WBEZ | Chicago River

Report: Drop money in the river, watch it float back

Thu, 09 May 2013 15:57:00 -0500

The glitzy towers of downtown Chicago are filled with offices that boast impressive financial returns, but their biggest cash flow may be one they all share: the Chicago River.

A new report commissioned by Friends of the Chicago River and Openlands says each dollar invested in the river provides a 70 percent return. Completed, planned and proposed improvement projects, the report says, amount to 846 new permanent jobs, 52,400 construction jobs and $130.54 million every year.

“Investing in the Chicago River pays us back,” said Lenore Beyer-Clow, policy director for Openlands.

Friends of the Chicago River, which began as a project of Openlands, has championed the once neglected river since it was a “back alleyway full of sewage and trash,” in the words of the new report. Mayors Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel have both called attention to the resource, most recently when Emanuel announced a plan to expand the city’s Riverwalk by six blocks. But Margaret Frisbie, the group’s executive director, said despite recent progress most people still don’t appreciate the full benefits of investing in the river.

The report looked at four major completed or planned projects involving the river over the last 30 years: the deep tunnel stormwater project TARP; disinfection of wastewater at three area treatment plants; $500 million worth of green infrastructure investment citywide over 15 years; and $93 million in projects by the City of Chicago and Chicago Park District.

The benefits came in the form of additional business income, tax revenue and jobs, but also avoided flood damage and sewage treatment costs. Investing in the river boots property values along its shores, too.

Wolf Point and River Point are among the high-profile riverside developments in the portfolio of real estate firm Hines Interests.

“Why are we focused on real estate along the river?” asked Greg Van Schaak, senior managing director for Hines. “It’s very simple: it’s more valuable.” Van Schaak said whereas rent in most towers varies by floor, buildings along the river retain the same value from the first floor through the fiftieth.

Van Schaak added that most of the major companies — Boeing, MillerCoors, BP — who recently opened offices in Chicago did so in riverfront buildings. “I don’t think that’s an accident,” he said.

Money talks, but it’s impossible to neatly quantify many of the benefits that natural systems provide. That may make it difficult to invest strategically even when all parties agree on the overarching value of a natural resource like the Chicago River.

“There are all these ancillary benefits to green infrastructure that aren’t quantified when you only look at economic returns,” said Debra Shore, an MWRD commissioner. Environmental benefits like carbon sequestration, soil retention and fresh air are valuable too, Shore said, but don’t yet appear on the ledger of an economic analysis.

A push to stop wasting Lake Michigan water

Tue, 07 May 2013 07:46:00 -0500

The Illinois Department of Natural Resources has proposed an update to the rules for diverting water from Lake Michigan. Northeast Illinois takes hundreds of millions of gallons of water out of the lake daily for municipal use and for diversion into the Chicago area waterway system, but a great deal of the diverted water actually escapes through leaky pipes.

“We waste a lot of money pumping, treating, distributing water that never gets sold,” said Josh Ellis of the non-profit Metropolitan Planning Council.

Ellis estimates that as much as 70 million gallons a day are lost to leaks in aging infrastructure across the region. That’s the equivalent of a Willis Tower full of water every few days, a loss that may not be sustainable as the regional population grows or new municipalities in northeast Illinois move to using Lake Michigan water.

“The time to start thinking and figuring out what needs to be done is now,” said Daniel Injerd, the chief of Lake Michigan management for IDNR. “We need, as an agency, to try to send a stronger message to communities to say it’s really time to start looking at water loss.”

IDNR is in charge of the permits for all Illinois entities who get water out of Lake Michigan, including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, and for the first time since 1980, the agency is proposing a significant change to the permitting policy. Rather than allowing a certain amount of leakage based on the age of the pipes in a village, town, or city, the new permitting process would require municipalities to account for all their water -- or submit a detailed plan for how to update aging infrastructure. Injerd says more than half of the 215 agencies that now have water allocation permits would be in violation of the leakage limits under the new rule.

The revised water diversion rule also includes more strict limitations on sprinkler use and requirements for water-efficient plumbing in new construction. Finally, the proposed documents suggests, but does not require, that municipalities adjust the price of water to reflect the real cost of moving and treating water and of upgrading water infrastructure.

Ellis thinks the proposed changes should go even further.

“Right now most water rate systems don’t generate enough revenue to cover the full costs of providing water services,” said Ellis. “We’re paying for the pipes, the pumps, the chemicals, the electricity...we feel that IDNR, through its permit conditions can prompt more municipalities to develop rate systems that generate enough revenue to pay for these things.”

