120 Million Gallons of Raw Sewage Dumped Into Lake Michigan
Lets see, it rained a lot last night and today, I wonder if the locks were open…the Evanston Review says they were. How about the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, the guys who run the locks, what do they have to say…ah nothing, they took that part of the website down, here’s where it used to be, part of some transparency program no doubt. You can still buy rain barrels, but apparently the MWRD hasn’t distributed the 233 barrels for every man, woman and child in the Chicago area necessary to prevent spillage into Lake Michigan.
Wilmette Life has the locks opening up at approximately 1:20 AM Friday, till late Friday afternoon. They were most likely open this evening during the downpour, of course no one would know that because the website is obscured. But, just to be conservative, perhaps 12 hours of flow went into Lake Michigan. The locks drain around 1 billion gallons per hour, thats 12 billion gallons of untreated wastewater into Lake Michigan.
Around 1% of that is sewage, so that give us 120 Million gallons of raw sewage into Lake Michigan. No big surprise here, ABC7 notes that all Chicago Beaches have been closed.
Our experience has been that the basement never took on water until after the Deep Tunnel was constructed. Every serious flooding incident that has occurred was the result of water backing into the basement through the floor drain.
A big clean up is underway. This is the first time that significant damage occurred in over twenty years.
I wonder how many people suffered damage due to the surge protectors placed on the city sewer drains? The street and sidewalk now have a nice coating of mud.
As a resident of an eastern state that is liberal too, I suggest you acquire the influence of the many native IL Obama nation to grant you stimulus monies to dig/blast/bore an eco-friendly tunnel connecting to the Potamac River just upstream from D.C. They will scarcly sense the difference-
Further, it will be covered over in green, to be sure-
scary….. I wonder how long it takes 120 million gallons of sewage to filter out of the lake. Does it eventually go down the Chicago river?
The Chicago sea kayaking community is very concerned about the limited and untimely information the MWRD’s supplies when it discharges floodwater containing untreated sewage into Lake Michigan:
http://caskaorg.typepad.com/caska/2009/06/mwrd-discharging-sewage-into-lake-michigan-beaches-closed.html
MWRD could use some readily available technologies (e.g., Twitter) to inform the public when it is discharging floodwater into Lake Michigan, how long it is discharging and how much it is discharging.
To answer a previous post, once this floodwater containing untreated sewage hits Lake Michigan it does not come back into the Chicago River. It is in Lake Michigan for good.
If you really want to know how many days your Lake Michigan Beaches have been closed, check out Illinois Beach Guard System via your search bar. It’s frightening. Why in this day and age we are discharging raw sewage into our drinking supply defies logic. It’s business as usual in Illinois- gov’t make up their own rules..rather than the laws on the books. I thought that the Water Reclamation district had to inform the public of any discharges into the Lake.
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