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The story examined the results of a 25-year-old binational effort to clean the Detroit River. A key component of the programs was citizen participation, but as our story proved, the public was kept largely ignorant of the program, and the activists who did participate ended up quitting en masse because of their frustration with the attempts by government and industry to stall the cleanup process and downplay the severity of water quality problems. The story discloses how government and industry hijacked control of the program, and the consequences of their neglect: water not fit to drink, fish not fit to eat, habitat destroyed, and increasing chemical contamination.