Short of raising prices or pulling from other revenue sources, right now municipalities have to seek out state loans to support infrastructure upgrades.

But Injerd says IDNR is not planning to impose requirements on water pricing.

“Probably most of our permittees think that’s not an area we need to delve into,” said Injerd. “It’s really not our role as a state agency to set water rates. But I have no problem recommending that communities develop a water rate that represents the true cost of providing a water supply.”

A 1967 Supreme Court decision limited Illinois’ water diversion from the lake, and it’s the role of the DNR to see that what the state pulls out doesn’t exceed that limit. A full quarter of the water diverted by Illinois is stormwater runoff that would have been returned to Lake Michigan via the waterways before the Chicago River was engineered to flow out of the lake in 1900.

Public comment on the proposed water allocation rule change is open through the end of May, and the Metropolitan Planning Council will be holding an event Tuesday May 8 to discuss Lake Michigan water loss.

Lewis Wallace is a Pritzker Journalism Fellow at WBEZ. Follow him @lewispants.

Chicago-area waterways slated for a clean-up

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 15:09:00 -0600

Asked whether people might one day go for a swim in Chicago's Little Calumet River, environmental advocate Tom Shepherd snorted.

“When I was a kid we used to jump in there,” he said. “And we didn’t know anything about what kind of dangers were lurking in there but we did nevertheless, and we came out all black and grimy.”

Shepherd, who works with the Southeast Environmental Task Force, now knows as well as anyone that the Calumet waterways have been severely polluted for over a century by a potent mix of toxic run-off from steel mills and sewage from the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD) of the greater Chicago area. To this day, water flows from MWRD plants into the river without being disinfected to federal standards. An innocent kayaker who splashes water in her own face may be hit with a faceful of fecal bacteria.

“We have been advocating for disinfection for a long time,” Shepherd said.

That disinfecting treatment is finally in sight. Illinois Governor Pat Quinn announced Monday that the state is giving $250 million in loans to the MWRD to help clean up Chicago-area waterways and replace aging infrastructure. More than half of the money will go to build facilities at the Calumet and O’Brien treatment plants that take dangerous bacteria out of wastewater before it hits the Chicago or Calumet Rivers. Some of the funded projects will also help keep sewers from overflowing, which sends raw sewage into the waterways with relative frequency.

Quinn also touted the creation of 2,000 unionized jobs with the low-interest loans, which are a part of the Illinois Clean Water Initiative.

The shift towards cleaner rivers hasn’t come easy. For years the publicly-elected MWRD commission fought for the right to not clean up Chicago’s waterways. After a prolonged legal struggle, in 2011 the MWRD announced it had reached an agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to start better managing polluted storm runoff and enforcing EPA standards for water it releases from its plants. At that time the Chicago Tribune reported that between 60 and 100 percent of the water in the Chicago River on a given day originated in a wastewater treatment plant and came out only partially treated. The numbers in the Little Calumet, Chicago’s branch of the Calumet River, are similar.

Shepherd said he doesn’t see swimmers getting in the Little Calumet any time soon, but boaters are already coming back.

“It’s pretty exciting. This summer we’re doing more paddling on the river, we’re bringing recreation, we have a great trail that’s being developed,” he said.

With Governor Quinn’s support, in 2011 the Southeast Environmental Task Force was involved with declaring a large area of heavily polluted wetlands near Lake Calumet a future wildlife reserve. At a press conference Monday, Quinn referenced the positive effects the water clean-up will have on that project, called the Millenium Reserve.

“You have eagles who actually live here. How many urban areas in the whole United States have eagles?” Quinn said. “It’ll be the largest conservation area in any urban environment in the whole United States, but in order to make it worthwhile, you’ve gotta have clean water.”

Shepherd, who has seen the eagles nesting in the south side wetlands, was hopeful about the clean-up efforts, but a little more reserved than Quinn.

“Someday we may be able to fish out there,” he said.

What’s causing the record-low levels in Lake Michigan?

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 15:32:00 -0600

Earlier this month WBEZ reported that Lake Michigan water levels are at a record low. Today the lake levels are still dropping, putting the livelihoods of shippers, boaters and whole coastal towns at risk.

That news is not getting old, either: As of Jan. 28, the lake was two inches below the previous record set in 1965 (down from just one inch in early January). It was more than five feet below the record high of 1987. A person of an average height can stand on dry land today in spots where 26 years ago she would have been up to her neck in water.

