Cuyahoga River

May 26, 2010 by Monkeyboy

Hello my home town peeps. I grew up in Cincinnati, more specifically Norwood {I’ll give you a minute to stop laughing at the fact that I can read}.

Ok. Since the late 1990′s I’ve mostly lived in New Orleans so needless to say, its been interesting. A lot of it fun; a lot of it not fun at all. So when Loki asked me if I wanted to post here occasionally, well, I was a little reticent. But now, in light of current events I thought maybe I’d stop by to say hi and try to share with you, the perspective on the oil spill here in the Gulf of Mexico from my somewhat unique perspective – I promise it won’t be preachy.

The words “Cuyahoga River” don’t mean a lot to anyone outside a couple hundred miles from it. The same can be said of Plaquemines Parish. Neither one is easy to pronounce if you’ve never heard it spoken correctly. And while one is clearly a river, the other one appears to be a church of some kind. Fair enough, but its actually the equivalent of a county.

In a few weeks, fourty-one years ago, the Cuyahoga River caught fire – for at least the ninth time in the previous hundred years. At the time of the fire I would not be born for two more years. It was, and I hope still is, common knowledge for people of the region. Just last year was “The Year of the River” according to some hippies. Here’s an interesting article about that. In just four decades, albeit my entire life, the river has been cleaned up and doesn’t seem willing to catch fire anymore.

So what right? Thanks for stopping by and telling us all something we already knew, now go back making Mardi Gras beads and we’ll come visit in a few months. I’ve often thought that some people see New Orleans as some weird Santa’s Workshop, where all year we make beads, build floats, and dirty up the streets in preparation for Mardi Gras. Maybe that’s just me, but I assure you, we do other things like drink Sazeracs. Another thing we do, as a region, is provide 30% of the oil used in the United States.

So then last month, there was this thing, with an explosion and a fire, and 11 people killed, and an oil rig about the size of Eden Park fell to the bottom of the ocean. That was all bad enough for sure, but the rig sort of, well, it seems to have fallen on the big pipe they were pumping oil and gas out of. And it broke the valves that were supposed to shut it off if something bad were to happen. And that, in a very simplistic way, describes where we are today. You can actually watch it happening in near-realtime. Don’t feel bad if you find yourself  watching it for hours – a lot of people do.

It took a month, but then about a week ago, the first oil to leave that pipe started hitting the Louisiana Shores. One of the places it has inundated was Plaquemines Parish. And one of the problems that’s hard to really grasp if you haven’t been out to a marsh, is exactly how hard that is to clean up. I don’t fully understand it myself. I just keep thinking of it in terms of trying to get the sugar and flower back out of cake mix. I know it isn’t exactly like that but its the best my mind can do with imagining it.

So the big question everywhere else, and frustration down here, is why should anyone but a Pelican or a fisherman really care? Obviously, if you’re an environmentalist your horrified. But that doesn’t matter much to most people living their lives and have their own problems. Then there’s the seafood thing, but I can buy (or used to anyway) seafood from a cooler in the back of a truck a few blocks from my house that was caught that morning – something I wouldn’t recommend you try in Cincinnati. Most of the time, in other parts of the country you don’t know where the seafood is coming from and no one asks. And lastly, there’s the price of gas and all that goes along with that, but the impact on that won’t be seen for a while if at all. I mean its only one well out of over 1000 in the gulf.

But here’s the thing, the Cuyahoga River caught fire nine times before people started to care. “Remember, a lot of people saw a filthy river as a sign of progress, not a problem at all,” [from the article]. So I have to wonder how many times we’ll allow something like this to happen before anyone starts to care?