A river's reckoning

Chicago likes to think of the filth flowing in its namesake river as nobody's business but its own, and for most of the last century that might have been true. But today that dirty water has become a problem for all the Great Lakes - the world's largest freshwater system and a drinking water source for 40 million people.

Blame the Asian carp.

More than a century ago, the city reversed the Chicago River to carry its sewage away from Lake Michigan and into a Mississippi River-bound canal system. Today, those canals have become a flashpoint in the battle to protect the Great Lakes from the leaping carp that can devastate prized fish populations and inflict brutal blows on unsuspecting boaters.

With the invaders finning their way up the canal waters toward the Lake Michigan shoreline, a push is on to reconstruct the natural barrier between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi basins that the Chicago canals destroyed so long ago.

It is a project that would almost surely mean that Chicago's river - and some of the city's wastewater - would again flow into Lake Michigan.

This itself would be an ecological disaster - if Chicago sewage officials can't figure out how to clean up sewage discharges that are among the nastiest in the nation.

Chicago has a rare distinction among major American cities: It does not employ a disinfection stage at its three main sewage treatment plants.

The result is a river and canal system running so thick with fecal coliform that signs along the banks warn that the contents below are not suitable for "any human body contact."

It is poison, basically.

Even before the carp arrived, conservationists had been pushing the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago to not just do basic sewage treatment, but also to disinfect its discharges, a step nearly every other major American city takes. That's something the district boss dismisses as not worth the expense, which would be no more than $2 to $3 per household per month according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The reclamation district shows no signs of budging on the issue, even as pressure mounts to do whatever it will take to safeguard the Great Lakes - and its $7 billion fishing industry - from what biologists call a menacing invader.

That's not what reclamation district boss Richard Lanyon calls the fish.

He calls them "these stupid Asian carp."

more from the Journal-Sentinel