A few commenters on this story asked about the reasons for today’s low levels in Lake Michigan. The short answer is that there is no short-term answer. Lake levels are subject to long-term fluctuations caused by weather and precipitation patterns.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers tests the lake levels in all five Great Lakes daily, and they have data on lake levels going back to 1860. That data shows relatively consistent fluctuations of several feet of depth, usually over the space of a decade or more. In one instance, the water in Lake Michigan went up three whole feet in only three years (1926-1929). Between 1965 and 1987, the levels went up five feet. Now they’re back down, but our environmental concerns are drastically different than they were fifty years ago. As Greg Buckley, the City Manager of Two Rivers, Wis. put it, “In ‘64 nobody talked about climate change.”

The big picture

The Great Lakes shapes and sizes have been in flux since the lakes were formed over 10,000 years ago by receding glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. As recently as 9,000 years ago, what is now Lake Michigan covered a much larger surface area, and drained out to the Mississippi River system through outlets to the south. What is now Chicago was completely submerged.

It took another five millenia for the waters to recede to more or less their current level, by which point the St. Lawrence River far to the east had become the lakes’ main outlet. Simultaneously, the land surrounding the newly-formed glacial lakes began to rebound; without the weight of the massive glaciers pushing it down, the Great Lakes basin landforms rise on their own at a rate of about three inches every hundred years. And according to the Great Lakes Information Network, sometime in the last 10,000 years the lakes were a full five feet higher than any levels recorded by the U.S. government.

Glacial change is powerful - but it’s slow. Neither a few inches per century of naturally rising lands nor five feet of lake level loss in 10,000 years compares to Lake Michigan’s recent decline of five feet over less than 50 years.

Bottled water is chump change

Some have suggested that bottled water and municipal water use are draining the lakes.

“Water withdrawals for drinking water, for bottled water, and for municipal use… are unlikely to be a significant factor in lowering lake levels,” said Dr. David Allan, a professor in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of Michigan (and co-creator of a new Great Lakes mapping project). “If you look at it from a water budget perspective, inputs and outputs, the inputs in the form of precipitation and runoff, and the outputs in terms of evaporation and flow...those values just dwarf the water use of human activity. They’re just a small fraction of the total water budget.”

Many cities and towns that draw water from Lake Michigan end up returning that water, used and semi-sanitized, to the same water basin. And although a controversial legal loophole allows Great Lakes water to be bottled and sold, the lake water that’s disappearing to China enclosed in Nestle company plastic is a fraction of Chicago’s daily use alone. It’s not enough to drain the lake by a long shot.

But bottling and some municipal water uses are a net loss to the lake. Illinois is unique in that on the small Illinois slice of the coast, water is pumped out of Lake Michigan to give Chicago and surrounding suburbs showers, fire hydrants and delicious drinking water – but it doesn’t return. After it’s used once, that water drains out into the Chicago River system.

The Chicago River has a special relationship to Chicagoans’ consumption habits. It used to flow into Lake Michigan and return Chicago’s runoff and sewage. But since 1900, when Chicagoans decided they didn’t want to drink their own sewage, it’s been flowing the other way, out into the Mississippi River system. Even though a federal court decision keeps a cap on Illinois’ water diversion, nearly 2 billion gallons a day leave Lake Michigan for a single use in the Chicago area and never trickle back down.

Despite that gargantuan-sounding number, Allan says the impact on overall water levels is tiny. After all, we’re talking about 4 percent of the entire world’s surface fresh water in Lake Michigan alone. That’s 1,180 cubic miles of water. A cubic mile of water holds more than a trillion gallons.

So when it comes to drinking water, the concern for northeastern Illinois is not so much that the lake will run out, but that Illinoisans could hit that federal cap as soon as the year 2030. That means Illinois is going to have to limit use, keep the groundwater in the area clean enough to drink, or renegotiate the deal.

Of course, scientists will continue to disagree on how urgently coastal communities need to reduce their diversions.

What we think we know

There are a few factors most researchers can agree are affecting lake levels.

1. Precipitation. The lake’s major sources of water replenishment are rivers and streams, runoff, and rain directly over the lake. The water basin is the whole area that drains into that lake, and the area of the Great Lakes water basin is about 295,200 square miles. Last year’s massive drought meant reduced precipitation in many parts of the basin. And when water evaporates from Lake Michigan, the movement of weather systems generally dictates that it comes back down further to the East, raining on Ohio or New York. And of course, no water system is contained: at the far eastern end of the Great Lakes basin, water flows out of Lake Ontario, into the St. Lawrence River, and towards the Atlantic. Moisture that leaves here headed east is unlikely to make a quick return.

