"You have a whole system that carries water to TARP, and you can't logistically enlarge every pipe," St. Pierre said in a recent interview. "So you really have to think about different ways to manage water, including developing a kind of hybrid where we keep water out of the [sewers] and modulate it, so the system can handle flows gradually over time."

Such a system is under construction at sites south of downtown Chicago, where MWRD and the Army Corps of Engineers are building two of the largest catch basins ever conceived. The basins, essentially deep quarries hollowed out by dynamite and earth excavators, will be able to hold an estimated 15 billion gallons of stormwater, which engineers believe should contain runoff from virtually any storm event.

When completed in 2029, the two new reservoirs, known as Thornton and McCook, will join an existing 350-million-gallon catch basin near O'Hare International Airport that since 1998 has helped avoid $250 million in flood damage, according to MWRD officials.

Last year, the Obama administration solidified that plan under a consent decree among the Justice Department, U.S. EPA, the Illinois EPA and MWRD. The agreement, which is awaiting court approval, came years after U.S. EPA first notified Chicago authorities of MWRD's massive Clean Water Act violations and imposed a new timetable for completing the reservoirs.

According to MWRD, most of the reservoir capacity -- roughly 11 billion gallons -- will be in place by 2017, including the 7.9-billion-gallon Thornton reservoir, which will trap sewer overflows from the highly industrialized Calumet-Saganashkee Channel, which links the Port of Chicago to the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.

Reservoirs added, but construction moves slowly
But environmental groups, some of which have fought for decades to force MWRD to eliminate combined sewer overflows, remain dissatisfied with the settlement as drafted. They want a federal judge to require more of MWRD, including that the Thornton and McCook reservoirs be finished on a much shorter timetable than the consent decree currently allows.

Jessica Dexter, a staff attorney with the Chicago-based Environmental Law & Policy Center, said TARP, which was conceived in 1972 -- the same year the Clean Water Act became law -- has become an administrative dead weight that MWRD has been unable or unwilling to carry through to completion.

"Over the course of years, the deadlines keep slipping back and back and back," Dexter said of the plan. "We think they can be more ambitious with it."

The Deep Tunnel portion of TARP, for example, came online in 2006, after decades of start-and-stop excavation work that was subject to changing political and budgetary priorities.

Among their complaints, outlined in a March 21 letter to the Justice Department, is that federal regulators simply endorsed MWRD's "status quo" planning schedule for completing the reservoirs by 2029, which would make TARP a 57-year project.

By comparison, the nation's largest public works project, Boston's Central Artery/Tunnel, or "Big Dig," was conceived around the same time as TARP and completed in 2007 at a cost of roughly $15 billion.

Dexter and other critics say there's no reason to spend another 17 years digging reservoirs when Chicago's stormwater management challenges are growing more daunting by the year. If TARP is to be the first line of defense against sewer overflows, the argument goes, it should be deployed much faster.

"We need to finish what we started in 1972, and do it as quickly as we can," Dexter said.

Part of the problem, according to critics like the Environmental Law & Policy Center and the Natural Resources Defense Council, is that the reservoir construction schedule is tied to a vendor contract that allows excavation to speed up or slow down based on how quickly the limestone being mined from Thornton and McCook sites can be sold.

12 Comments

1. 1. the Gaul 04:07 PM 4/4/12

   of course . . . you can't print any article today without some parrot crying "where's the evidence?" or "where's the link?" Useless people . . .

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2. 2. Xopher425 04:18 PM 4/4/12

   Need 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.
   
   But 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 . . . . .

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3. 3. payitfwd in reply to Xopher425 05:41 PM 4/4/12

   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.
   
   As 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!

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4. 4. Xopher425 05:57 PM 4/4/12

   Weather is also the state of the atmosphere, not just individual events.
   
   But 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?

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5. 5. geojellyroll 07:37 PM 4/4/12

   Next year when there is no 'great rain storm'...it won't make Scientific American.
   
   Reminds me of climatologists predicting by 2010 kids in the UK would never experience snow.
   
   Science should not be about agenda.

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6. 6. jtdwyer 08:19 PM 4/4/12

   So THATs where all this crap in the lower Mississippi River comes from!

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7. 7. OBagle 09:13 PM 4/4/12

   Why 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.
   
   Arguing 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.

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8. 8. Xopher425 09:40 PM 4/4/12

   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.
   
   Another 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.

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9. 9. payitfwd in reply to Xopher425 04:39 AM 4/5/12

   "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."
   
   Scary 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.

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10. 10. brublr 06:16 PM 4/9/12

    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.
    

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11. 11. jamesnorris211 12:42 PM 9/25/12

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12. 12. dkrycek 01:48 PM 11/20/12

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