America Before the EPA: Burning Rivers, DDT, and Leaded Air

America before the EPA was a country where rivers caught fire, industrial smog killed people in their homes, children absorbed lead from the air they breathed, and hazardous chemicals were buried under schoolyards. There was no single federal authority responsible for air, water, or land pollution until the Environmental Protection Agency began operations on December 2, 1970. The conditions that preceded it were not abstract or contested. They were visible, measurable, and often deadly, and they fell hardest on people who happened to live near factories, smelters, refineries, or contaminated waterways.

Air That Killed People in Their Homes

The clearest way to understand pre-EPA air pollution is to look at what it did to specific towns on specific days. In Donora, Pennsylvania, a mill town in the Monongahela River valley, a temperature inversion beginning October 27, 1948 trapped emissions from the American Steel and Wire Company and the Donora Zinc Works over the town for days. Twenty people died, most of them older adults with heart or lung disease, and more than 5,000 of Donora’s roughly 14,000 residents suffered moderate to severe illness including coughing, chest constriction, and vomiting.¹² American Steel and Wire settled the lawsuits out of court without admitting liability, calling the disaster an “Act of God.” A 1961 study later found that death rates from cancer and cardiovascular disease in Donora remained significantly elevated for nearly a decade.

Donora was extreme but not unique. New York City suffered repeated “killer smogs.” A 1953 episode was linked to roughly 170 to 200 deaths, and a 1966 Thanksgiving smog contributed to an estimated 168 to 400 fatalities.³ In St. Louis in 1939, coal smoke blotted out the sun entirely, an event remembered as “the day the sun didn’t shine.”² Los Angeles began experiencing persistent smog during World War II, and by the mid-1950s the city’s ozone levels reached peaks of 0.68 parts per million, more than six times the federal health standard later adopted. A 1956 Los Angeles County Medical Association survey found that over 80 percent of local physicians believed smog contributed to lung cancer.⁴

By the 1960s, more than sixty U.S. metropolitan areas suffered serious air quality problems. In some industrial towns the toll on human life was staggering: residents of Steubenville, Ohio and Wichita, Kansas had their life expectancy reduced by four to five years from air pollution alone.⁵

Rivers That Burned and Water You Could Smell

The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland became the enduring symbol of American water pollution when it caught fire on June 22, 1969. An oil slick and debris trapped beneath wooden railroad trestles ignited, and flames rose as high as five stories for roughly twenty minutes before firefighters put them out.⁶⁷⁸

The 1969 blaze was not the first. The Cuyahoga had burned more than ten times over the previous century, with documented fires in 1868, 1883, 1887, 1912, 1922, 1936, 1941, 1948, and 1952. A 1952 oil slick fire on the river caused an estimated $1.5 million in damage and generated no national attention.⁷⁶ Baltimore, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Buffalo, and Galveston all had oil-on-water pollution severe enough to pose fire risks. Three other American rivers caught fire in 1969 alone.⁹

Beneath the spectacle of burning rivers was a slower, more pervasive problem: rivers, lakes, and streams routinely received raw sewage, industrial chemicals, and agricultural runoff. Only 85 million Americans were served by sewage treatment plants, and a 1970 U.S. Public Health Service report found that 41 percent of surveyed water systems fell below minimum health standards.¹⁰ Cleveland’s antiquated sewer system discharged 25 million gallons of raw sewage daily into the Cuyahoga, which flowed into Lake Erie. The lake received an estimated 1.5 billion gallons of noxious waste per day from industrial and municipal sources in cities including Cleveland and Detroit. Phosphorus and nitrogen overload fueled massive algal blooms that consumed dissolved oxygen and caused fish kills, leaving dead fish along the shoreline.³ By the late 1960s, national publications were declaring “Lake Erie is dead.”¹¹ The Potomac River in Washington, D.C. was so heavily polluted with sewage that the odor was “nearly unbearable.”¹²

The underlying attitude was straightforward. For decades, industry treated air and water as free and essentially infinite resources, giving little thought to what was being discharged into them.¹³