2. Surface temperature. The sun has an upper hand on any human attempts to control or extract water from the lake. Evaporation across the lake’s broad surface is the most reliable cause of water loss. And after the hottest year ever in 2012, we’re now experiencing the second consecutive warm winter in the region. Those combined factors mean the lake’s surface temperature stays a little warmer, and when the sun shines down, the water disappears even more rapidly than usual. Nearly a foot of the water lost to Lake Michigan disappeared in the hot spell between 2011-2012.

3. Ice cover. It’s probably obvious that ice cover on the lakes is the inverse of warm surface temperatures. And through the winter months it can serve as a protective layer against evaporation. Great Lakes ice cover has declined 71 percent since 1973 due to rising temperatures.

4. Dredging in the St. Clair River. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says Chicago’s perpetual diversion of water out of the system via the Chicago River is more than offset by other diversions into the Great Lakes basin from the north. But they concur with researchers who say that further east, the deepening of the St. Clair River accounts for over a foot of permanent loss in Lakes Michigan and Huron. The St. Clair, which connects Lake Huron with Lake St. Clair near Detroit, has been dredged to keep shipping channels open since the mid-1800s. Lakes Erie and Ontario, which receive the flow diverted through the St. Clair, are not facing the same low water crisis.

Climate change, right?

Is climate change causing the water to disappear? As Allan puts it, “the answer is a decisive maybe.”

Looking back at the loss of five feet of water over the last thirty years, he said, “you’d like to be able to say what fraction of that drop is due to climate change. And I don’t know how one would do that.”

But climate is the major factor in changing lake levels, so even if cause is immeasurable, a correlation between climate change and low water is hardly a stretch. Global temperatures are rising, the Great Lakes region is warming, the lakes are heating up, which means more evaporation and less ice cover.

“There’s a whole argument that says falling lake levels are consistent with climate change,” Allan said. “What I don’t think we have the ability to do at the present time is say, ‘our models tell us that lake levels should drop by x amount.’”

The return of the glaciers

What’s left of the ancient glaciers is now melting away, but this time the runoff isn’t flowing into inland freshwater lakes. So as lake levels go down, the salty seas are rising. As in the lakes, a process that might have happened naturally over many thousands of years has been accelerating exponentially in recent decades.

A saltwater invasion threatens coastal crops and raises the likelihood of full-scale destruction of coastal communities by storms and flooding. Plus, rising sea waters threaten fresh-water aquifers along the ocean coasts, which makes the preservation of clean potable water like the Great Lakes all the more pressing.

A master index of Great Lakes stressors

Dr. Allan and a team of researchers at the Great Lakes Environmental Assessment and Mapping Project (GLEAM) recently launched a website that breaks down environmental stressors including temperature change, ice cover, and loss of precipitation into a series of individual maps and a total “stress index”. Check out this video for a guide to how to use the site.

“I would caution people that the whole mapping tool is designed to be something of a 10,000 foot look at the Great Lakes,” he said. “The data get fuzzier the more you zoom in. But you can certainly get a broad picture.”

The stress index across most of Lake Michigan’s coast on the GLEAM map is very high. For example, those wide beaches Chicagoans have enjoyed in recent summers also mean shallower water just off the coasts, which can cause a host of problems including increased presence of dangerous bacteria. So much for a summer of safe Lake Michigan swimming. Check out the site for more information, but before you go, watch our instructional guide.

Scouring a Scarred Watershed

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 06:30:00 -0600

Before development clogged up natural plumbing with impervious surfaces, every drop of rain that fell within the Chicago River watershed would seep slowly through the soil into the river. Now as much as 42 percent of Cook County is covered with surfaces that do not absorb water, and instead channel it more directly into the river.

That runoff scores the landscape as it speeds through the watershed, carving out gashes in the soil over time. These gashes, called gullies, are like small ditches that let runoff water scrape away soil as they funnel it into the river.

John Quail, director of watershed planning for Friends of the Chicago River, explained Saturday to a group of volunteers how gullies encourage a vicious cycle of erosion. “Topsoil is the currency of the forest,” Quail said to the group he was training. Since fall, Friends of the Chicago River has recruited volunteers to become “Gully Walkers.”

