Cincinnati-based ORSANCO is committed to reducing river pollution through programs that its eight member-states embrace and enforce. Suggestions for its priorities heading into the next century were discussed during a conference Thursday at the Omni Netherland Plaza Hotel. Among them were:
Develop more effective research and educational programs to help everyone in the basin appreciate the river.
Whether any of the ideas will be adopted, adapted or rejected will be up to the governing ORSANCO commissioners over the next months or years.
One speaker even suggested asking Tennessee -- whose rivers pour into the Ohio -- to reconsider its original objections and to join ORSANCO.
ORSANCO itself came in for some criticism and suggestions. While it seeks new allies, some speakers said, ORSANCO ought to do a better job of bringing together its committees, which represent various agencies and industries in the eight states in the watershed of the Ohio River.
A half-century of muted activism by ORSANCO has persuaded communities to clean up their sewage discharges, established a system that alerts drinking-water treatment facilities to chemical spills, and created an annual, volunteer riverbank cleanup.
Image is important to ORSANCO, members indicated, because too many people, including state and federal legislators, perceive the river as dirty and its fish inedible.
The Cincinnati Health Department has issued a warning for five consecutive weeks that the people who swim in the Ohio River risk illness. And the Ohio Department of Health advises people to limit how often they eat fish caught in the river.
On the other hand, appreciation of the ever-cleaner river would draw people and jobs, they said, although those would bring new problems to be addressed.
Already, 50th anniversary conference participants said, growing recreational use has created the unmet challenge of fuel spills from tens of thousands of boats.
Similarly, while communities use the Ohio as a drinking water source to be protected, said Rita Zettelmayer of Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection, individuals "use the river as a floating landfill. They put their trash into the river and never see it again."