What Was Buried in the Ground

After World War II the American economy produced a flood of new synthetic organic chemicals, plastic packaging, and industrial byproducts. Hazardous chemicals were stored in steel drums that eventually rusted and leaked into soil and groundwater. Municipal and industrial waste was dumped with little regulation or documentation.¹³

The most notorious case surfaced in Niagara Falls, New York. Between 1942 and 1953, Hooker Chemical Company buried 21,800 tons of toxic chemicals in the abandoned Love Canal, then sold the land to the local school board for one dollar with a deed disclaimer releasing the company from liability.¹⁴¹⁵

Congressional investigators found similar situations elsewhere. In Kentucky, the site known as Valley of the Drums held roughly 100,000 drums of industrial waste on 23 acres. In Elizabeth, New Jersey, the Chemical Control Corporation ran an illegal dump whose executives were imprisoned for disposal violations; remediation stalled despite an EPA cleanup order, and the site exploded and burned on April 21, 1980. In Lathrop, California, a Hooker Chemical subsidiary knowingly discharged over 10,000 tons of pesticide-laced wastewater into the ground beginning in 1975.¹⁴

By 1979, the United States was producing over 35 million tons of hazardous waste annually, with approximately 70,000 chemical substances in commercial use.¹⁵ The scale of the buried inheritance eventually led to the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, the Superfund law, which created a $1.6 billion cleanup fund financed primarily by taxes on chemical companies. By 2022, the EPA had identified 40,000 Superfund sites nationwide.¹⁴

DDT and the Pesticide Problem

Before Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, pesticides like DDT were sprayed from airplanes and treated as miracles of modern chemistry. Carson argued that indiscriminate use was devastating ecosystems and threatening “the foundations of life itself.” She did not call for abandoning all pesticides. She advocated banning the most persistent chemicals like DDT, tightening regulations on others, and expanding research into biological alternatives.¹⁶

The chemical and agricultural industries pushed back hard. William J. Darby of the American Chemical Society wrote in 1962 that accepting Carson’s views would mean “the end of all human progress, reversion to a passive social state… disease, epidemics, starvation, misery, and suffering.”¹⁷ On August 29, 1962, President Kennedy publicly acknowledged the pesticide problem, and by May 1963 his Science Advisory Committee had substantially supported Carson’s position. Carson herself testified before Congress on June 4, 1963.¹⁸

The evidence against DDT was clearest in bird populations. DDT caused birds to lay thin-shelled eggs that broke during incubation, and bald eagles, ospreys, and brown pelicans suffered severe declines. Fewer than 500 bald eagle breeding pairs remained in the lower 48 states by 1963. The EPA banned DDT on June 14, 1972, after consolidated hearings that produced 9,300 pages of testimony. By 1996 the bald eagle count had risen to more than 5,000 breeding pairs, and the species was downlisted from endangered to threatened.¹⁷ Under authority granted by the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, the EPA eventually banned or severely restricted all six major pesticide compounds identified in Silent Spring: DDT, chlordane, heptachlor, dieldrin, aldrin, and endrin.¹⁸

Lead in the Air and in Children’s Blood

Beginning in 1923, automobile manufacturers and gasoline producers added tetraethyl lead to fuel to reduce engine knock. By the late 1960s, approximately 250,000 tons of lead were consumed annually in the United States, and an estimated 80 to 90 percent of atmospheric lead in large cities came from leaded gasoline.¹⁹ The EPA later described airborne lead as a “major health threat to our society.”²⁰

The agency began issuing lead reduction standards in 1973, ordered car manufacturers in 1975 to build engines compatible with unleaded fuel, and completed the phase-out for on-road vehicles in 1996.²¹¹⁹²² The Clean Air Act’s lead reduction alone prevented an estimated 10.4 million lost IQ points in children in 1990. No safe level of lead exposure in children has ever been identified.²³

Why the States Could Not Fix It

Before 1970, environmental regulation was managed almost entirely at the state level. Early federal laws like the 1955 Air Pollution Control Act funded research but relied on states to set and enforce their own standards. That arrangement was largely ineffective because standards were routinely undermined by local business interests, and federal environmental policy was scattered across roughly 44 separate government offices with no coordinating authority.²⁴

