Down Chicago’s Drain

The Chicago Reader talks to some of the candidates for the board of the Water Reclamation District in the 2010 primary election. As the article points out, what was once an position nobody paid attention to is slowly getting more attention.

And now that the results are in, none of the new candidates the Reader interviewed won, only the three incumbents for the board.

Here's our sturdy Water Bug trash boat, covered in dust. What to do with it? For the last two years it has been resting in a storage area at JPUSA, but Mike tells me the area will soon be remodelled and built out into a church space. All this junk needs to go!

So what should we do with the boat? It would be great to fix it up and take it out on the water again, but I have no place to store it, and in any case it will be several months before the weather is warm enough for any boat trips. To think of all the work we put into building it, it would be a shame to toss it out to the scrappers, but I'm not sure what other options we have.

NPR is running a nice series this week on the Mekong River. Michael Sullivan travels from the headwaters in Tibet all the way down the the delta in Vietnam, talking about the history of the river as well as its current ecological conditions.

Two transportation experts from Michigan are disputing the projected costs of blocking the Illinois Waterway, as claimed by Illinois and government officials.

According to the LA Times article, more than 3800 loaded barges pass through the O'Brien Lock yearly, which is located on the Calumet river and is the primary shipping channel connecting the Great Lakes to the Illinois River.

The two analysts claim that the $70 million loss to trade of transferring cargo by truck or rail over the closed lock is small in comparison to the $7 billion fishing industry which will be devastated if Asian Carp make it upstream into Lake Michigan.

If the lock is closed, I have my doubts that cargo will simply be transferred from barge to truck to boat to hurdle over the barrier. Closing the lock will disrupt barge and towboat traffic along the canal, but how much of the traffic passing through the lock is headed for distant ports? The barges of the canal are not headed out onto Lake Michigan, and the great ocean-going ships are too large to head very far downstream. How much cargo really will be affected if the locks are closed?

One other type of traffic that will be affected if the locks are closed are the pleasure boats and tour boats. And will the Chicago Harbor Lock at the mouth of the Chicago River be affected as well? Tour boat operators are fighting against closing the locks as well.