Landmarks: ‘Often forgotten’ reversal of Calumet River a key part of Chicago area water strategy

The Chicago area has traditionally been a pretty wet place, going back thousands and even millions of years.

The limestone pulled out of quarries in Thornton and Lemont was originally part of a reef in a tropical sea dating back to before dinosaurs roamed. If you look close along roadways lined with the white stones, ancient fossilized seashells can occasionally be found.

Much more recently, Blue Island was an actual island poking out of glacial Lake Chicago, a meltwater-swollen version of Lake Michigan that extended as far south as Homewood.

At some point thousands of years ago, the lake breached its shore near Stickney and an unimaginable cascade of water carved out the modern valleys of the Des Plaines and Illinois rivers while making its way to the Mississippi River.

So it’s not surprising when the area is inundated with lots of rainfall that flooding becomes an issue.

“So many people don’t understand where they live in terms of geology,” said Dick Lanyon, whose understanding of such matters was informed by a 48-year career with the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, including several years as executive director.

“The Chicago area is on a huge flat plain straddling the divide between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River,” he said Wednesday amid a series of storms. “When you have a lot of rainfall on flat land, it just doesn’t drain off very quickly.”

So water begins to seep into basements and fills up viaducts, even though engineers have been working for more than a century on ways to keep those things from happening.

Lanyon is retired from the MWRD now and used the time since to research and write a four-book history of drainage efforts in the Chicago area. His latest, “Calumet: First and Forever — Draining the South Area of Chicago,” is the subject of a Historic Pullman Foundation presentation at 3 p.m. July 23 at Pullman Exhibit Hall, 11141 S. Cottage Grove Ave.

In the 1800s, as the modern Chicago area began to take shape, the place was still rather moist from its earlier incarnation as Lake Chicago.

“Early on, it was muddy, unsanitary,” Lanyon said. “There was no pavement, no sidewalks, but because of jobs and opportunity, people wanted to live here. It was a rapidly growing area. But in the early days it was a tough environment in which to live.”

Massacres, floods, huge catastrophic fires — nothing seemed to stop the rise of Chicago until it started choking on its own waste. In 1900, the city stunned the world by reversing its eponymous river, diverting its polluted effluent from Lake Michigan down the same path ancient Lake Chicago’s waters took thousands of years before, with help from the Sanitary and Ship Canal.

It was a huge success, and was even initially celebrated in some communities downriver, Lanyon said.

“Oftentimes, the Illinois River would dry up, so this additional water was like a godsend,” he said. “But then as the sewage made its way down, along with the solids in the sewage, it became a real nuisance for cities right on the river like Joliet and Peoria. An odorous nuisance.”

While the federal Clean Water Act helped alleviate some of those water woes in the later part of the 20th century, the Illinois River system is now beset by new nuisances such as algal blooms generated by agricultural runoff.

In Chicago, there was still more work to be done as the city was still expanding, especially to the south where industry had taken hold and the Calumet River was still draining into Lake Michigan a few miles south of the drinking water intake at 68th Street.

Though the growth of the city in the early 1900s corresponded with advances such as disinfection for drinking water, the supply still wasn’t filtered, and on the South Side “you might get some sediment or a little fish come through the pipes,” Lanyon said.

“It was risky for people who lived on the South Side and depended on that water that was brought in through the 68th Street crib,” he said. “The district (what’s now known as the MWRD) knew that if they didn’t control that flow and reverse the Calumet River there would be pollution problems in Lake Michigan.”

But converting the Calumet wouldn’t be as easy as the celebrated 1900 Chicago River reversal, which had caught the eye of officials in Washington, D.C.

“In the 1890s, there was no federal interest in water resource development or control,” Lanyon said. “State law allowed them to discharge water, build a canal and take water from Lake Michigan to dilute sewage.”

By the time it was Calumet’s turn, the national Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act of 1899 had created more red tape, and officials in Chicago had to scale down their plans.

They were allowed to create the Calumet-Saganashkee Channel canal, but were prohibited from diverting any more water from Lake Michigan than they already were as part of the Chicago River project.

“So the original Calumet-Sag Channel was very small,” Lanyon said. “It was no bigger than the I&M Canal in terms of width. That made it only a partial reversal of the Calumet River.”

In the city’s early days, the main strategy behind waste treatment was dilution — mix sewage with a bunch of fresh water and let natural processes take care of it. Without the right to bring in enough Lake Michigan water to make the Calumet River anything more than an open sewer, officials added more infrastructure. The Calumet treatment facility as well as pumping stations at 95th and 125th streets were added around the same time as the Cal-Sag Channel opened in 1922.

“The idea was to collect and pump all the sewage that was going into the Calumet River, treat it and then convey it over to the east end of the Cal-Sag Channel in Blue Island and discharge it away from Lake Michigan,” Lanyon said.

The project was supposed to be an extension of the Chicago River success, but the federal permitting process delayed the start of work until 1911.

“They ran into trouble with the first world war,” Lanyon said, citing shortages of labor and material.

By the time it opened in 1922, the Calumet treatment plant was nearly obsolete, and 14 years later it was replaced with a larger facility “which employed new technology that’s basically the same technology as today,” he said, though there have been improvements along the way and the capacity has increased.

Now, “the Calumet plant treats the sewage from everything basically south of 87th Street — a population of a million or a million and a half people,” Lanyon said.

And after big rainstorms such as those last week, all the combined sewer overflow that ends up in the district’s tunnel system and is stored in the Thornton reservoir is eventually treated at Calumet before being sent down the Cal-Sag.

The channel is able to handle the load thanks to post-World War II industrialists who lobbied the federal government for a Cal-Sag widening project that would enable more shipping.

“The Cal-Sag was a shorter route than going up the Chicago River and into Lake Michigan,” Lanyon said, and throughout the 1960s the channel was widened by about four times and the O’Brien Lock and Dam was added, among other work.

Now fully reversed, the Cal-Sag joined the Chicago River as the only outlets from the Great Lakes aside from the St. Lawrence River at the east end of Lake Ontario.

Decades after the first Lake Michigan water hit the Mississippi River, six other Great Lakes states filed suit to stop the water diversion. That initial litigation in the 1950s gave Lanyon his first opportunity to dip his toes into Chicago’s myriad water issues at an engineering firm that was working on the case. Not long afterward, he started at the MWRD and became fully immersed.

“I got familiar with the way water flows in my hometown, which I hadn’t really paid attention to while I was growing up, even though I grew up along the North Branch of the Chicago River,” he said.

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The diversion issue is still an open docket before the Supreme Court, he said, but there hasn’t been “really busy litigation” since the 1960s. High lake levels in recent years seem to have pushed the issue even further on the back burner.

The main source of diversion of Lake Michigan water, Lanyon said, is for domestic supply. All the rain that falls in the watersheds of the Chicago and Calumet rivers that now is sent southwest comes in second.

“The smallest portion is the water used directly from the lake for operation of the locks on the Calumet River and downtown in the Chicago River,” he said.

Water from all three diversions eventually ends up taking the same route through the busy corridor where early explorers Louis Jolliet and Jacque Marquette paddled into what would become the Chicago area 350 years ago.

It’s the same route the water from glacial Lake Chicago created when it burst its bank thousands of years ago.

Should the reversal of the Calumet and Chicago rivers become an active legal issue again, the MWRD could argue they’re following historical — and prehistorical — precedent.

Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.