What is the Water Doing?

3/18/2011

The Illinois Pollution Control Board held a hearing Friday, March 9th to determine what the water quality standards should be for the Chicago Area Waterway System(CAWS). 

Before, the waterway system was basically considered a drainage ditch.The city and metro areas would dump all its waste-water that then goes down the CAWS to the Illinois River and to the Mississippi River.  

Chicago does not in fact disinfect its waste-water and does not do the third part of a three part waste-water treatment process that almost all other major cities do. 

Now that people are using the waterways for recreation, environmentalist want a better habitat for fish and aquatic life. 

Main issues assessed in in the hearing were deciding if the water quality standards should be upgraded to support more recreational uses and aquatic life on the waterways.

A standard brought up was water temperature and the affect it may have. Water temperatures have been brought up as a means of cooling. “More fish can live in 70 degrees rather than 90 degrees.” In order to change this, cooling towers will have to be applied and cost for this are an issue. 

The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District(MWRD) said  “disinfection is too expensive and the costs are not justified - despite the fact that people get sick every year because of coming into contact with the water (and public health and safety should be cost enough) and that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency(EPA) estimates that it would only cost $1.94 per household per month.”

MWRD also has two main concerns, “whether to disinfect: because they currently do not disinfect from discharge from the big three sewage plants, and whether to treat combine sewage over flows better.” 

Combine Sewage overflow referring to when it rains hard and there is not enough pipes or waste water treatment plants in the system, so it backs up the sewer overflows and goes into the river as untreated waste.” 

Representatives from both Midwest Generation and Citgo attended the hearing. 

A representative of the energy company Midwest Generation said “the heat discharge and how the fish in the system are being affected is most important.” 

“The clean water act representing the saying be all that you can be is stating that we want the water to be fishable and swimmable if at all attainable” says Albert Ettinger a senior attorney for the Environmental Law and Policy Center. 

“In the 70’s this was not thought to be attainable, when it came to establish criteria for the systems in the early 70’s, they have rather lacked criteria” says Ettinger”

The Illinois Environment Protection Agency says “we can improve the criteria and provide better treatments at the sewage plants, industrial discharges and power plants, and what we have already have can be improved as well.”

Overall pollution has been a big issue, but nipping it in the bud has been an even bigger goal for the state of Illinois. The necessary steps are being taken to make sure that the water systems and sewage plants around the state of Illinois are taking the best measures possible to attain clean and healthy water for citizens and wildlife.