The Watershed Approach - Urban Watersheds: Geology, Contamination, and Sustainable Development - page 3

• A long industrial history exists (e.g., metal processing and automotive).
• Brownields are plentiful.
• Varied geology.
• An abundance of contamination to study.
• Heavily populated (currently over 1.5 million in the watershed; but historically the
population was much greater).
• Varied land use (industrial, residential, commercial, agricultural, open space,
parkland).
• Urban sprawl is widespread.
• High stream density.
• A relatively small watershed that is easy to study (approximately 1200 km 2 ).
• High volumes of data about the watershed exist from State of Michigan Remedial
Action Plans, USEPA, and contaminated site investigations by the authors.
The watershed's 175 years of industrial development include a 100 year legacy of auto-
mobile manufacturing. What began as an area of postglacial swampland, beach deposits,
and forests has evolved into a landscape now littered with brownfields and broadly con-
taminated water resources from the groundwater to the surface waters, and into the water
vapor in the lower atmosphere. If we follow this principle “it is important to understand
how things were, so we can understand how they are today,” then it becomes necessary
to provide some historical context for this topic by highlighting the key aspects of the
industrial development within the southeast Michigan region and its effects on the Rouge
watershed.
1.3 The Evolution of Industry and the Rouge Watershed
The growth of industry in Detroit and its surrounding region can be attributed to the basic
geographical factors of site and situation, and its geology. Detroit's site (the actual area
within the original settlement of 1701) consisted largely of marshes, was heavily forested,
and underlain by thick wet clay—a remnant of past glaciations. In 1815, Edward Tiffin, the
surveyor general for the northwest reported to the National Government his assessment of
the Detroit area's agricultural potential: “the streams were narrow and deep…the interme-
diate spaces between the inland lakes are a poor and barren sandy land,” and concluded:
“the balance is bad, there could not be more than one acre out of a hundred, if there would
be one out of a thousand, that would in any case admit of cultivation”* (American State
Papers 1834).
With respect to its growth potential, this agricultural deficiency at the site was more
than compensated for by Detroit's situation —the quantity and quality of its linkages and
interactions (e.g., physical, social, and economic) with the surrounding region. Detroit's
early economic development was spurred by a combination of situational factors: the
opening of the Erie Canal in 1826, the city's Great Lakes location, the increasing use of rail
* The Congressional impetus for the Tiffin survey was to locate 2,000,000 acres of bounty land (land given as a
reward for military service) for veterans of the War of 1812.