OVERWHELMED BY RAIN?: The weather instability as a result of climate change, such as extreme downpours, may eclipse the ability of cities like Chicago to cope, even with new infrastructure investments.
Image: flickr/Isaac Singleton Photography
CHICAGO -- This largest of American lakefront cities has long relied on feats of engineering to keep its sewage away from Lake Michigan, its primary freshwater resource and recreational crown jewel.
In 1900, the Sanitary District of Chicago reversed the Chicago River's flow, sending wastewater from homes, businesses and streets west toward the Illinois and Mississippi rivers rather than continue to foul the city's waterfront along what today is Lakeshore Drive.
As Chicago grew over the next 110 years, so did its sewers -- morphing from a rudimentary straight-pipe sewage system into something far more complex, if only moderately cleaner. The conduit for the new plumbing system was the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which linked the Chicago and Calumet rivers to the Mississippi, which provided a trench for Chicago's wastewater to flow downstream.
Today's sewer network, built and maintained by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, is a behemoth among urban wastewater collection systems. Girded by more than 109 miles of deep underground pipe, Chicago's massive "Tunnel and Reservoir Plan" (TARP) ranks among the nation's largest public works projects, both in term of scale and cost, estimated at $3.58 billion.
But questions remain as to whether -- having installed all this -- Chicago can keep up with the increasingly stringent demands of Mother Nature, especially as climate change ushers in greater weather instability marked by repeated record precipitation events.
The heaviest rain in Chicago history, a 6.86-inch deluge on July 23, 2011, put its so-called Deep Tunnel system to its toughest test yet. It flunked, and sewer managers were forced to relieve flooding by opening outfalls to the Chicago River and Lake Michigan, allowing tens of millions of gallons of filthy, bacteria-laden stormwater to pour into local waterways, including along the swimming beaches that line Lakeshore Drive.
The 2011 storm was only slightly larger than two previous record rainfalls -- on July 23 and 24, 2010, and Sept. 13, 2008. Those storms, too, produced severe flooding that overtopped highways and streets, filled underground parking garages and basements, and triggered similar spoutings of untreated sewage into the lake and river.
Dubbed "City of the Big Shoulders" in 1916 by its most famous poet, Carl Sandburg, Chicago had never seen anything like these. Experts say the rising frequency and intensity of rain events has changed many Chicagoans' assumptions about what climatologists call the "100-year storm," or the rain event that has a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year. And for many more, climate change became more a reality than a theory.
"Certainly, it has put our residents in a new frame of mind," said David St. Pierre, executive director of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD), which he joined in June 2011 after two decades managing wastewater systems in Atlanta and St. Louis.
Tunnels working as designed
Since last year's floods, St. Pierre said, he has attended numerous public meetings to field Chicagoans' complaints about chronic flooding and offer reassurance that the district's multibillion-dollar TARP system is working as designed. The problem, he tells residents, is that the region's first-line sewers are overwhelmed by the high volume of stormwater rushing off streets, sidewalks and parking lots.
That surging wastewater is unable to move quickly enough into interceptor sewers that feed water to the 2.3-billion-gallon-capacity Deep Tunnel system, where it can be routed to treatment plants before discharge into the Sanitary and Ship Canal. The result is that stormwater rises in low-lying areas and backs up into homes and buildings across the region, creating an environmental and public health hazard.
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12 Comments
Add Commentof course . . . you can't print any article today without some parrot crying "where's the evidence?" or "where's the link?" Useless people . . .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNeed evidence? Look out the window. Those of us paying attention here in Chicago, after going through one of the mildest winters and the warmest March on record, don't need that much evidence. And I think that three major storms, that have over-loaded our sewers and resulted in beaches being closed due to feces and bacteria in the water, is evidence enough.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut what may be more important, whether you have your head in the sand in regards to climate change, is the increase in population, increase in the number of homes and businesses, and, therefore, the increase in waste produced (not to mention the increased drain on limited resources.)
