Don't Use Chicago River Pollution As An Excuse To Do Nothing On Asian Carp... Or Anything Else

Is it impossible to prevent Asian carp from invading Lake Michigan…  because the Chicago River is too dirty?

Richard Lanyon, Executive Director of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD), seems to think so.  Lanyon thinks that Chicago experiences too many combined sewer overflows (CSOs) – in which stormwater floods into an outdated sewer system that also contains untreated human waste, causing it to discharge that bacterial frappe directly into the Chicago River.

Here is what Lanyon is quoted as saying by Great Lakes Echo:

“We would hope hydrological separation doesn’t happen, because we don’t want to put CSOs into Lake Michigan.  We have a lot of CSO outflows right downtown, they’d be the first to get into the lake.  Who wants to do that?”

In NRDC’s recent “Re-Envisioning the Chicago River” report, we worked with engineers from Shaw Environmental to examine this very issue.  According to Shaw’s analysis of the Chicago waterway system, we begin to experience CSOs here in Chicago when we receive as little as two-thirds of an inch of rain.

If separation to stop the Asian carp necessarily required re-reversing the Chicago River to send it back into Lake Michigan, Lanyon would be correct:  if one were able to re-reverse the Chicago River today, it would be a massive new source of pollutant loadings to Lake Michigan that would violate Great Lakes water quality standards.  This is not only because of the CSO problems, but also because MWRD has been allowed to operate for many years with lax permitting standards for its wastewater treatment plants (that, among other things, have allowed them to avoid disinfecting their effluent before they discharge it).

Add to that MWRD’s abject failure to complete its Tunnel and Reservoir Project (TARP) in a timely manner, as well as MWRD’s refusal to take a serious look at using green infrastructure to reduce CSOs and create neighborhood amenities (as is being done in many other cities, such as Philadelphia and Milwaukee), and you’ve got one seriously screwed up Chicago River – which could take many years to clean up.

Lanyon’s argument that the Chicago River is too polluted to think about putting in barriers to stop invasive species is a red herring, thrown out by someone who does not take the Asian carp threat seriously or accept that it’s a legitimate problem.  Statements such as these are designed to make separation of the Great Lakes and Mississippi River to stop Asian carp sound too hard or too complicated to be achievable anytime soon.  Given the fierce battle that MWRD has put up to resist efforts by other governmental entities to clean up their operations, it makes you wonder if MWRD has any interest in cleaning up the River at all.  MWRD has shown repeatedly that it likes the status quo:  being able to use the Chicago River as if it were its own private sewer canal.

In our Chicago River report, we identified the need to think of separation as an iterative process – and as a series of solve-able engineering problems – rather than something that can or should be attempted all at once.

While the CSO pollution issues are critically important to address for the health of the Chicago River and the communities that use it, there is no reason to think that we need to wait for them to be fully resolved before we start the process of moving toward separation.  In their technical review of the issues that would need to be addressed for separation to occur, the Shaw engineers found that an initial separation could be done quickly – roughly 18 months of construction, after any public review and final approvals were worked out – if we incorporate into the planning for separation a system of pumps that would allow water to flow with the Chicago waterway system much as it does now while still creating physical barriers in the system that would prevent Asian carp and any other invasive fish species from moving toward Lake Michigan. 

This proposed solution would allow the system (with all of its flaws) to continue functioning much as it does now – and Chicago would continue to send its sewage and stormwater away from the City, until such time as we can muster the political will and resources to clean up the River once and for all.

We will never protect the Great Lakes from Asian carp if we don’t get moving on a solution quickly…  indeed, far more quickly than the Army Corps of Engineers is currently moving.  Our “Re-Envisioning the Chicago River” report shows that separation can be done relatively quickly and cost-effectively, if we work with the existing infrastructure in the waterway system and use readily available, off-the-shelf technology.