This moment outdoors is brought to you by L.L. Bean, official partner of the National Park Foundation for the Find Your Park Movement. I'm going to see. C. In the In 2007, something remarkable happened in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. A young bald eagle took flight from its nest along the Cuyahoga River.

It was the first successful nest in Cuyahoga County in more than 70 years.

The eaglet grew up eating fish from the Cayahoga River.

Throughout most of the 1900s, fish couldn't survive there.

Neither could the wildlife that depend on it as a food source.

I'm Jason Epperson, and on today's episode of America's National Parks, Cayahoga Valley, and the event that helped call the world to the attention

of polluted waterways. Cleveland, Ohio was a bustling manufacturing hub, and the river, which empties into

Lake Erie had long been a dumping place for sewage industrial waste.

Yellowish black rings of oil circled on its surface like

Greece and soup, said a Czech immigrant, about his first sight of the river back in the 1880s.

The water was yellowish, thick, full of clay, stinking of oil and sewage.

Piles of rotting wood were heaped on either bank of the river. and the river as its sewer and manufacturing plants were allowed to dump into it at will.

The pollution was so bad, the river would often catch fire.

Between 1868 and 1952, it burned nine times.

So when the river caught fire again in June of 1969, it wasn't much of a surprise.

The fire burned only 24 minutes, too quick for the local paper to get a photograph.

Fame came later, though.

When Time magazine ran an article about the incident in its August 1st issue,

widely read because of the cover story on the chapiquitic scandal.

The article described the Cayahoga as the river that ooises rather than flows, and in which a person does not drown but decays.

This, coupled with a massive oil spill in California that put 3 million gallons into the Pacific, became a rallying cry for America to protect its waterways.

The event helped spur an avalanche. to protect its waterways.

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