Imagine your city drawing its drinking water and sewage from the same river. That was Chicago’s problem in the late 1800s. The Chicago River flushed the city’s waste into Lake Michigan, the city’s sole source of drinking water. According to the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRD), a fast-growing population and fear of disease pushed officials to act. Their fix was bold. They decided to reverse the flow of an entire river.
A city poisoning its own water
By the late 1800s, Chicago was one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. The more people there were, the more waste there was, and that waste had no place to go but the river. According to WTTW Chicago's account of the reversal, the city was battling typhoid, cholera, and other waterborne illnesses. A bigger sewer system wasn’t sufficient. Engineers had to send the waste far away from the lake, for good.
How do you turn a river around?
Rivers don't turn around on command. But Chicago is near a low ridge. That ridge separates the Great Lakes basin from the Mississippi River basin. Engineers had a simple idea. Dig a deep ditch towards the Des Plaines River, and gravity would take the water the other way.
That channel became the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. According to MWRD's own history of the project, the excavation took a lot of people and equipment, working in tough conditions. Chicago Sun-Times op-ed by MWRD president Kari K. Steele, chief engineer Isham Randolph later applied what he learned here to help build the Panama Canal.
