Ecosystem Interactions Class Discussion Presentation in Blue Green Lined Styl...
Water cycle 1
1. Special Report
Water: Demand & Supply
By Jerry Dennis
The water supply of the Chicago region is not infinite. How can we preserve this vital
natural resource?
In this special report, Chicago Wilderness examines freshwater needs for people and
nature.
In an age when more than a billion people around the world lack access to safe drinking
water, Chicago appears to sit on the hydrological version of Easy Street. Other major
cities must rely on elaborate and expensive systems of tunnels, flumes, canals, and
reservoirs to draw freshwater from sources so distant that inhabitants of those cities might
never see them. Many have no idea where their water comes from.
Not so in Chicago. Here the source is plain to see. Lake Michigan defines the physical
boundaries of the region, shapes its identity, and fuels much of its commerce, recreation,
aesthetics, and even weather. This vast lake, part of the largest freshwater system on the
surface of the planet, built Chicago.
Lake Michigan and its four sister lakes contain nearly 5,500 cubic miles of water, or
roughly 18 percent of the world’s entire supply of unfrozen surface freshwater. Lake
Michigan is the second largest of the Great Lakes by volume, with 1,180 cubic miles of
water (the largest, Lake Superior, at 2,900 cubic miles, is exceeded in volume only by
Russia’s Lake Baikal).
In surface area Lake Michigan covers 22,300 square miles, making it slightly smaller
than Lake Huron and about 10,000 square miles smaller than Lake Superior. Altogether,
the Great Lakes cover nearly 95,000 square miles, an area larger than England, Wales,
Scotland, and Northern Ireland combined. If all the water in the five lakes could be
distributed uniformly across the land, it would transform the lower 48 states into a vast
lake ten feet deep.
Chicago’s thirst is prodigious. Every day nearly a billion gallons of water is withdrawn
from Lake Michigan for use in the Greater Chicago region.
2. Millions of people are accustomed to looking out on a gigantic lake that stretches to the
horizon. Many of us don't think twice about drawing on this seemingly limitless source of
freshwater.
It’s a lot of water, and good thing: Chicago’s thirst is prodigious. Every day nearly a
billion gallons of water—921.62 million gallons, to be precise—is withdrawn from Lake
Michigan for use in the Greater Chicago region. About 324 million of those gallons goes
to residents of the city for drinking water and other domestic uses. Another 145 million
gallons is consumed by manufacturing and commercial customers. Slightly more than 21
million gallons is earmarked for municipal buildings and schools, and almost 93 million
is used for fire-fighting, street-sweeping, construction projects, and other miscellaneous
purposes. The remaining 340 million gallons of each day’s supply is piped to the suburbs.
Photo (right): Lynda Wallis
Most of the water drawn from Lake Michigan is delivered through the James W. Jardine
Water Purification Plant, the largest facility of its kind in the world. Located on the
lakefront at the end of E. Ohio Street (it’s the massive structure dominating the pier
adjacent to Navy Pier), the plant has a capacity of more than a million gallons of water
per minute. Jardine and a smaller facility, the South Water Filtration Plant at 79th and
Lake Michigan, dispense purified water via tunnel systems to 12 pumping stations
throughout the city, which in turn distribute it to neighborhoods and suburbs.
3. By any standard, it’s an impressive accomplishment. Each day, water is collected from
the lake, filtered, chemically treated, and pumped through a 4,227-mile-long system of
subterranean pipes that rivals the human circulatory system for complexity, to ensure that
every time we turn the handle of a faucet, flush a toilet, switch on a washing machine, or
activate a fire hydrant, we are rewarded with a flow of safe water. Plenty of water. As
much as we want.
Water purification
The Jardine Water Purification Plant, just north of Navy Pier, can process more than a
million gallons of water per minute.
Photo: Photo: Barry Peterson / Chicago Perspectives
But is the supply truly limitless? Can we be certain it will remain clean? What of those
parts of the region that depend solely on groundwater — are those supplies diminishing,
or secure? How much is enough for people and healthy ecosystems?
Last August I journeyed from my home in Traverse City, Michigan, to Chicago with
those questions in mind, to see for myself how the city and its metropolitan region, the
largest by far on the Great Lakes, uses — and misuses — the nearly unimaginable bounty
of freshwater at its doorstep. With so much water so near at hand, perhaps it’s human
nature to be cavalier about it, a tendency which might help explain why the Chicago area
was identified in 2002 by the Natural Resources Defense Council as tenth on the list of
American metropolitan areas that waste the most water. Much of the waste in recent
decades has been in the form of runoff from thousands of acres of asphalt parking lots,
but leaking water mains and other faults in the infrastructure have also been to blame.
