Restating the Obvious

Green River

Chattanooga is an industrial city surrounded by mountains and when he was a boy, in the '20s, the factories ran on soft coal and people heated their houses with soft coal. It's a cliche used by bad and ignorant reporters today, but in those days Chattanooga was a "gritty industrial city," the grit coming from soft coal smoke.

By the '60s, people heated and cooked with gas or electricity (thanks to TVA) and many of the factories had converted to electricity. The air may have been full of nitrous oxides in 1965, but you could see across the street on a muggy day, which you couldn't have done in 1925.

Dad was also amused by greeniacs who broke into a cold sweat about acid rain in Scandinavia but who did not know that an hour's drive into the backwoods would bring them to Ducktown, where you could see the effects of real, not hypothesized, acid rain -- for 20 miles in every direction there was not a green leaf, the result of open roasting of copper sulfide ores since 1840.

Although local professionals knew all about Ducktown, of course, I have never met a sort of common or garden variety greeniac who had ever heard of the place, although as an example of man's inhumanity to nature it was about as bad as it gets.

By the '60s, the release of SO3 (which combined with moisture in the air to create sulfuric acid rain on Ducktown) had stopped, not because of environmental regulations but because the mine owners had learned that they could make more money by capturing the sulfur in the stacks and selling the acid.

Nevertheless, well into the 1970s, the Ducktown-Copper Hill area looked pretty much like the West Bank without Arabs, and with grim humor the local motel was called the Sahara.

The water from the mines went into the Ocoee River, which was bright green from the copper salts, what was left of it after a power company siphoned off most of the flow for power generation.

In those days, kayakers had not discovered the Ocoee, which thanks to its artificial lowness was excellent white water. It used to be a peaceful, scenic -- though not natural -- drive. Last time I was there, it was full of noisy paddlers and not much fun to visit any more.

Except for the kayakers, the Ocoee was, like the rest of the Copper Basin, lifeless.

All this is by way of background to a story in today's Chattanooga Times Free-Press. Fish are back in the Ocoee. And they did it all by themselves, no help from do-gooders.

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