It has been a source of beauty and life for eons. It was a source of pollution and disease for decades. Now the Ohio River is somewhere in between.

        The Ohio — once called Belle Riviere, or “the beautiful river” by the French — has been both an oasis and a sewer, a playground and a superhighway for industry.

INFOGRAPHIC

Ohio River map and facts

        The mighty river carves a border between five states and sweeps around headlands, over rich bottoms and past scores of towns and cities on a 900-mile-plus trek from western Pennsylvania to the southern tip of Illinois, where it dumps into the Mississippi River.

        Today, as a cloud of black sludge from the nation's worst coal waste spill inches downriver toward Cincinnati at about a half-mile an hour, the Ohio is in the best shape it has been in a century.

        Waste water treatment plants and federal clean water regulations have revived the river from its decades as a cesspool that sickened people living along it during the first half of the 20th century.

        Now a much greater challenge has to be met: controlling the pollution swept into the river from our farms, city streets, lawns and stripped hillsides by every day rainfall.

        It's called non-point-source pollution, and poses a much larger risk to the riv er's overall health than any single disaster.

        “We've won one war and the river has become phenomenally cleaner,” said Michael C. Miller, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Cincinnati for 30 years.

        Mr. Miller studies aquatic life in the river, and says fish — along with macro invertebrates, the small creatures some fish feed on — are more plentiful than at any other time they have been studied.

        “Despite all the damage we've done to the river, it is remarkably resilient,” he said. “Now the question is: Can we hold on to that condition? That is a much tougher problem.”

        Tougher because our everyday existence causes this pollution.

        Stan Hedeed, a biology professor at Xavier University, said solutions to point-source pollution, such as the liquid coal spill in Kentucky, are much easier to find.

        Accidents lead to investigations. Investigations often lead to regulation. Regulation can offer a solution.

        The spill near Inez, Ky., for example, already has led Kentucky lawmaker Hal Rogers to call for a $2 million study of the state's sludge impoundments to make sure this type of environmental catastrophe doesn't happen again.

        But fertilizers, hog waste, oil or dirt being washed into the river from rainfall is a very different problem, Mr. Hedeed said.

        “The river's greatest problem doesn't come from individual accidents,” Mr. Hedeed said. “The point-source issue is solvable. You can haul someone into court based on that type of problem. But who is there to blame for such a general source of pollution?

        “All of us.”

        The river is what first attracted settlers to the “Northern Territo ry” of Ohio in the late 1700s. The amount of pollution in the river grew with the population along the river's shore.

        By the 20th century, raw sewage was being dumped directly into the river and its tributaries, and a growing industrial base was using the great river to carry away huge amounts of waste.

        Those practices went completely unregulated.

        “There was significant chemical industry in the valley, not just along the Ohio but in the feeder river valleys,” said Dan Hurley, a historian who owns Applied History Associates in Cincinnati. “That really peaked in the 1920s through the 1950s.

        “At that point came the realization that something more needed to be done.”

        Bacteria from human waste-borne diseases such as typhoid and cholera was common in the water. In the 1930s, only 1 percent of the population along the river had sewage treatment facilities.

        The pollution from Cincinnati alone was equal to 720 dead horses being dumped into the river every day, said Jeanne Ison, public relations director for the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission, or ORSANCO.

        “That's a heck of a lot of bacteria,” she said. “And industries just dumped as they pleased. No one really knows what all went into the river at that time.”

        Governors from eight states in the Ohio River Valley met in the Hall of Mirrors at Cincinnati's Omni Hotel in 1947. The meeting produced a pledge to try to keep pollution out of the river.

        That agreement led to the birth of ORSANCO, a watchdog organization that monitors water quality and studies the health of the river.

        Six years later, Hamilton County built its first sewage treatment plant. Today, there are seven waste water treatment plants in the county.

        Marty Umberg, a chief engineer for the Metropolitan Sewer District, said the city tried building “interceptors,” which directed sewage away from the smaller creeks and directly into the larger Ohio River, before treatment plants were built. The idea was the larger river would better dilute the waste.

        It is estimated that one-third of the flow into the Mill Creek was untreated sewage before the interceptors were built.

        “Back then the interceptors were a progressive, state-of-the-art step,” Mr. Umberg said.

        The waste water treatment plants put an end to water-borne diseases. Federal laws in the late 1960s and early 1970s put limits on industrial waste that could be dumped into the river.

        Since that time there have been numerous chemical spills into the Ohio. Among the worst:

        • Tank ruptures allowed two massive releases of toxic carbon tetrachloride into the Kanawha River in West Virginia, a tributary of the Ohio River, in 1977. The spills went undetected until the Environmental Protection Agency made them public.

        The outcry from the incidents led to ORSANCO developing a new testing system for drinking water that allows the organization to watch for unreported spills of toxins into the river.

        • A 1988 tank explosion in Pittsburgh sent 1 million gallons of diesel fuel into the Ohio River system. ORSANCO officials tracked the slick as far as Evansville, Ind., some 800 miles away.

        “All we could do is watch it flow by Cincinnati,” Ms. Ison said.

        • In January, a tank ruptured at Southside River-Rail in Riverside, spilling 990,000 gallons of liquid fertilizer into the Ohio River.

        These singular events can be disastrous to any wildlife in the path of the spill. But the fish and bird populations along the river have rebounded, said UC's Dr. Miller.

        “The Big Sandy is suffering desperately,” Dr. Miller said said of the Ohio River tributary that has carried the brunt of the sludge damage. “But as big industry has closed along the river, we've seen the fish populations come back.

        “We're seeing phenomenal recovery.”

Ohio River gets sludge reprieve

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