Sadly, too many people are confusing politics (like the four states that mandated NOT teaching climate change in school) with actual science (massive die-off of species in numbers unseen since the dinosaurs went extinct, increased power and duration of storms, extreme seasonal temperatures, record droughts, and massive melting off glaciers and icecaps.) It's enough that I'm beginning to think that maybe humanity should die off, taking the planet with us. Maybe it'll teach the Earth next time about allowing the evolution of such a self centered, destructive species . . . . .
pokerplyer pretty much ALWAYS comments on climate change articles to try and debunk them. It's probably best to simply ignore the deniers rather than make a counter-argument because that is just fruitless.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a resident of Cook County, I am disgusted at just how much air and water pollution still exists in this area. These things need to be addressed immediately. They need to quickly finish this TARP project and stop dumping sewage into our local waterways!
Weather is also the state of the atmosphere, not just individual events.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut pokerplyer has one good point: we really have no guarantee that the intensity and frequency of storms will increase. It could, for all we know, completely stop raining, causing drought and another Great Chicago Fire.
Can we really take that chance with something so fragile?
Next year when there is no 'great rain storm'...it won't make Scientific American.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReminds me of climatologists predicting by 2010 kids in the UK would never experience snow.
Science should not be about agenda.
So THATs where all this crap in the lower Mississippi River comes from!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy bother getting upset at Climate Change Deniers? There can never be good without evil, light without darkness or beauty without ugliness. Let them deny - they were born to this exact mission. Without the deniers, no advancement or discovery is possible. N. Korea, Syria, China, are proof of that. When the likes of Albert Einstein were packing their bags for Switzerland early on during the Nazi regime, the vast majority of their fellow Jews "denied" that any ill-will was forthcoming, and that needless paranoia-mongering would only result in the self-fulfilling dissolution of Jewish societies. The stock markets go up and down constantly, meaning that someone abandons a stock in panic, while someone else grabs it a few seconds later, certain in the belief that an opportunity to make a killing was never so obvious. One of them is right today, and maybe is wrong tomorrow. Fortunes are made and lost every day.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisArguing with the deniers is as foolish as trying to replace the weed-ridden forests with putting greens. The only thing you can do is to just take cover for yourself or head into the wilderness as the Book of Revelations advises.
All valid points, but it's so much FUN. And it's a never-ending source of wonder/amazement/frustration of how some people's brains function . . . . or not. I have a customer/friend who is, otherwise, a very intelligent woman. It is just astonishing how adamant she is that global climate change is not occurring.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnother reason: they continue to spread their ignorance and getting other ignorant people to do things such as the recent change in state law to not teach climate change. As frustrated as I get, that scares me even more.
Besides, it helps me keep my brain active and engaged.
And I really like to argue.
"they continue to spread their ignorance and getting other ignorant people to do things such as the recent change in state law to not teach climate change. As frustrated as I get, that scares me even more."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScary is right. If it were up to some people, we would probably do away with all of the scientific "nonsense" taught in schools and use school for praying, discussing the theory of intelligent design and advocating abstinence. It's bad enough to be ignorant from laziness but a deliberate, self-imposed ignorance is truly terrifying. I don't understand those people.
Commercial projects here in Chicago must be reviewed by the Landscaping Examiners along with the Zoning, Architectural, Fire, Electrical, Plumbing, HVAC and so on. The City will require our clients to install trees 25' apart on sidewalks which are more than 9' wide and otherwise lacking them and the North American Climate trees which have been acceptable for the 60 years past are no longer so as the City will now accept only trees which heretofore grew only in the Southern States. Similarly, the City is an early adopter of Green Roofs as may be seen atop City Hall on Google Earth. 40% of the vegetables in World War II were grown in Victory Gardens, 20% of the average city is in vacant lots, Urban Farming in Chicago is a burgeoning topic among Planners and Architects and climate change reality is the norm among all of us.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks for the information. I believe with the <a href="http://southtownplumbinginc.com">chicago plumbing service</a>, they can maintain themselves just fine. Thanks again for sharing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is really amazing thinking about all of the <a href="http://www.ablesewerage.com/services.html">plumbing in Chicago</a> that has to handle things like this. Thank you for posting this article! It was very informative!
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