Fake Riverbanks Turn a Chicago Canal 'Wild'

August 13, 2018 8:10 AM

The name “Chicago” derives from a word in the language spoken by the Miami and Illinois peoples meaning “striped skunk, ” a word they also applied to the wild leek (known to later botanists as Allium tricoccum). This became the Indian name for the Chicago River, in recognition of the presence of wild leeks in the watershed. You probably wouldn't want to eat any if you did come across any growing on the banks of the Chicago River now, but there are efforts to turn a mile of the river "wild" again. By 2020, Urban Rivers wants the canal to house birds, fish, trees, and mussels. To do that, it has to build a habitat almost from scratch.
posted by filthy light thief (15 comments total)

I've been to the place in the photograph. If you look down onto the little islands, you can see an abandoned goose (?) nest with actual eggs in it. Unfortunately, I think they've been there for months.

However, it's a pretty picturesque spot. There were a bunch of ducks there and it's fairly quiet. I saw an actual hawk in an adjacent tree, too.

The little woven islands were very mysterious. It's nice to know what's going on with them.
posted by amtho at 8:48 AM on August 13, 2018

I like the idea, though like everything else related to Chicago geography, it's also ungodly.
posted by ZeusHumms at 9:52 AM on August 13, 2018

but there are efforts to turn a mile of the river "wild" again.

To be clear, there is no “again” about it. Nor even really a “wild,” for that matter. The North Branch Canal is not a river, it’s a man-made steel-walled shipping canal bypassing a section of the river. Since there are no banks, the plants are on little rafts and need to be constantly tended.
posted by Sys Rq at 11:01 AM on August 13, 2018 [3 favorites]

Sys Rq, thanks for the correction and context.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:25 AM on August 13, 2018

Big shoulders!
posted by clavdivs at 11:44 AM on August 13, 2018

The effort to dump less untreated sewage into the river has been tough, because Chicago does not have separate storm sewers, so when it rains heavily they sometimes have too much runoff and have to dump it in the river. One partial solution has been the deep tunnel project, which diverts water through tunnels and into disused quarries. Check it out. It holds 8 billion gallons.
posted by mai at 11:45 AM on August 13, 2018 [3 favorites]

Here’s Wikipedia on the deep tunnel project, which has been a long time coming.
posted by mai at 11:47 AM on August 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

See also, my favorite single serving website: istheresewageinthechicagoriver.com.
posted by mai at 11:50 AM on August 13, 2018 [4 favorites]

See also, my favorite single serving website: istheresewageinthechicagoriver.com.

I was expecting to just see "YES," but the website is is more nuanced, and informative. The question on the website is "Is raw sewage being dumped into Chicago rivers right now?" and right now, the answer is "No, But sewage overflow has occurred on 660 days since 2007. See when »"

It also has a good bit of history

Whenever Chicago gets a lot of rain or there's a significant snowmelt, the Chicagoland water management agencies must dump excess wastewater into the lake and river in order to prevent flooding.

It's because of practices like these that the city reversed Chicago River's flow in 1900 to avoid contaminating our drinking supply. As a result, a significant amount of 'nutrient pollution' from Chicago travels down the Illinois and Mississippi rivers and collects in the Gulf of Mexico in a dead zone roughly the size of New Hampshire.

Here's a story from 2015 about the historic river reversal, "an incredible engineering feat that turned the Eastern half of the United States into an island."
posted by filthy light thief at 12:36 PM on August 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

Yeah, on the “see when” page it shows that they last dumped in March. So the tunnels are working! Mostly! They reached capacity in May after a very snowy winter and wet spring. But it’s been a very dry summer. So the river is probably more sewage-free than it has been in over 100 years!
posted by mai at 1:52 PM on August 13, 2018

I may have spoken too soon. I found a news story about sewage outflow from June: here. That website may not be up to date.
posted by mai at 1:59 PM on August 13, 2018

As a beautification project, this is great, and should be applicable to other highly manipulated "rivers" and canals that are no longer needed for shipping.

But to call it "wild" is silly, they could do more honest branding on this one.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:49 PM on August 13, 2018

I am envious of Chicago's reporting, frankly. Milwaukee and Wisconsin's reporting on MMSD's sewage overflows tend to just sort of position it as something MMSD does for kicks or because they're a lazy union operation or something and not, y'know, an unfortunate consequence of a combined sewer system that treats every cubic inch of rain that falls on an impermeable surface in the city's catchment area. Sure, they usually manage to keep ahead of the rainfall, but sometimes the storage capacity is exceeded and overflows into waterways occur. Or you flood people's basements with a hearty poo slurry. If you're particularly bad, both!
posted by Kyol at 7:43 AM on August 14, 2018

Based on reading the above about Lake Michigan, it's odd to think that communities just outside the watershed keep trying to get their drinking water from the lake.
posted by ZeusHumms at 9:52 AM on August 14, 2018

The alternative in Waukesha is radon contaminated ground water and while water treatment plants are set up to deal with the consequences of the occasional brown trout, expanding the radon treatment capacity is more expensive than running a gigantic pipeline going over the ridge and back, I guess.

Anyway, probably getting away from the original discussions. It's lovely, although I have to wonder if there's been any consideration for "returning" the canals to normally-bedded waterways (by pulling up the steel siding, say), or are they only possible because of the siding? Milwaukee was busy over the past few decades removing a lot of concrete-sided waterways and returning them to nature with the occasional property buyout for what would turn into a floodplain.
posted by Kyol at 10:33 AM on August 14, 2018