In their effort to catalogue these scars and repair the ecosystem, Friends of the Chicago River has turned to crowd-sourcing. Gullies are a problem all over the Chicago River watershed, which comprises hundreds of square miles. The goal is to gather GPS data along at least 50 miles of the river. Once they know the size and locations of the gullies, they will dispatch volunteers to repair small ditches and call in contractors for the heavy lifting.

“We talk about restoration, but we don’t really mean it too literally,” Quail said, leading the group through Edgebrook Woods on the city’s far northwest side. “That would mean turning the North Shore into a muddy swamp.” Instead the term takes on a more general meaning: restoring nature to the urban environment. Before Chicago developed, the river meandered through a series of wetlands and marshes. Now it flows between concrete walls.

Volunteers measured the width and depth of several gullies Saturday, recording GPS data along the way. As they tracked the river downstream through the forest, they came to a hill topped with a parking lot. Standing water at the foot of the hill bled into a mat of shallow ditches — it was the source of the gullies. In the summer, Quail said, the runoff's path downhill would be more clear, appearing as chutes between the vegetation.

Whether volunteer efforts can keep pace with the growth of increased precipitation due to climate change or urban sprawl remains to be seen. The effects of negligent stormwater dumping are no drop in the bucket. In west suburban Theodore Stone Forest Preserve, stormwater dumped by a neighboring mall carved out a ditch so massive that volunteers have dubbed it “Apathy Canyon.”

A few years ago, Edgebrook Woods volunteers built a rain garden of native plants where a curb cut in the Forest Preserve’s access road released stormwater into a field. After two 100-year storms hit in as many years, though, water began to pool up beyond the rain garden. So volunteers built another one. And another. Several years and four 100-year storms later, three rain gardens helped stabilize the flow of water off North Central Avenue.

Drought could lead Chicago River to reverse course (again)

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 12:47:00 -0600

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced in early December that without much rain or snow this winter, the Chicago River could reverse course – for the second time.

Given the run-around

In the year 1900, the city's civil engineers reversed the flow of the Chicago River, sending Lake Michigan water towards the Mississippi in a famously gutsy feat of engineering. As the city and its industries grew rapidly through the late 1800s, the amount of waste and contamination dumped into the river was threatening to make the lakefront unlivable and deprive Chicagoans of safe drinking water.

When the Chicago River flows in its natural direction, "what you have is a great deal of, for lack of a better word, poo, going into the Great Lakes," said Henry Henderson of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

That’s how we got the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which served the dual purposes of diverting dirty river water away from the lake, and connecting Lake Michigan – and therefore the entire Great Lakes water basin – to the Mississippi River water system for the first time, opening up the possibility of commercial navigation between the two. Needless to say many to the south weren't happy with the new arrangement, which Henderson has described as turning Lake Michigan into "the tank that flushes our waste thousands of miles away into the Gulf of Mexico."

The new connection between the two water systems has also had unforeseen consequences in the form of invasive species, and lately environmentalists and fishing interests to the north have been calling on the Army Corps to permanently close off the link through the Chicago Area Waterway System (CAWS) in order to prevent a full-fledged Asian carp invasion. That would also restore the river to its natural flow, and force Chicago to think differently about its water infrastructure and waste treatment.

Gravity Rules

Waste treatment or not, the river might re-reverse on its own. After a long drought and one of the hottest summers ever, the water in Lake Michigan only has to go down six inches to sit below the level of the Chicago River. At that point, gravity would send the river back to where it came from.

Flowing into Lake Michigan with it: sewage runoff and only partially-treated human waste (among other things). The Chicago River has been somewhat cleaned up in recent years, but not enough to allow an uninterrupted flow back into the city’s main source of drinking water and recreational beaches.

And those suspicious swim advisories you hear about in the summer? The Chicago Park District has warned they will happen more often if the river reverses.

“Anytime you reverse the flow of the Chicago River, you want to monitor and ensure that there’s no major impacts on water quality,” said Lieutenant Colonel Jim Schreiner, Deputy Commander for the Chicago District Corps of Engineers. He said there are occasions when the Army Corps intentionally (re)-reverses the river to control flooding. All of this is manipulated by the Corps’ control over the Chicago Harbor Lock. The Army Corps is tasked both with supporting the massive shipping industry through the waterways and with helping control contamination, in partnership with the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District.

