My River

Lt. Rick Hatton

Patricia Gallagher Newberry — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 11:43:00 GMT

I’ve been crazy about the water forever. I got my scuba diver certification in 1984 and began volunteering for the Boone County Water Rescue Team 22 years ago.

My most dangerous dive was in 1993 involving a 36-foot cigarette boat. This individual ran up and down the river nonstop. Our captain warned him: “If you don’t slow down, one of these evenings you’re going to have a real serious problem.” Two summers later, we got a call that there was a pretty serious accident right up from the Montgomery Inn Boathouse. This gentleman and his buddy had picked up two guys and the four of them were fairly inebriated. They decided to go streaking up and down the river and do some donuts. He comes out of a donut and thought he was either heading upstream or downstream, but headed for the shore at a very high rate of speed. The two guys in the back were ejected onto the shore. I had to suit up and climb under the boat, where I found the driver wrapped around the steering column. Only one passenger survived.

In the 1997 Falmouth flood, people were on their roofs with flashlights at one, two in the morning. All you could hear was wailing. Every once in a while, you could hear a loud cracking and crunching where houses were coming off their foundations. And there would be empty trailers floating down the river. At one point, the captain backed up into a chain link fence and all this shrapnel began flying. It was like being in a hand grenade zone. We got 43 people off the river and out of harm’s way before daybreak.

Death is the hardest part of the job. It’s watching the family, trying to imagine what they are going through. When it’s no longer a rescue, but a recovery, we try to prep them for that.

Illustration by Joel Kimmel.
Originally published in the September 2011 issue.

Don Phelps

Patricia Gallagher Newberry — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 11:44:00 GMT

I came on when I was 20. That was 21 years ago. I just came down here and asked the owner if he needed some help. I’d been reading a book with a ferry in it and remembered the ferry from when my dad would bring me down. This was just something I was going to do until I figured out what I was going to do.

I like the customers. I’ve made lots of friends here. There are people who have been crossing since I’ve been here. I have a few customers who get out of their cars and talk to me. They talk about the weather. When it’s a 75-degree, sunny day, you don’t know how often I hear, “Man, I wish I had your job.” I know all about their kids, what their kids are doing. Sometimes, I’m like a bartender or a psychologist and I think, Whoa, that’s a little much to share.

About half of our customers are regulars. They live in one state and work in the other. The rest are usually going to the airport. A lot of them don’t carry cash, and we only take cash. We have to send them over to the UDF for cash.

I found a dead body once, stuck in the paddlewheel. It was right around Halloween time and I thought it was a dummy. It’s not a very pretty sight and it doesn’t smell real good. That’s something you don’t forget. Once a car went off the end of the platform when its brakes failed. That was probably the most terrifying moment I’ve had down here. The driver was not a very good swimmer. But he still rides the ferry.

Illustration by Joel Kimmel.
Originally published in the September 2011 issue.

Henry Dorfman

Patricia Gallagher Newberry — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 11:44:00 GMT

I’ve been into motorcycles, powerboats, sailboats. With paddleboating, you really feel one with the water. When you are paddling with dolphins or manatees, you’re right there. When an eagle or an osprey is skimming across the water, you’re right there. You paddle under the waterfalls, over the waterfalls, things you can’t do with a sailboat or a motorcycle.

I like paddling the Ohio River for its scale; it’s big. It’s like when you’re paddling Lake Superior, you know you’re on a real lake. I like the variety of what you can see along the Ohio, too—city skylines, rock cliffs, huge barge tows. What I don’t like is encountering the untrained or intoxicated power boaters who present a danger to themselves and others. Or those with straight-through exhaust pipes who should be working out their inadequacy issues where the noise doesn’t impose on others.

I would like to see Cincinnati leverage its riverfront with facilities to launch and store paddlecraft, much like Philadelphia and Boston support rowing. I’d also like to see a whitewater play park there or on the Great Miami near Hamilton. Cities as small as Springfield, Ohio, and South Bend, Indiana, have pulled that off. Why not us?

