The Cuyahoga River caught fire many times, including this large blaze of flammable liquids in 1952. Photo: Cleveland Press Collection.

By Ben Brumfield | Illustrations by Harriss Callahan

Published April 30, 2019

When the Cuyahoga River caught fire for the 13th time, it was 1969, and John Koon was a graduate student preparing to fight the flow of flammable and other toxic chemicals into America’s waterways. Fifty years later, in 2019, the National Academy of Engineers elected Koon, an environmental engineer, into its ranks for his life’s work of remediating water pollution.





John Koon at the Ciba-Geigy chemical plant in Cranston, Rhode Island.

America's messes spurred Koon in his early years to clean our waters.

By the early 1960s, chemical dumps, arsenic-laced factory smoke, leaded car exhaust, roadside litter — all manner of filth — marred swaths of the country. The Cuyahoga, which runs through Ohio, was just one of many rivers dead from industrial waste when Koon and the nation were awakening to pollution.

Wildlife biologist Rachel Carson had jolted Americans in 1962 with her landmark book Silent Spring, which left a lasting impression on Koon, who is now a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The book dealt with the insecticide DDT, which planes sprayed on crops and trucks spread as fog in neighborhoods.

A truck fogs a San Antonio neighborhood with DDT, which was used to fight the spread of insect-borne diseases. For decades, people were unaware that it was also harmful to humans. Photo: National Archives.

The poison killed sea life, contaminated breast milk, and made birds' eggshells so thin they couldn’t survive incubation, reducing eagle populations in particular.

“Our national symbol looked like it might go extinct,” Koon said. “In my first undergraduate environmental course, the instructor handed out copies of President Lyndon Johnson’s State of the Union Address, in which he issued a call to save America’s environment.”