Just found this article in last year's New Yorker. Ian Frazier writes a travelogue of a journey following the invasive bighead and silver carp up the Illinois River. There's an amusing stop at the Redneck Fishing Tournament, a visit to the electric fish barrier in Romeoville, and an explanation of the DNA evidence that fish may have crossed the barrier.
Today's Chicago Tribune has a full-page feature about the history of pollution in the Chicago River, specifically that most colorful and polluted tributary known as Bubbly Creek, which drained run-off from the Stockyards.
The most fascinating part of the article is a clipping from 1911 about a mugging victim who was tossed from the Ashland bridge into the river unconscious, but survived by floating on the thick layer of filth and debris on top of the river. The South Arm of Bubbly Creek which passed under the bridge had once been the outlet of a large marsh which was filled in when the area was urbanized. Several blocks downstream from here the little stream met the Stockyards Slip, a dredged channel which functioned as the sewage outflow from the vast stockyards, which no doubt backed up into the South Arm as well. This filthiest part of Bubbly Creek was buried underground in the 1920s in an effort to clean up the river.
Another smaller article is a review from 1906 of Upton Sinclair's new novel The Jungle, claiming that the author exaggerated the terrible working conditions in the Stockyards, and the condition of Bubbly Creek. The creek is mentioned briefly in the novel, but is not a big part of the story, just another signifier of the grim living conditions in the neighborhoods Back of the Yards.
WBEZ is broadcasting a great series this week about the water connections to Chicago. Reporter Gabriel Spitzer is traveling the Illinois River to explore how Chicago and Lake Michigan are connected to the Mississippi River, while Brian Mann is exploring the St. Lawrence Seaway to see how the other end of the Great Lakes is connected to the larger world.
Both the Sanitary & Shipping Channel connecting the Great Lakes to the west, and the St. Lawrence Seaway connecting the Great Lakes to the east are facing similar challenges of keeping out invasive species and conserving the clean water of the lakes.
Today American Rivers released its annual list of 10 most endangered rivers in America. For the last 26 years the environmental advocacy group has compiled a list to raise awareness of rivers which can be improved by public support. Last week the Obama Administration and EPA recommended that the river must be made clean enough for recreation.
Meanwhile, the old school commissioners of the Water Reclamation District are arguing yet again that adding a complete disinfection system to the city's sewage treatment plants will cost billions, and the bizarre claim that enabling recreation on the river will only lead to children drowning. Better to have those city children play with the cars in the street than in the park along the river, apparently.
Good news for future swimmers of the Chicago River: the EPA has declared that Illinois must now make the river clean enough to be swimmable.
The Chicago River was once a heavily industrialized waterway, but nowadays the prime source of pollution in the river is the wastewater released from the three enormous sewage treatment plants along the Chicago and the Calumet rivers. Sewage is treated at these plants but is not fully disinfected of bacteria before being released into the river system. For many years the Water Reclamation District has argued that the river is too dirty for recreational use, and therefore the released wastewater need not be cleaned to the higher standards of a more pristine waterway.
The EPA argues that deindustrialization and the miles of trails constructed along the river have indeed transformed it into a recreational river, and any wastewater released should be held to a higher standard of water quality.
Fully disinfecting wastewater from all three sewage treatment plants could cost up to $1 billion according to the Water Reclamation District, but the EPA estimates the cost will be much less. The current EPA decision will affect only the Howard Avenue and Calumet plants, not the big Stickney plant, costing even less.
Will the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District finally be forced to clean up the Chicago River? According to a recent Chicago Tribune article, a meeting earlier this month by the Illinois Pollution Control Board changed the official designation of areas of the river to include recreational use.
Previously the MWRD has refused to disinfect wastewater discharged from its sewage treatment plants under the Catch-22 assumption that if the Chicago River was too polluted for recreational boating, it was not necessary to fully treat the discharged water since no recreational users were being affected.
An infographic published with the article charts the astoundingly high levels of colony-forming units (CFUs) of fecal-coliform bacteria in the North Branch of the Chicago and the Little Calumet Rivers downstream from two of the three metro sewage plants (the channel next to the largest Stickney sewage plant is an industrial shipping channel not generally used for recreational boating).
Apologists at the MWRD point out that disinfecting the wastewater discharged into the river will not fully clean the waterway, because it is still subject to Combined Sewage Outflows (CSOs) during heavy rainstorms, when rainwater overloads the underground pipes and combined sewage and stormwater must be released into the river so that it does not back up into nearby basements. The engineering solution to that problem, the Deep Tunnel which is supposed to capture overload water, is still years away from completion, even 38 years after the project started.
The Plastiki, a catamaran made from recycled plastic bottles, has finally arrived in Sydney, Australia after 130 days sailing from San Francisco. The boat will be open for tours for the next several weeks, and you can read about the adventure on the Plastiki blog:
Governor Pat Quinn announced a deal today to export up to 30 million pounds of Asian Carp to China. A fish processing plant in downstate Pearl, IL will be expanded using $2 million of state funds.
Chicagoist provides a concise summary of how plans to stop the Asian Carp are tied to the future of the Chicago River.
Also, an excellent two-part article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel which tells the history of the Chicago River, its current degraded state and how the river is still connected to the growth of the region.
Chicago and Milwaukee have thrown insults at each other in the past over each city's stewardship of Lake Michigan. Politicians in Chicago blame Milwaukee for beach closures whenever a storm overflows Milwaukee's sewer system into the lake. In civilized Illinois, the implication is, we don't dump sewage back into the same lake where we get our drinking water. But as the Journal Sentinel article shows, Chicago's ability to drain its waste away from the city, out of sight, has allowed it to dump far more untreated sewage into the environment than Milwaukee ever does, by sending it all downstream and out of mind.
Last week's discovery of a carp in Lake Calumet has added extra urgency to plans for separating the Great Lakes and Illinois River ecosystems. At the Shedd Aquarium on Friday Senator Dick Durbin announced a bill to be introduced this week that will force the Army Corps of Engineers to study the possibilities of physically separating the Chicago and Calumet rivers from the Illinois River (which would require re-reversing their flow back to Lake Michigan). The costs for such a project will be enormous, as well as the costs of transferring shipping across the barricade. But the danger to the Great Lakes ecosystem is equally great.
