There was indeed a cesspool of a bay for many years, for a variety of reasons. Our Presque Isle Bay is where most of the city storm drains end up. It was also a huge shipping port, commercial fishing port, ship building, had a enormous coal fired power plant and was unknowingly the outlet for many illegal sanitary sewer lines (not so sanitary). The city had almost nothing in place for recycling of things like used motor oil, paints, solvents and so forth.

Fast forward and almost all of these things have changed. Where people used to pour things into the storm drains in front of their houses(out of sight, out of mind I guess) not only is the socially unacceptable these days, you can pretty much recycle everything here now. The fishing is gone, shipping is still here but a much smaller scale, same with ship building, the power plant is long gone and many of the illegal sewer lines were discovered when the bay front connector highway was built. That was a shocker to everyone, even one of the high schools had an illegal sewer line to the bay. Add in our little buddies the zebra mussels who have been filter Lake Erie for a bunch of years now and the place has cleaned up nicely. While I feel that the folks in California are over the top on their environmental laws, they definitely set the precedents for the rest of the country, us included.

Yes, Erie and Presque Isle are much nicer places these days.