The state-level system failed for structural reasons that are worth spelling out. States routinely located their most polluting facilities, including feedlots, sewage plants, tanneries, paper mills, and landfills, near their borders, sending the worst effects downwind or downstream into neighboring states. Litigation over these disputes moved at glacial speed: Wisconsin’s lawsuit against Illinois over Chicago’s diversion of Lake Michigan water for sewage began in 1922 and was not settled until 1966. Companies engaged in what amounted to “eco-shopping,” seeking out states with the lightest regulations on pollutants like sulfur oxides, mercury, and chromium. That created a race to the bottom, with states competing for industrial tax revenue and jobs by relaxing environmental standards. Individual states also lacked the resources to maintain testing facilities for the thousands of chemicals that needed health risk assessments.²⁵

What Finally Tipped the Country Into Action

On January 28, 1969, a blowout on Union Oil’s Platform A off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, released an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 barrels of crude oil over ten days. The spill was not fully capped until early 1970. Approximately 3,500 seabirds died along with an unknown but substantial number of marine mammals including dolphins, elephant seals, and sea lions. It remains the third-largest oil spill in U.S. history.²⁶ Public opinion shifted quickly. Americans naming “pollution/ecology” as a top national problem rose from 1 percent in May 1969 to 25 percent two years later.²⁴

Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson channeled that outrage into the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Roughly 20 million Americans, about 10 percent of the population, participated in demonstrations across the country. Congress adjourned so members could attend events back home.²⁷ Organizers targeted 12 members of Congress with poor environmental records and succeeded in removing seven from office later that year, a signal to Washington that the environment had become an issue that could win or lose elections.²⁸ Nelson had modeled the campaign on anti-Vietnam War teach-ins, deliberately building a grassroots movement rather than a government-led initiative, and tapped law student Denis Hayes as national coordinator.²⁹

How the EPA Got Created

President Richard Nixon was not a natural environmentalist. His top domestic adviser, John Ehrlichman, convinced him that ignoring the issue was “politically dangerous.” Nixon told aides: “All politics is a fad. Your fad is going right now. Get what you can, and here’s what I can get you.” He also faced pressure from Democratic rivals, particularly Senators Edmund Muskie and Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who were using their committees to investigate environmental disasters and propose stringent legislation.²⁴

In early 1970 Nixon sent Congress a 37-point environmental message proposing national air quality standards, motor vehicle emission limits, $4 billion for water treatment facilities, and a tax on lead additives in gasoline.³⁰ On January 1, 1970, he signed the National Environmental Policy Act, which required environmental impact statements for major federal projects.²⁴ In July 1970, he signed Reorganization Plan No. 3, which consolidated environmental responsibilities from 15 units across four federal departments (Health, Education, and Welfare; Interior; Agriculture; and the Atomic Energy Commission) into a single new agency.¹³ Nixon chose a reorganization plan rather than new legislation to bypass potential congressional gridlock, though Congress ultimately approved it.

William D. Ruckelshaus was confirmed by the Senate as the first EPA Administrator on December 2, 1970, the date recognized as the agency’s official birthday.³⁰ By his own account, the new agency was not carefully crafted. Staff from four departments arrived with incompatible procedures and cultures. Ruckelshaus moved fast anyway. Within days he issued ultimatums to the mayors of Atlanta, Detroit, and Cleveland, giving them 180 days to stop violating water quality rules or face legal action. He targeted major industrial water polluters including U.S. Steel, requiring disclosure of what was being discharged into waterways. Cities that failed to meet clean-air standards were given five-year deadlines. Ruckelshaus later reflected: “The EPA… never would have been established had it not been for public demand. That I am absolutely certain of.”³¹

The Laws That Followed and What Actually Changed

The EPA’s creation was part of a legislative burst that reshaped American environmental law. The Clean Air Act of 1970 empowered the agency to set national ambient air quality standards for pollutants including particulate matter, ozone, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and lead. It also established emission standards for new industrial sources and hazardous air pollutants, and substantially expanded federal enforcement authority.³² The Clean Water Act of 1972 created a permitting system for discharges into waterways and authorized massive federal spending on sewage treatment, eventually totaling $650 billion in grants to municipalities.³³ The same period produced the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act regulating active waste disposal, the Toxic Substances Control Act requiring the EPA to assess chemical risks, the Endangered Species Act, and eventually the Superfund law for abandoned hazardous waste sites. Environmental protection in the 1970s was largely bipartisan.²⁷

