CHUB stands for Cuyahoga Habitat Underwater Baskets. About 400 of them are being installed along the bulkheads that line the last 5½ miles of the river, where it ceases to be a moving natural environment that supports plants and fish and becomes a deep, still and nearly lifeless channel for huge freighters.
The CHUBs are the invention of Grafton-based Filtrexx International, which was founded in 1999 to help developers, homeowners and other land owners to combat erosion of water-side lands. The company invented and patented a polypropylene mesh that can hold soil and compost together underwater, providing a rooting medium for plants.
Filtrexx, as part of a team of river remediation specialists assembled by the Cuyahoga River Community Planning Organization, worked with Cleveland’s Custom Rubber Corp. and Matrix Engineering to develop the CHUBs, which serve as hanging pots for indigenous aquatic plants.
About 160 of the baskets have been installed 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 surface of the water.
To larval fish, though, the hope is that they look like home — providing shelter, rest, food and a chance to grow a little bigger on their trip downstream to the lake.
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. However, their tiny offspring are ill-equipped to make it back to the lake when there are several miles of steel-walled shipping channel between their birthplace and their destination.
“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,” said Jim White, executive director of the Cuyahoga River Community Planning Organization. “And they have a dramatically increased need for calories — just when they need the most, they are getting the least.”
The CHUBs are designed to give the fish enough shelter, food and resting places to make the trip possible.
“They’re kind of like little Howard Johnsons,” Mr. White said Tuesday aboard a boat to watch and explain the installation process.
The work has been made possible by a $30,000 grant from ArcelorMittal, coupled with $495,000 in federal money from the Corps of Engineers, secured by Cuyahoga County. The installation of the CHUBs is the first and most modest stage of several designed to bring 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 replacing bulkhead walls.