Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Re-reverse the flow?

This interesting plan to help save Lake Michigan comes from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In Chicago we like to boast of our grand undertakings, and the reversal of the flow of the Chicago River was certainly the grandest of the grand. Unfortunately we tend to obfuscate the other side of the story. This is another side.

Almost as enlightening is the comments section where our neighbors to the north profess their never ending love and admiration for us.

1 comment:

Pete said...

I agree that with modern advancements in sewage treatment, there's really no good reason for the Chicago River to flow away from Lake Michigan any longer. But though re-reversing would stop the outflow, it probably wouldn't add much inflow to Lake Michigan, as the river is a fairly minor watershed that drains only a fraction of the Chicago region, unlike the Fox, Des Plaines and Kankakee rivers that naturally flow toward the Mississippi and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico.

I live in Joliet, and the re-reversal would undoubtedly have warmed the hearts of Jolietans of 100 years ago, to whom the river's reversal brought Chicago's waste and filth cascading downstream. Essentially Joliet and the other river towns along the Des Plaines River and Illinois River became Chicago's sewage treatment plant.