If water levels hit the lowest projections, the Army Corps will regulate lake contamination by closing the locks at Chicago for longer periods. That would limit how often boats and barges pass between the two waterways. According to Lt. Schreiner, over 40-thousand vessels pass through the locks every year in about 11,500 lockages.

This strange scenario will only come to pass if the Army Corps’ lowest possible lake level projections for the winter come true; lake levels are almost always at their yearly low in late winter. If significant rain or snow hits the Michigan-Huron region in January or February, the water will still be unusually low, but it is unlikely to lead to a major change of course.

The Eastland Disaster: The Musical!

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 13:43:00 -0500

The Eastland Disaster: All Chicagoans of a certain age (ahem, such as myself) grew up hearing about it from parents or grandparents; how, on July 24, 1915, a Lake Michigan cruise ship, overloaded with 2500 — plus passengers, tipped over while still docked in the Chicago River, killing 844 people in just 20 feet of water. Most of the dead were trapped in cabins below-decks, either drowned or crushed to death by tumbling furniture including a piano. Chicago hardly had recovered from the December 1903 Iroquois Theatre Fire in which 602 people were burned, smothered or crushed to death and now, the Eastland.

Universally, the world still was reacting to the sinking of the Titanic just three years earlier. Parallels were drawn both then and now between the two maritime disasters, but they have few similarities beyond the tremendous loss of life. The Titanic was a 900 foot luxury vessel lost in a vast ocean on its maiden voyage, while the Eastland was a 265-foot lake steamer with a decade of service, docked in a modest river.

But the biggest differences are the great and ironic hubris attached to the Titanic, declared unsinkable, and the class struggle represented by the wealth and fame of its First Class passengers vs. the nameless immigrants in steerage. The Eastland had no such hubris, especially on that July day when the vast majority of its passengers were working-class employees of the enormous Western Electric works (manufacturers of all Bell Telephone equipment) and their families, on an annual company-paid holiday. The Titanic was glamorous, the Eastland was not.

It's easy to create a dramatic work about the Titanic with its inherent themes of mankind vs. nature or god, rich vs. poor and the choices made by passengers and crew — noble or not — in the three hours it took the ship to sink. For decades, too, there was the unreachable and unknowable wreck lying 12,000 feet under the sea. There have been at least four major motion pictures about the Titanic, scores of books, several plays and a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical.

The Eastland Disaster commands none of that, as it was instantaneous and absurd, providing no time for personal drama or choices, and offering no inherent themes other than, "Why, God, why?" for the theologically inclined. People died because they arrived early and went below to escape the chill morning air. People lived because, like football great George Halas, they arrived late and were caught in traffic on LaSalle Street. The ship wasn't even lost: within weeks it was righted, refurbished and renamed (the Wilmette) and saw another 30 years of service as a training vessel at the Great Lakes Naval Base. There are a couple of books about the Eastland, a Chicago-based Eastland Disaster memorial society and now — 97 years after the event — a musical, created by the Lookingglass Theatre.

So, what kind of musical do you make out of the Eastland Disaster? The answer, for author Andrew White and composers Andre Pluess and Ben Sussman, is a blue-collar musical; a show as unglamorous and modest and accessible as the folks who boarded and died on her.

What does that mean? For starters, don't expect a Broadway-style show with production numbers and big solo songs; they're not here. Also, don't look for a lot of precise details of the what, when, where and why variety. If you want to know that the Eastland was docked at Clark Street, or was one of three steamers going out that day with Western Electric employees, or was known as the Speed Queen of the Great Lakes, you'll have to Google the "Eastland Disaster" for such things are not the concern of Eastland, the world premiere musical.

Indeed, with the exception of Mara Blumenfeld's costumes in full shirtwaist/Gibson Girl mode, there's nothing about the physical production that says "1915." The same holds true for the score by Andre Pluess and Ben Sussman, which is broadly folkloric and Appalachian in flavor. Most of the show is underscored by acoustic string instruments and piano, and the tunes don't stop to allow for applause. The contrapuntal and chorale writing is quite amazing in the few numbers (not specifically named in the program) where it reaches full flower, such as the chorus "Only the river remains."

The result — and clearly the intent — is an ethereal work which frequently is moving and haunting but rarely exciting. You may leave with musical impressions but you won't hum a tune. You certainly will remember the poor boy whose body lay unclaimed for weeks, or "the human frog" who held his breath like Houdini to dive again and again for the quick and the dead, but you won't leave with much understanding of the event itself. Lacking the obvious themes of the Titanic catastrophe, there is little to understand beyond the frequently-arbitrary and unfair falling out of life.

