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Saturday's a special day for the Little Miami River
Saturday's a special day for the Little Miami River
Park Service recognition came 25 years ago By Dan Klepal Enquirer staff writer LOVELAND - Roland Muhlen's first canoe race was 40 years ago, down the Little Miami River. On Wednesday, the three-time U.S. Olympic team canoeist from Bridgetown returned to his watery roots to bring attention to the silver anniversary of the lower Little Miami River's acceptance into the federal Wild and Scenic River program. The 25th anniversary will be celebrated Saturday with a day of music, food, storytelling and other family activities. The event, at Nisbet Park from noon until 6 p.m., is free and open to the public. "My very first competition was on the Little Miami River, and it changed the focus of my entire adult life," said Muhlen, who was a member of U.S. Olympic teams in 1972 and 1976 and the 1980 team that boycotted the Games. It was quite a struggle garnering that designation. Upon its first look at the lower 28 miles of the river, the National Park Service cringed. There was illegal dumping, trash and shacks scattered throughout. The river was promptly rejected from the federal program, created to protect streams from development that would pollute them. That rejection energized thousands of people in the area to clean up the river. Little Miami Inc. worked with politicians to have the shacks removed, and two years later the lower part of the river was accepted into the federal program. It remains the only time the Park Service has reversed itself and accepted a portion of stream it initially rejected. "When the Park Service first looked at it, they said it was a mess, and that was all we needed to hear," said Eric Partee, executive director of Little Miami Inc. "I think that effort is symbolic of the real connection between people and the river." After Saturday's celebration, the folks at Little Miami Inc., and other environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Rivers Unlimited, will have to get right back to work. That's because the river received another designation this year - one that environmentalists aren't pleased with. The national environmental group American Rivers listed the Little Miami as one of 10 "endangered" rivers in the country because of ongoing pressures from sewage plants and the planned construction of a highway and new bridge crossing as part of the $1.4 billion transportation plan called the Eastern Corridor Project. The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency has no fewer than three requests for expanded or new waste-water treatment plants, and has already approved two others. Officials with OEPA say the amount of phosphorus and ammonia in the stream is too high. The permits for expanded sewage plants have carried with them additional restrictions on those chemicals, forcing the owners to design additional pollution controls for the plants' discharges. "It just shows you this is an ongoing labor of love and the challenges before us are nonstop," Partee said. http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.d...43/1056/news01 |
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