Burning Discarded Automobile Batteries, 07/1972.
Trash and Old Tires Litter the Shore at the Middle Branch of Baltimore Harbor, 01/1973.
Clark Avenue and Clark Avenue Bridge. Looking East from West 13th Street, Are Obscured by Smoke from Heavy Industry, 07/1973.
Something else people had to protest about, and fight tooth and nail to implement change – the utter disregard and damage being done, not only to our environments, but to all life. People fought like hell for change, and it took time, but change was effected. The photos? Life pre-EPA. It was wasn’t pretty. It was a choking stink. It was piles of garbage everywhere. Now the EPA has been gutted, and the Tiny Tyrant has been busy rolling back every single bit of fucking progress made in this area. A lot of people reading this weren’t born yet in the early ’70s. Unfortunately, you’re going to get a right taste of what it was like, and not in a good way.
More photos? See here. Feel like a bit of reading? See here.
Making America great again, one burning river at a time!
As a city kid, I remember having to wipe the black soot off the window sills every day.
Yeah, I remember the daily pollution warnings. There were a lot of days people were advised to stay indoors, and basically not breathe if you had to be outside at all.
Yeah, the Redhead in Toledo, Ohio when the Cuyahuga River caught on fire.
One thing the Democrats can do right now is publicly commit that as soon as they take control of the government, they will reinstate the EPA rules retroactively and impose massive fines on any companies who violated them during the Trump years.
Hopefully, this will convince some companies to limit their pollution, and if not then at least the fines will help with cleanup.
I remember that picture of Middle River -- I grew up in Baltimore and the smokestacks from the Sparrows Point Bethlehem Steel plant were still belching smoke (downwind of the city, over the neighborhoods where the steel workers lived) -- it reminds me of the bits in my Eugenics textbook about how the poor were obviously bred to be poor and ignorant. They didn’t understand the effect of lead and cadmium on developing brains, back then. And the legislators don’t care -- I’m betting they have nice clean air in Beaver Creek or Vail or Montauk or Chappaqua or wherever it is they are congregating these days.
I guess that our oligarchs are calibrating what people will put up with based on Beijing.
@5:
That won’t do a damn bit of good. Where in the fuck are the dems right now? Have they fought one iota over rolling back on coal, oil, pipelines? No. Did they fight when it came to confirming Pruitt, even with the fucking email business? No. Did they fight confirming Tillerson? No. They aren’t doing jack fucking shit, and control of the government? Yeah, well, maybe there will be a balance again, but in the meantime, we’re dealing with a fascist regime. That regime has now slaughtered all progresses made environmentally, rolled back protections and regulations, and revoked land protections. You really think this shit isn’t going to have a radical effect by the time the dems get their shit together?
One thing which would really help is if people woke the fuck up and got upset and furious about these things. That would help. Y’know though, people aren’t going to give a shit until we are right back in the ’70s again, and the land is a blight, illnesses are at an all time high again, there’s no potable water, and people can’t breathe outside.
Take a moment and think -- how many people outside Flint, Michigan care about the water situation? Humans are worse than fucking pigs, and selfish and greed to boot. A Democratic promise isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.
In the early 50s I was a pre teen. I still remember my father driving our family from Oakland to San Francisco. The bay on the Oakland side stunk. Today, that smell is only a memory. May it stay that way.
It was a pity that the Hills Brothers Coffee roasting plant on the SF side is also gone. I believe that the Bay Area Air Quality Management District may have been involved. As sorry as I was to miss the smell of coffee the bay cleanup more than made up for the missing coffee.
IIRC, the BAAQMD wanted to clamp down on volatile hydrocarbons. I don’t remember the results but bakeries were targeted for ethanol emissions -- from the action of yeast on carbohydrates when baking bread.