Author White instead wants Eastland to reflect the connections of the blue-collar, immigrant communities of which most Western Electric employees were members. His focus is on a few real people, a few fictional ones, and the patterns of love, loss, longing and family which the disaster interrupted. In director Amanda Dehnert's effectively shadowy staging, people float before you and drift in and out of Christine A. Binder's pools of light, sometimes suspended in air (as if in water), with dripping-wet clothing hauled out of iron washtubs to represent the dead, and with the audience seated in church pews within a Chautauqua tent.

Eastland wishes to be an elegy and not an exclamation point, an ache rather than a terrible wound, and at this it is highly successful. It continues at Lookingglass Theatre in the Water Tower Pumping Station through July 29.

The 'Eastland' disaster

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 07:00:00 -0500

Even at its widest part, the Chicago River is not much of a river. You can walk across one of the downtown bridges in less than a minute. The water here is barely 20 feet deep. Calm, peaceful and not very dangerous.

July 24, 1915 was a Saturday. That morning the steamship Eastland was moored at the south bank of the river, just west of the Clark Street Bridge. The ship was scheduled to depart for a cruise to Michigan City. Most of the 2,500 passengers were employees at the Western Electric plant in Cicero, on their way to a company picnic.

Boarding began at 6:30 a.m. The ship began to list to starboard. This wasn’t unusual, and the crew took measures to balance it.

Shortly before 7:30, the Eastland cast off. After an hour of sways and straightening, the ship was now listing toward port—in this case, away from the dock. During the next few minutes the list continued. Finally, the ship simply rolled over onto its side.

The whole thing happened so quickly. There wasn’t time to grab life jackets, or get into the lifeboats. Many of the passengers had gone below deck to get out of the cool morning drizzle, and were trapped.

The Eastland settled into the mud at the bottom of the river. The hull jutted out above the water line. The ship was barely 20 feet from the dock.

Help was immediately on the scene. Some passengers had made their way to the hull of the overturned ship and jumped off into rescue boats. Others were plucked out of the river. Meanwhile, firemen clambered atop the wreck and began cutting through the hull, hoping to free those trapped below.

A total of 848 people died. Among the dead, 22 families were entirely wiped out. The Eastland sinking was the single deadliest disaster in Chicago history.

Someone had to take the blame. Both state and federal investigations were launched. Though the captain and some others were indicted under various charges, the cases were never brought to trial.

The Eastland itself was raised, sold to the Illinois Naval Reserve, and became a training ship called the Wilmette. It was scrapped in 1947.

Nobody really knows what caused the Eastland to capsize. One story is that the passengers suddenly rushed to one side of the deck to look at something on shore, and that caused the tipping.

Most likely, the original design and later modifications to the Eastland had simply made it top-heavy. And three weeks before the tragedy, the ship had added three lifeboats and six life rafts to its upper deck. This last 12 tons of weight may have been just too much.

So in the end, we might say the Eastland was victim of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Those new lifeboats and life rafts had been put on board because of new federal safety regulations—which had been enacted after the sinking of the Titanic.

January 2, 1900: Reversing the Chicago River

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 11:15:00 -0600

In case you hadn't noticed, the Chicago River flows backwards. It's been doing this for over a hundred years.

Like any normal river, the Chicago River used to flow into a larger body of water--namely, Lake Michigan. This became a problem in the middle of the 19th Century. As Chicago grew into a major city, the raw sewage of civilization was dumped into the river and flushed through to the lake. And the lake was where Chicagoans got their drinking water.

Besides being gross, this was dangerous. All those germs in the drinking water produced outbreaks of cholera or typhoid or other diseases.

You'll often hear the story of the Great Chicago Plague. It's said that cholera wiped out 70,000 people in a single year, about 20% of the city's population. Don't believe it. Someone cooked up the tale to make a point.

In any case, the solution to the pollution was simple. Just reverse the flow of the river so that it didn't empty into the lake.

Build a barrier at the east end of the Chicago River to block it off from the lake. At the same time, connect the west end to the Des Plaines River. Then our water would flow through the Des Plaines into the Illinois River, which flowed into the Mississippi River, which carried everything off into the Gulf of Mexico, a thousand miles away.

At first the engineers tried to deepen the Illinois & Michigan Canal, and use it as the west-end drain. That didn't work. A new canal was needed, and in 1889 the Illinois legislature approved plans to build the Chicago Drainage Canal.

