools of grain dust, and a general rainbow of industrial discharge. The stink was overpowering. "Unbelievable! Disgusting!" he concluded.

Residential sewage presents almost as much of a problem. A startlingly high percentage of lakeside residents run sewage directly into the lake. Along New York's portion of the Erie basin, 78% of the homeowners depend upon a primitive, inadequate settling process. Even some municipal sewage-treatment plants add to the problem. If they are hooked up to a combined network of sewage and storm-water pipes, they can usually handle only a small percentage of the sewage during a storm. The rest passes completely untreated into the river through emergency runoff pipes, then oozes into the lake.

Rich in the same phosphates that fertilize a farmer's crops, the sewage triggers a fantastic growth of algae on the lake's bottom. Some 87 tons of phosphates are dumped into the water each day, and each pound is capable of breeding 350 tons of slime. Because dead blue-green underwater plants rob the water of its oxygen, much of Lake Erie is now a "dead" sea incapable of supporting any fish life. When the algae eventually breaks off and floats to the surface, it clogs commercial fishing nets, blocks water-intake pipes and washes onto beaches, leaving foul-smelling deposits of decaying vegetation.

Brown Sludge. Behind much of the trouble has been an argument over authority. In the Buffalo area, for instance, neither the state nor federal health agencies have been conducting any inspections of industrial plants discharging wastes into the lakes or the Buffalo River, both claiming that they have neither the jurisdiction nor the manpower. At first, New York even took a lofty, disinterested attitude toward the whole conference on the grounds that the state is at the lower end of the lake, and could not be contributing to the pollution--although the delegates could see, if they chose to look, dark eddies of brown sludge swirling at the foot of Niagara Falls.

By week's end though, New York, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania had all been convinced. They pledged support for a far-ranging federal-state program that calls for tight controls over industrial waters and secondary sewage plants. The program should be in operation by the beginning of 1969, and may cost the states upwards of a billion dollars apiece. To ease the pain, the Federal Government plans to pay part of the cost of all new sewage plants.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.