This story was updated at 3:40 p.m. Saturday, April 20, to correct the spelling of Craig Kenkel's name and correct the year Share the River was formed.

Over the last 50 years, the Cuyahoga River has gone from being a flaming national joke to become not only a symbol of how a river can rebound, but an asset treasured by nearly every community along its more than 100-mile route.

Those who manage, safeguard and use the river today say it’s in the best shape they’ve ever seen, though there’s still room left for improvements they hope to see ahead.

In recent years, the river has done better and better on its water-test results.

“They all show an upward climb,” said Kyle Dreyfuss-Wells, CEO of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.

She watches the river’s water quality perhaps as closely as anyone, because her organization has a big impact on it and since 1972 has spent more than $5 billion on its treatment plants, in part to protect the river and therefore Lake Erie.

“Our southerly wastewater treatment plant, which is the largest treatment plant in the state of Ohio, discharges into the Cuyahoga River,” Dreyfuss-Wells explained.

She said that since the famous fire of 1969 — which spurred the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water Act — the river has become largely free of what’s known as “point sources” of pollution. Those were primarily industrial and included, if you go back a few decades, plants and factories from Akron to Cleveland that dumped their waste into the Cuyahoga or its tributaries. They generally got few complaints from local residents.

“A polluted river was a sign of economic prosperity: ‘We’re making stuff!’ It’s perverse, but it was a different mindset then,” observed Jim Ridge, who founded the recreation and advocacy group Share the River in Cleveland in 2013.

People have since learned to think differently and the Cuyahoga has helped them do it, he said.

“When the ’69 fire happened, public opinion started to change,” Ridge said. “It’s now a false choice to say that good business means you have to allow pollution. What we’ve seen with Cleveland, and Akron as well, is that as the river and its tributaries have cleaned up, people want to live by them, work by them, play by them and play on them.”

The big old industrial polluters either cleaned up their act to comply with new state and federal regulations or closed their doors and stopped polluting altogether.

Without a continual supply of those industrial pollutants, the river did a lot to repair itself. Fish now swim the length of the river, including the mouth, where Time Magazine once said the water “oozes rather than flows.”

Ships that use the lake have also cleaned up their act, according to Dreyfuss-Wells: They leak less oil and also no longer dump bilgewater into the river and lake. They’ve also come to accept, if not outright embrace, the recreational use that has cropped up on their waterways as a result, Ridge said.

They’ll have to be especially accommodating in June, when the same section of the river that caught fire in 1969 will host an event known as Blazing Paddles. It’s the second year for the annual event, organized by Ridge. This year’s Blazing Paddles is expected to draw 500 participants for the 5.7-mile and 2-mile paddleboard races and to fill the river with other races and parades of kayaks and canoes. Thousands more will watch them from the shore, nearby buildings and on TV for what Ridge said will be the “ultimate photo op” for the river’s rebirth.

To be sure, such events, along with shells being sculled up and down the river by members of the Cleveland Rowing Foundation and others, are as much a sign that the river has come back as the sight of bald eagles, which have also returned to the Cuyahoga.