The measurable results, compared to the burning-river and killer-smog baseline, were substantial. Between 1970 and 2020, combined emissions of six common air pollutants fell 78 percent even as the economy and population grew. New cars and trucks became roughly 99 percent cleaner for common pollutants compared to 1970 models. Sulfur in gasoline was reduced by 90 percent, and in diesel fuel by 99 percent. The Clean Air Act prevented an estimated 205,000 early deaths in 1990 alone, and by 2020 the annual amendments were preventing an estimated 230,000 premature deaths and 2.4 million asthma attacks each year. Reductions in fine particle pollution between 1980 and 2000 added roughly seven months to average life expectancy in U.S. cities.²³

Water quality improved too. A UC Berkeley and Iowa State University study analyzing 50 million water quality measurements found that most of 25 tracked pollution measures improved after 1972, with increases in dissolved oxygen and decreases in fecal coliform bacteria. The share of U.S. rivers safe for fishing rose 12 percent between 1972 and 2001.³³ The point-source pollution that once set rivers on fire and made the Potomac unbearable has been largely addressed, though nonpoint source runoff, harmful algal blooms, and PFAS contamination remain significant challenges.¹² A 2011 EPA study estimated that the health benefits of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments alone were worth roughly $2 trillion per year by 2020, exceeding compliance costs by a ratio of more than 30 to 1.²³

Read against the pre-1970 baseline, those numbers are the answer to the question of what the EPA was for. A generation of Americans looked at Donora and the Cuyahoga and Love Canal and Santa Barbara, concluded that state governments alone would not or could not protect them, and demanded a federal agency with the authority to say no to industrial polluters. The country got one on December 2, 1970.

1
Smithsonian Magazine. The Deadly Donora Smog of 1948 Spurred Environmental Protection
2
PBS. The Most Dangerous Smog in History
3
University of Michigan. Environmental Crisis in the 1960s
4
South Coast Air Quality Management District. Smog and Health Historical Information
5
American Affairs Journal. Costs, Benefits, and Unintended Consequences: Environmental Law and Deindustrialization
6
Case Western Reserve University. Cuyahoga River Fire
7
Smithsonian Magazine. The Cuyahoga River Caught Fire at Least a Dozen Times, but No One Cared Until 1969
8
National Park Service. Story of the Fire
9
University of Idaho. From Flammable to Fishable: The U.S. Clean Water Act
10
Waterkeeper Alliance. Clean Water Act
11
Cleveland Historical. Lake Erie Is Dead
12
Government Accountability Office. 50 Years After the Clean Water Act: Gauging Progress
13
EPA. EPA History: 1970–1985
14
Levin Center. Love Canal
15
EPA. Love Canal Tragedy
16
EPA. Rachel Carson
17
Environmental Defense Fund. 25 Years After DDT Ban, Bald Eagles, Osprey Numbers Soar
18
Environment and Society Portal. The U.S. Federal Government Responds
19
ScienceDirect. Tetraethyllead and Global Lead Exposure
20
EPA. Looking Back, Looking Ahead at EPA
21
CDC. Get the Lead Out
22
EPA. Biomonitoring – Lead
23
EPA. Progress Cleaning the Air and Improving People’s Health
24
Science History Institute. Richard Nixon and the Rise of American Environmentalism
25
The Revelator. Life Before the EPA
26
UC Davis School of Law. Commemorating a Major Environmental Disaster and One Transformative Legacy
27
Columbia Climate School. First Earth Day Achievements
28
BBC. How an Environmental Movement Was Born
29
U.S. Senate. Gaylord Nelson Promotes the First Earth Day
30
EPA. Origins of EPA
31
NRDC. Why EPA Needs Another William Ruckelshaus
32
EPA. Evolution of the Clean Air Act
33
UC Berkeley. Clean Water Act Dramatically Cut Pollution in U.S. Waterways