Women make up 55 percent of Cincypaddlers’s membership. We see women coming out of bad relationships where their self-esteem was kind of beaten down. We teach them a sport that is fraught with accomplishment and self-reliance and it greatly enhances their sense of independence. They get out there and kick butt. It’s easier to teach women. They’ll listen and learn technique. Guys always try to muscle everything. Proof that women are the smarter gender is that you never see women missing fingers.

Illustration by Joel Kimmel.
Originally published in the September 2011 issue.

Olivia Lantry

William Powell — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 12:19:00 GMT

We host field trips, teacher workshops, and science camps. Students come in with these ideas that the river is so polluted and so dirty that they would never swim in it or even go near it. We have activities to give them a better understanding of our local environment.

We talk about food chains, threatened and endangered species, and aquatic macroinvertebrates. They learn to identify some preserved macros, which look a little alarming at first, until the kids realize how cool they are. Then, they can use the forceps to pull out live macro, some of the cool stuff living in our local streams. We give them a chance to identify maybe a dozen of the 150 fish that live in the river. With the older kids, assuming the river is at a good level, we walk down to take samples and do an assessment of the water quality. They realize it’s not so bad out there.

We have an aquaculture facility where we’re culturing fathead minnows, these little fish. They’re the white lab mice of aquatic systems; we can use them to do toxicity studies. We’re studying the relationship between mussels and fish. Mussels are one of the most endangered organisms in the world. Their lifecycle is very dependent on fish species, but we don’t know a lot about that relationship.

Downstairs, we have an early warning detection system. It’s really cool because it’s so simple. We have water from the river constantly being pulled into the building, and it passes through a tank full of 14 Asiatic clams. The clams generally hang out open as they filter the water, but if there’s something in the water they don’t like, they’ll close up. Each clam is attached to an electrode, and if they close, it sends a signal to the EPA that something’s wrong with the water.

We’re always spreading the message to keep the river clean because it’s so important to us. Cincinnati is here because of the river. We drink the river. It’s such a great resource. We want people to take some pride in it.

Rich Cogen

William Powell — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 11:43:00 GMT

I used to be the environmental attorney for the city. I started to notice articles and photographs in the newspaper that showed refrigerators flowing down the river, and nobody was saying they thought that was bad. So I got together with some colleagues and formed the Ohio River Foundation to improve the condition of the river.

Overall, the water quality of the whole 981 miles is fair to poor. Mercury levels are still high enough that consumption of fish is not recommended. Raw sewage still flows into the river. There are certain times when the river is deemed unsafe for human contact [by ORSANCO]. We also have extreme problems with nitrogen and phosphorus, which come from storm water runoff, and with water volume and sediment. The reasons for improving the water are straightforward. Four million people obtain their drinking water from the Ohio River, so you have treatment costs associated with making it drinkable. These costs have increased in the last few years.

To alleviate the runoff problem, we need to keep the water percolating through the ground by disconnecting downspouts and installing rain gardens, roof gardens, and rain barrels. Governments need to update infrastructure and the associated regulation. For example, road construction still involves attaching every road surface to a storm sewer.

Citizens can update their homes. Using water efficient products like showerheads and toilets will immensely cut their water usage and keep money in their pockets. That translates to lower costs for treatment because the sewer districts will receive less wastewater.

We have educated about 10,000 students through our River Explorer education program. This summer, we launched youth conservation teams, groups of high school students that go out to perform restoration projects like planting trees along rivers and streams to reduce erosion. On the advocacy side, we defeated an effort by the Army Corps of Engineers to spend $2 billion of public money to extend backup locks with no cost benefit to the taxpayer. Obviously, we need to maintain our locks and dams because the river’s navigation system is necessary for commerce. But from an ecological standpoint, changing the habitat from an 18-inch-deep river to an average depth of about 20 feet has wreaked havoc. Species have gone extinct. Mussel populations have been destroyed. Fish populations are still far below what they were historically.

The future health of the river depends on a combination of all of these factors. It’s about personal choices by homeowners to be more efficient, as well as regulatory decisions at the local, state, and federal levels.