Sunday 10/21/01 Cleveland Plain Dealer

The Rocky River is slowly building a reputation as one of America's finest waters for catching steelhead trout, but the urban stream has a dirty little secret.

While anglers deeply care about the stout, silvery fish that slip into its waters when the cold weather arrives, few are outraged enough about the pollutants that pour into the river each day to make a stink of their own. Many are to blame but the major culprit for sullying the waters is Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, which pours a lethal mix of chemicals into the Rocky River and its tributaries.

Stopping the pollution should be a critical issue for the city of Cleveland, the Ohio EPA, environmental groups and angling organizations. Rather than the flow of noxious materials being reduced, it has been allowed to increase.

It is rare when a large slug of pollutants pours into the Rocky River and kills great numbers of fish. That indignation might roust anglers and environmentalists. The chemicals that are released into the feeder creeks and the Rocky River insidiously drip from discharge pipes to poison the waters and taint the trout that anglers love to catch.

Steelhead trout anglers are proud to practice catch-and-release fishing, allowing a valuable trout to be caught again. The truth of the matter is that sportsmen who have filleted a trout caught from the Rocky River and broiled or baked their treasure have often found it to be less than palatable.

The Ohio Division of Wildlife has done a wonderful job of developing the fine steelhead waters of northern Ohio. They annually release more than 400,000 young steelhead trout into the Rocky, Chagrin and Grand rivers and Conneaut Creek each spring.

Those young trout leave the confines of the rivers as they warm and head to Lake Erie. During the summer months they feast on Lake Erie's large schools of baitfish before heading back to the streams where they were released.

Coho and chinook salmon were stocked in the rivers many years ago, but they return to spawn and then die. Steelhead trout also head up the streams in an attempt to spawn. Although few are successful, they return to Lake Erie to grow even larger.

The Rocky River lures a legion of anglers for a good reason. Its lower reaches wind through the Cleveland Metroparks where anglers have easy access to the river and its trout. A few fishermen trudge upstream to escape the crowds and, to their dismay, find the distasteful sight and smell of pollution.

There are undoubtedly many industries and municipalities adding to the overload of effluence that is finding its way into the Rocky River and Lake Erie. The easiest to identify is the distinct smell of glycol from the airport.

A new milky-colored slime has joined the mix of pollutants from the airport. It is runoff from steel company slag that is being used as a base for a new runway and adjoining taxiway being constructed. The contractor has agreed to remove the slag after Ohio EPA tests discovered that a discharge from the slag, as well as raw sewage, was leaking from it into Abram Creek.

Cleveland could have stopped the flow of glycol at no cost if Mayor Michael R. White would only have approved the plan.

Glycol is used to de-ice airplanes. Much of it is sucked into containers and used again. Some of the glycol contaminates the ground and finds its way into Abram Creek or directly into the Rocky River.

A new de-icing system presented last summer to Cleveland officials would have used heaters burning propane and natural gas to de-ice airplanes. The innovative Infratek station received rave reviews at Newark International Airport and the company wanted to build Cleveland its own $4 million de-icing hangar at no cost.

White turned it down, most likely because it was proposed by Councilman Michael Dolan, head of City Council's Aviation and Transportation Committee, who has disagreed with White in the past. For another winter, stream-polluting glycol will again be used at the airport.

"We did studies in the early 1990s and agreed in 1992 to build some type of waste water treatment plant to prevent airport runoff from polluting the Rocky River," said Dolan, a fisherman. "It is a forgotten promise."