Excerpt
More than 180 years ago, the city of Chicago, Illinois, established on lacustrine and alluvial soils near the Chicago River along the shores of Lake Michigan, had an abundance of water upon which its industries thrived and population grew. However, this exuberant growth quickly overwhelmed water resources that served transportation and commerce, industrial and residential waste disposal, and public drinking water supply. The original 0.9 × 1.2 m (3 × 4 ft) intake pipe that reached 183 m (600 ft) into Lake Michigan and connected to a suction well was soon inadequate to assure safe drinking water as high levels of raw sewage were dumped into the lake (Ward 1994). The reversal of the Chicago River, construction of the Chicago Sanitary and Shipping Canal (figure 1), and investments in water treatment systems over the last century have improved Chicago's management of raw and treated sewage and debris, attempts to eliminate typhoid germs, and capacity to monitor other bacteria within Chicago area river systems and nearshore waters (Sible et al. 2015; Olson and Morton 2016). By the 1960s, as Chicago's population and industries continued to expand, the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan (TARP, also known as the Deep Tunnel Project) was created…
- © 2017 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society