When was chicago river reversed

The long problem of protecting the city's drinking water had at last been solved. When the gates at Lockport chugged open months later, the Illinois River swelled with Chicago's pent-up effluence, and the days of water-borne disease swept away with the subsiding flood.

The reversal of the Chicago River created its own problems: It flushed big-city waste into prairie rivers and forever altered local hydrology. But it opened the door to still further advancements. In , the world's largest water-reclamation plant was built on the Sanitary and Ship Canal's banks in Cicero, eventually processing more than 1. Photo credit: CityFiles Press. Meanwhile, there was still work to be done in Chicago. Although the reversal of the Chicago River was hailed as a public health and engineering triumph, the populations of several lakefront suburbs grew and continued dumping their own waste into Lake Michigan.

Neighboring states along the Great Lakes, meanwhile, grew concerned about the diversion of Lake Michigan water to the Chicago River. After the Supreme Court ruled that those concerns were warranted, a series of locks were installed to help control the diversion of the fresh lake water into the river. Although the death rate decreased in Chicago, the river continued to be an open sewer system, carrying raw human and industrial waste through the city.

It serves more than five million people and processes approximately 1. This idea would also benefit the city by providing a continuous transportation link from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.

While the idea was relatively simple — using gravity to make water flow from the river into the continually deepening canal and then into another river — the construction was not.

Beginning in , the main channel the first phase of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal took eight years to complete, and nearly 40 million cubic yards of earth and rock were removed all along the mile kilometer stretch. By , the first phase of the canal opened, with the river permanently reversed and the waste problem solved. In , the state of Missouri sued Illinois , but the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of Illinois, stating that there was no evidence that the water quality in the Mississippi River had been affected.

Construction continued uninterrupted, and the canal was extended several times, including the building of other canals to support and perfect the system. Esme Benjamin contributed additional reporting to this article. In the years to follow, several side channels and canals were built to extend the canal, flush waste water, and allow more water into the main channel. Since its completion, the historic Chicago River reversal has left a mixed legacy of innovation and, unfortunately, environmental damage.

However, at the time of the reversal, no one was even thinking about the environmental impact of the waterway.