Daywatch: Smoke from Canadian wildfires to hit Chicago again
Good morning, Chicago.
Hours before heavy rains swamped Chicago and Cook County suburbs on July 2, the region’s $3.8 billion flood-control project appeared ready as can be to bottle up storm runoff.
The Deep Tunnel’s massive sewers, capable of holding 2.3 billion gallons, were almost empty, according to Metropolitan Water Reclamation District records.
At the end of tunnels hundreds of feet below the Chicago River, Des Plaines River and North Shore Channel, the McCook Reservoir — more than 20 times larger than Soldier Field — was just 17% full of raw sewage and runoff being stored until it could be safely treated.
But the first sign of trouble came before 8:30 a.m., when runoff mixed with human and industrial waste began pouring into the Des Plaines from an overflow pipe at 40th Street in southwest suburban Lyons, district records show.
Two hours later, the same thing happened at a pump station in north suburban Wilmette and another, much larger facility off Lawrence Avenue in Chicago, where fetid gunk flowed into the North Branch of the Chicago River for nearly a day. Waste and runoff would end up pouring out of 19 other overflow pipes across the county, from Evanston to Westchester, many for hours at a time.
“When you have a slow-moving storm that’s dumping a large amount of rainfall, it doesn’t take much to cause problems,” said Zachary Yack, a National Weather Service meteorologist.
Read the full story by Michael Hawthorne and Adriana Pérez.
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