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Drought could lead Chicago River to reverse course (again)

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers warns low water in Lake Michigan could cause the river to flow back into the lake

December 17, 2012


By: Lewis Wallace

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.