Jake Lieb drives his John Deere two-seater around his property and across the shallow Camp Creek. The waterway cuts back and forth through miles of farm fields until it reaches the Sangamon River and eventually pours into Lake Decatur 32 miles away — the man-made source of water for 200,000 people.
These are troubled waters. The city of Decatur paid $100 million in 2021 to dredge so much polluted sediment from the lake that it could have filled the Willis Tower seven times.
