When Ohio’s polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire for the 13th time on June 22, 1969, it catapulted Cleveland to the center of America’s newly-emerging environmental movement, helping to create the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and The Clean Water Act of 1972.

Frank Samsel, an 89-year-old Cleveland native who designed and operated a boat in the 1970s called the Putzfrau (German for “cleaning lady”) which sucked up chemicals and scooping assorted solid debris from the Cuyahoga, said that in the summer of 1969, the river “smelled like a septic tank,” bubbling and producing methane.

Then a spark from a train crossing a bridge fell into the river, causing smoke and flames that reached as high as a five-storey building, causing about $50,000 in damage to two railroad bridges. It wasn’t the worst fire on the river, which French historian Alexis de Tocqueville had described as pristine in 1838 – but it was the last.