Waterways murky, but signs blunt

Chicago River to get sewage warnings

April 25, 2005|By Michael Hawthorne, Tribune staff reporter.

While Mayor Richard M. Daley and other civic leaders promote the Chicago River as the city's second lakefront, signs are going up that provide a stark reminder of the waterway's sewage-choked history.

The river is the cleanest it has been in decades. But people riding the popular downtown tour boats or canoeing the concrete-lined channels soon will see warnings above each of the 241 pipes that pour untreated human and industrial waste into the river's murky flow after heavy rains.

Posting the signs marks the beginning of a campaign to draw attention to Chicago's chronic sewage overflows, which are hampering efforts to make the river clean enough for the surging number of people drawn to it for recreation. More than 10 billion gallons of bacteria-laden wastewater and storm runoff spilled from the pipes last year alone.

"The way the river is used is changing, and we need to recognize that," said Laurene von Klan, executive director of Friends of the Chicago River, a group that has pushed for years to change the popular view of the waterway as little more than an open sewer.

City officials and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, the regional sewage treatment agency, are embarking on the public awareness campaign somewhat reluctantly.

When state environmental regulators renewed pollution permits for the city and district three years ago, they required public notification of sewage overflows. It took until now for officials to agree how the signs should be worded, with some arguing that any warnings would scare people away from the river.

They needed a written reminder of their legal obligations before promising to post the signs by Memorial Day.

At 37 locations along the river, the district will caution that overflow pipes "may discharge sewage contaminated rainwater during and after rainfall." The warnings will be more explicit at 204 other locations maintained by the city, noting the discharges "may contain bacteria that can cause illness."

More than a dozen signs will be going up along the signature stretch of the river between Lake Michigan and Wolf Point, according to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency map.

"Some people didn't like the image this would create for tourists," said Janet Pellegrini, an EPA official who oversees the river.

The federal Clean Water Act, enacted in the early 1970s, required improvements to make waterways fishable and swimmable. But the rules always have been different for the Chicago River.

Once a sluggish prairie stream that drew American Indians, fur traders, explorers and armies to its banks, the river was dredged and straightened in the early 1900s to keep the burgeoning city's waste from contaminating its water supply, Lake Michigan.

For decades, the river was treated as a place where fish and wildlife weren't welcome, let alone humans. Fences went up along the banks. Skyscrapers were built to shut the fetid river off from the city.

One branch came to be known as Bubbly Creek, for the foul-smelling gases that burbled to the surface from offal and carcasses dumped by the city's livestock slaughterhouses.

The overflow pipes are part of the aging network of sewers built in the mid-1800s. At the time, sanitary and storm sewers typically were combined into one system. Newer cities built systems that separate the two.

Efforts to warn people about the overflows come as federal, state and local officials are taking a close look at the river for the first time in three decades. They are debating whether there should be more rigorous standards for wastewater pumped into canals and channels dug to reverse the river's current away from the lake.

About 60 percent of the river's flow is treated sewage that isn't disinfected to remove disease-causing bacteria. Most other cities douse wastewater with chlorine after treating it by removing solids and pumping what is left through tanks filled with microbes that kill pathogens.

The difference becomes apparent when comparing monitoring data from systems that disinfect sewage with ones that don't. Disinfected wastewater pumped into the Fox River by Elgin contains levels of fecal coliform bacteria well within state standards intended to make water safe for swimming, according to the U.S. EPA. Wastewater coming out of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District's North Side treatment plant contains bacteria levels more than 650 times higher than the state standard.

The Illinois EPA has proposed that the district's treatment plants do more to eliminate bacteria and other pathogens in the river. But regional officials argue that spending money to make the water cleaner would sap money from the Deep Tunnel project, a network of tunnels and reservoirs that captures storm runoff and has dramatically reduced the number and severity of sewage overflows.