Reviving river life
Partnership works to preserve fish habitat along last miles of Cuyahoga

Crain`s Cleveland Business
September 1-7, 2008
By Dan Shingler

The Cuyahoga River is on fire again.

This time, it’s from sparks of innovation that are fueling flames of environmentalism and could stoke the business prospects of three local companies.

The three companies, along with Cuyahoga County, local universities and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, have undertaken efforts to restore aquatic life to the last 5.6 miles of the Cuyahoga, which often is alive with big lake freighters but little else.

The goal is to make that final stretch of the river habitable to the many species of fish that attempt to use the river each year to spawn — an effort that may create a new industry in the process.

Currently, bigger fish are able to get up river, but the tiny offspring they produce can’t make it back downstream to reach Lake Erie and survive to adulthood, said Jim White, executive director of the Cuyahoga River Community Planning Organization.

The fish are the offspring of steelhead trout, smallmouth bass, white suckers and other species that spend most of their life in the lake but come up the river to spawn. Their tiny offspring are ill-equipped to make it through several miles of steel-walled shipping channel to reach the lake.

“They normally would drift down with the current and swim along the bank — (but) when they get to the shipping channel, there’s no current and no bank,” Mr. White said. “And they have a dramatically increased need for calories — just when they need the most, they are getting the least.”

The solution, say Mr. White and his partners, is to provide the little fish with some sustaining structure and plant life, while not interfering with the river’s mission as a channel for commerce.

Eventually, they hope to restructure much of the bulkhead wall that lines the river channel, creating pockets in and behind the wall where plants can grow and young fish can rest, feed and gain strength on their way downstream.

But first, they’re installing CHUBs.

Basket cases

CHUB stands for Cuyahoga Habitat Underwater Baskets. About 400 of them are being installed this year along the bulkheads that line the last few miles of the Cuyahoga.

CHUBs are the invention of Filtrexx International, a company in Grafton that was founded in 1999 to help developers, homeowners and other landowners combat erosion of water-side land. The company invented and patented a polypropylene mesh that can hold soil and compost together underwater, thus providing a rooting medium for plants. It does about $2 million in sales a year now, but hopes the CHUBs will amp up that number.

Filtrexx, along with biologists and Mr. White’s group, worked with Cleveland’s Custom Rubber Corp. and Matrix Engineering, also of Cleveland, to develop the CHUBs.

About 160 of the baskets have been installed, at a cost of about $40,000, in the crenalations of the bulkhead walls that line the lower Cuyahoga. To a passing boater, they look like little more than a few weeds barely protruding above the service of the water.

To larval fish, though, the hope is that they look like home.

“They’re kind of like little Howard Johnsons,” Mr. White said last Tuesday, Aug. 26, aboard a boat as he explained the installation process to Crain’s.

Great opportunities

The installation of the CHUBs is the first and most modest stage of several designed to bring aquatic life back to the lower Cuyahoga. If all goes well, another 400 CHUBs will be installed next year, followed by more extensive work that will create additional habitat along the river by moving or altering the bulkhead walls.

The work has been made possible by a $30,000 grant from the Cleveland arm of the steel giant ArcelorMittal, coupled with $495,000 in federal money from the Army Corps of Engineers.

Filtrexx, Custom Rubber and other companies involved in producing and installing the CHUBs hope to create a new industry. Mr White said the companies already have secured patents to protect their intellectual property rights, in the event that other industrial rivers also become markets for the invention.

Mr. White thinks that’s a distinct possibility. Alex Marks, general manager of Filtrexx, said it’s becoming a reality.

“We’ve actually already done it,” Mr. Marks said, noting that groups working on the Maumee River in Toledo have contracted Filtrexx to install 100 CHUBs along the bulkheads there. And that could be just the start, according to Mr. White.

“There are 136 ports on the Great Lakes, and virtually all of them have some length of armored shoreline,” Mr. White said.

The Great Lakes might just be the tip of the melted iceberg. Mr. Marks said his company has received inquires from entities in Florida and Milwaukee; on the Chesapeake Bay; and from groups working with the Hudson, Potomac and Passaic rivers on or near the U.S. East Coast.

The price of progress

CHUBs aren’t cheap. At about $300 per basket, there is substantial revenue potential in the hundreds, if not thousands of miles of shoreline and river banks where they could be installed.

Perhaps no one is happier to see them installed along the Cuyahoga than Bill Braun, owner of Custom Rubber. Mr. Braun said he hopes the CHUBs increase in popularity and provide more business for his company on East 55th Street in Cleveland. If they do, he plans to buy more equipment and add to his staff of 85 to ramp up production.

But Mr. Braun has another, more personal reason for wanting to see the CHUBs installed on the Cuyahoga. Almost every day, weather permitting, Mr. Braun can be found rowing on the river at dawn. He is a past president of the Cuyahoga Rowing Association.

“I row on the river every day in a rowing single, so I see them,” Mr. Braun said. “I’m anxious to see them each day and watch them succeed.” 

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©2008 Crain Communications, Inc.