Fish show how much rivers have improved

Thursday, June 17, 2004

	Keith Srakocic, Associated Press Gary Gmys, of Ephrata, tends to his fishing rods along the southern shore of the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh yesterday. Gmys, who was raised on Pittsburgh's South Side, says he believes the fish he catches now are much cleaner than before the mills closed down. Click photo for larger image.

On the Allegheny River near the Fort Duquesne Bridge yesterday afternoon the tug Mary Rose pushed a container barge against the current, as 14-year-old Jamal Wesley, of the Hill District, landed a 15-inch smallmouth bass on the wharf.

It was a river scene that showed the changes that have occurred in, on and around local waterways over the last 30 years as the region moves beyond open hearths and pollution-tolerant bullhead catfish into a post-industrial era with riverside bicycle trails, kayaks and now, the Citgo Bassmaster Classic (Pittsburgh lands Bassmaster Classic for 2005," June 16, 2004).

"I think it's terrific we got the Classic. I remember these rivers 60 years ago when they were filthy, dirty and all the sewers went right into them," said Reg Fitzhenry, 74, of Hazelwood, who along with his grandson Joey was fishing yesterday on the Allegheny River wharf Downtown with Venture Outdoors during its "Free Fishing Wednesdays" program.

"We weren't even allowed to swim in the rivers, but we did it anyway under the Homestead High Level Bridge at Bare Ass Beach. We had to swim through the sewage."

Among the 60 other fishermen joining Fitzhenry were guys in ties, women in dresses, kids in life vests, folks in wheelchairs and one man wearing in-line skates.

Pittsburghers have always been river people, and Pittsburgh has always been a river city, its livelihood and self image tied to the flows like a hook tied to a fishing line.

When George Washington visited the site known as the "Forks of the Ohio" in 1753, he said it was "a place well-situated" because of its rivers and the strategic protection they provided. The city grew up around Fort Pitt because of the cheap transportation the rivers provided for people, produce and products.

For the first half of the 1800s the rivers were the centerpieces of the region. People walked along the rivers, swam in them and fished in them. Many streets ended at public beaches, and rowing was a popular sport for middle-class men. In the city, two dozen boat houses stored racing shells and doubled as social clubs.

But by 1859, when James Laughlin built blast furnaces and coke ovens in Hazelwood, the riverfront was changing. Railroads tracked river floodplains, and glass, iron and foundry industries followed their lead. By World War I, steel mills, fuel storage tanks, boatyards and chemical plants sprawled along the rivers for miles, blocking public access and using them as dumps for their wastes.

"The physical access wasn't there and people were cut off from the rivers that had defined Pittsburgh and southwest Pennsylvania for so long. They became the back alleys of industry," said Davitt Woodwell, regional director of the Pennsylvania Environmental Council and one of those who helped land the fishing tournament next year.

All that began to change in the late 1950s but not all at once.

Pittsburgh's first Renaissance targeted the city's air and water, and by 1959 the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority's North Side plant was treating sewage from the city and surrounding municipalities that had been flowing directly into the rivers.

Other major factors included the state's regulation of coal mine discharges into creeks and rivers beginning in the 1960s; the federal Clean Water Act of 1972 that set a goal to make the nation's rivers "fishable and swimmable" and the community-wrenching closing of steel industry mills in the 1980s and 1990s.

"The rivers have been improving gradually over the last 30 years," said Frank Jernejcic, a fisheries biologist with the West Virginia department of Natural Resources. "I've got water quality data that shows that, but the best indicator is the fishing."

According to Jernejcic, there were 41 fishing tournaments at eight sites in West Virginia that put fishermen on the water for 11,000 hours in 1975. Last year there were 519 tournaments at 36 sites covering 125,000 hours. On the Ohio River alone, the number of tournaments jumped from 25 in 1975 to 119 in 2002.

"The bottom line is they wouldn't be fishing the river if they weren't catching fish," Jernejcic said.

Closer to Pittsburgh, John Dunn, 53, of the North Side, fishes at least three or four times a week on the Ohio and Allegheny rivers between the West End Bridge and the Veterans Bridge and said he's caught smallmouths up to five pounds along the North Shore, plus an assortment of flatheads, perch, spotted bass, white bass, sauger, walleye and saugeye.

"They could have had the classic here three or four years ago,'' Dunn said. "That's when it got good and it's only going to get better."

Ken Komoroski, one of the city's point men who lured the Bassmasters to Pittsburgh's rivers, said the idea was spawned 10 years ago in the mind of Dennis Tubbs, an aquatics resources specialist with the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission but would not have caught on with tournament owner ESPN if the rivers and the riverfronts weren't clean enough to support a viable sport fishing experience.

"We just presented the facts as they are and talked to the right people," said Komoroski. "The greatest thing to come out of it is the image change for the region. The secret's out about Pittsburgh. It has a great population and now a great fish population."