Pollution
Cuyahoga River in Upstate Ohio
Quite possibly one of the most dire environmental scenes of the last half century, the Cuyahoga River in Ohio is more infamously known as the RIVER THAT CAUGHT ON FIRE. So polluted that large stretches were devoid of fish, it was said to be the river that "oozes rather than flows." Several fires broke out on the river over the later half of the 20th Century, the most destructive was in 1952, but it was the 1969 fire that caught the attention of Time Magazine and blew the whistle on the damage being done to this Lake Eerie tributary.