Public invited to weigh in on water quality

MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

A thick, white blanket of misty fog hovers above the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal on the Southwest Side, where warm-water discharge from an adjacent power plant meets the cold January air.

Midwest Generation's power plants, Crawford at 350l S. Pulaski and Fisk, at 1111 W. Cermak Road, produce coal-generated electricity for more than a million homes.

But the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency says the plants should lower the temperature of the water before releasing it back into the canal. The water is used to cool the plants' condensers. It's one of several proposals the IEPA presented to the Illinois Pollution Control Board in October after an exhaustive five-year study on the 78-mile-long Chicago Area Waterway System and Lower Des Plaines River.

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What: Public hearings on water quality standards and effluent limitations at the Illinois Pollution Control Board.
When: 10 a.m. Monday through Friday
Where: James R. Thompson Center, 100 W. Randolph St., Room 9-040
For more information on the hearings and a copy of the Illinois EPA study, visit www.ipcb.state.il.us

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Beginning Monday, the public will have the opportunity to weigh in on IEPA's proposals, among them lowering the temperature of coal plant effluents and requiring sewage treatment facilities to disinfect water before discharging it back into the waterways.

"This is an opportunity to essentially improve the standard of these waterways," said Cindy Skrukrud, a clean water advocate at the Sierra Club's Illinois chapter who plans to attend the week-long hearings at the James R. Thompson Center.

Skrukrud praised the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago for pushing projects such as the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan (TARP), which helps lower the frequency of combined sewage overflow into the rivers. But she said it's high time for a disinfection program to protect canoe and kayak users who frequent the waterways.

"People are seeing the river more as an amenity, the other water feature in Chicago besides Lake Michigan," Skrukrud said. "It makes sense now to go a step further so that we are protecting the people who are using it more."

The proposals call for the Reclamation District to disinfect for fecal coliform bacteria at its North Side and Calumet reclamation plants, in addition to its plant in Stickney, the largest wastewater treatment facility in the world.

"We feel the reclamation district is being very penny wise," said Albert Ettinger, who will represent the Chicago-based Environmental Law and Policy Center at the hearings. Ettinger said most large-city treatment facilities already disinfect their water, and that Chicago's facilities are long overdue for a similar program.

"They persist in letting the waters be extensions of the sewer system," Ettinger said, adding that many student row teams already use the waterway's rivers and canals. He said he's ready for a "rough and tumble" hearing next week.

At the heart of the debate is how to interpret the EPA's 1972 Clean Water Act, which states that all bodies of waters must be "fishable and swimmable," unless they qualify for an exemption. Waterway advocates argue that Chicago waters should be made safer for recreational boaters and even waders, but opponents argue manmade waterways like the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal were explicitly designed to redirect sewage and industrial effluent.

According to the IEPA report, the reclamation district estimates a disinfectionprogram would cost between $963 million and $2.7 billion in capital cost and operation and maintenance costs.

Midwest would likely have to build cooling towers or "closed cycle" cooling systems at five of its plants to comply with the proposed temperature standards, a cost the company estimated between $559 million and $790 million, according to the report.

Calls to Midwest and the Reclamation District were not returned.