From the New York Times:

Thomas Simon remembers the day he found a carp in the Grand Calumet River in 1985, barely alive, bloody and with no fins. “It looked like someone had beaten it up,” said Mr. Simon, a biologist who studied the river for 26 years.

Yet state officials were thrilled, because it was the first fish found in years in the northwest Indiana river that is widely considered the nation’s most toxic waterway.

A quarter century later, fish are more plentiful and look healthy. But state and federal agencies say they are still unsafe to eat, their flesh laced with toxins from sediment poisoned by decades of dumping from nearby steel mills, chemical plants, meatpacking operations and other industries. Read more.