Digging began in 1893. The Drainage Canal was going to be 28 miles long, 24 feet deep, and 202 feet wide. It was said to be the greatest public works project in history.

As the canal neared completion, some downriver towns weren't happy about Chicago sewage flavoring their drinking water. St. Louis prepared a lawsuit to halt the project.

Politicians love to hold dedication ceremonies, to show voters that tax dollars are being wisely spent. Now they couldn't wait. On the morning of January 2, 1900, an anonymous flunky simply opened the sluice gate, and the Chicago River began flowing into the new canal. Fait accompli!

Today the drainage canal is called the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. Meanwhile, two other waterways have been built to aid its noble work.

And if you look at the census figures, you'll note that the population of St. Louis keeps getting smaller and smaller. Is it something in their water?

Clever Apes: Top 5 Chicago science stories of 2011

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:21:00 -0600

Here at Clever Apes, we’re big proponents of giving the people what they want. First off, I have decided that they want a one-hour Clever Apes special, with our favorite segments from 2011 all gift-wrapped into one apey package. I have chosen to be overwhelmed by a groundswell of public pressure for such a special, and have therefore answered the call that (I would guess) has rung out loud and clear. Click the “listen” button above to hear.

Secondly, based on our web traffic, what the people want are Top 5 and year-end lists. So here are our nominations for the top 5 Chicago science stories of 2011:

5. Lab-grown neurons advance Alzheimer’s research

A team at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine has figured out how to grow a type of neuron affected by Alzhemier’s Disease. Basal forebrain cholinergic neurons are crucial to retrieving memories. Thanks largely to the determination of a grad student named Christopher Bissonette, scientists can now make these cells to order based on human embryonic stem cells, or even artificially made stem cells. This could greatly speed up the testing of drug candidates, and could someday open up the possibility of transplanting healthy neurons into the stricken brain of an Alzheimer’s patient.

4. New artifacts rewrite the history of human settlement in North America

A major find in central Texas has largely overturned the long-dominant theory of when humans arrived in North America. For years, archaeologists believed that the first North Americans were the Clovis people, who showed up around 13,000 years ago. Cracks had been appearing in that theory, and the latest excavation may spell its end. The newly dated artifacts appear to be 15,000 years old. That insight comes partly from the lab of University of Illinois at Chicago professor Steven Forman. He uses a technique called luminescence dating, which calculates when the last time deeply buried object was exposed to sunlight.

3. Satellite discovers new worlds

The Kepler satellite mission has had a huge year. To date it identified about 2,326 planets outside of our solar system, known as exoplanets. Recently it found the first known planet in the “habitable zone,” meaning it sits in a region where liquid water could exist. It also found the first known earth-sized planets, and earlier this year, a batch of multiple-planet solar systems, including one with six planets. Batavia-based astrophysicist Jason Steffen is part of the Kepler team, and did much of the computational work behind the finds. It has also, coincidentally, been a big year for Steffen, who got much attention for experimental results supporting his theory on the best way to board an airplane.

2. Chicago River gets less icky

The Chicago River, long relegated to glorified sewage ditch, is poised to get a lot less disgusting. The water reclamation district, under pressure from state and federal environmental regulators, has agreed to start disinfecting the effluent that makes up most of the river system’s water. That represents a big about-face for the agency and a victory for environmentalists and river users (though the cost to homeowners, who will finance much of the project, remains a big question mark). The agency also recently agreed to curb discharges of raw sewage into the river by committing to a timetable for completing the deep tunnel and reservoir project and beefing up green infrastructure. It will still be years before you can swim in the river without a Purell bath afterwards, but this year clearly marked a basic shift in how the region thinks about its waterways.

1. The passing of the Tevatron

For decades, Fermilab’s big particle collider kept the Chicago area (and the United States) at the frontier of high-energy physics. Finally, this year, scientists pulled the plug on one of the most remarkable machines ever constructed. The Tevatron gave scientists a clear look at the top quark, a fundamental building block of matter that had long eluded detection. It yielded a trove of insights into how the tiniest particles behave, pushed forward the search for the mysterious Higgs Boson, advanced superconducting technology and seeded its eventual usurper, the Large Hadron Collider. There’s lots more cutting-edge research unfolding at Fermilab, but its longtime crown jewel is now an artifact on the prairie.

There you have it, 2011. Clever Apes will be back next year with lots more from the fascinating, odd and deeply human world of Chicago-area science. As always, don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast, follow us on Twitter, and find us on Facebook.