4. Natural wetlands
Chicago was named for the nodding wild onion that grew in profusion along the
riverbanks. Skokie is a Native American term for “marsh.” Most of Chicago Wilderness
had a natural abundance of ephemeral ponds, bogs, marshes, streams, rivers, and all
manner of muck.
Photo: Dave Jagodzinski
Chicago’s relationship with water has always been complex. For many years there was
simply too much of it.
The Flow of History
Chicago’s relationship with water has always been complex. For many years there was
simply too much of it. From its beginnings, the young city, built on wetlands at the mouth
of the Chicago River, was regularly inundated by lake storms. In spring the river filled
the streets, and in winter, as the visiting Ralph Waldo Emerson noted in 1853, “it rains &
thaws incessantly, &, if we step off the short street, we go up to the shoulders, perhaps, in
mud....” Hundreds of rivers, creeks, bogs, swamps, lakes, and lagoons encircling the
southern end of Lake Michigan overflowed according to the whims of wind, weather, and
season. The city was rarely dry until the mid-1800s, when a series of city ordinances
decreed that buildings be lifted and back-filled to as much as 14 feet above their original
level. Only when the streets and sidewalks were raised to match those new heights was it
possible to construct underground water and sewage systems.
Those early systems were far from adequate, however. During the 70 years in which the
city grew from a minor trading post to the metropolitan capital of mid-America, its water
and waste problems grew at an even greater pace. For decades a reeking torrent of raw
sewage, stockyard runoff, and industrial effluence poured into the Chicago River and
Lake Michigan, poisoning the city’s primary source of drinking water.
When water meets civilization
Many of our current problems with flooding stem from paving so much of our region
with impermeable surfaces. We leave rainwater no good place to go.
5. Photo: Phyllis Cerny
Photo: Kim Karpeles/Life Through the Lens
The short-term strategy had always been to reach farther into the lake in search of clean
water. Over the years, intake pipes and tunnels were extended from 140 feet to 600 feet to
a full two miles; still the water remained fouled. Spring run-offs and heavy rains
continued to flood the Chicago River, often pushing plumes of contamination far into the
lake. To the eyes — and noses — of dissatisfied citizens, it appeared that the culprit all
along had been the river passing through the heart of the city.
Sanitation concerns in the late 1800s led to
reversal of the Chicago River, diverting water
downstream from Lake Michigan. This flow
of water “downstream” does not offset
human-induced water losses in nearby
habitats, such as Lockport Prairie.
7. often the most practical source of private and community water. In most places west of
the subcontinental divide — the height of land that separates the Great Lakes and
Mississippi watersheds — they were the only choice.
In the 1980s, studies of groundwater reserves in northeast Illinois revealed a disturbing
fact: In the region centered around Chicago, where wells had for decades been pumping
groundwater to the surface, the water table had descended in an immense “cone of
depression” as much as 800 feet below historical levels. A quarter of that drawdown had
occurred during the period of rapid suburban growth since 1971, when the rate of
recharge of groundwater supplies had been slowed as wetlands, fields, and forests were
covered with asphalt and buildings. At the same time, more wells were withdrawing
greater volumes of water from both shallow and deep aquifers, until the rate of
withdrawal had far surpassed the rate of natural infiltration and replenishment.
Sedge meadows and marshes are part of the rich mosaic of ecosystems at Middlefork
Savanna in Lake County, IL. They provide valuable protection for rare species like the
Blanding’s turtle—and splendid recreational opportunities for us.
Photo: Mike MacDonald / ChicagoNature.com
Groundwater is sometimes forgotten in discussions of the hydrologic cycle, that dynamic
and complex system by which the same water has been circulating between the earth and
the sky since the planet’s infancy. At any moment a little more than 97 percent of Earth’s
326 million cubic miles of water is contained in the oceans. The remaining three percent
is fresh water, of which about 75 percent is locked up in -glaciers and polar ice sheets.
Some of the rest fills lakes and rivers, circulates as vapor in the atmosphere, or cycles
through the bodies of plants and animals. Most of it, however — as much as two million
cubic miles worth, by some estimates — is stored beneath the surface of the earth in the
water-saturated sand, gravel, and porous rock we call aquifers. Some aquifers are
confined between layers of impermeable rock or clay, but many others circulate slowly,
at rates of a few inches or a few feet in a year, slipping deeper underground or emerging
on the surface as springs and seeps, and are constantly recharged by rain, snow, and other
surface waters infiltrating the soil. For centuries groundwater was assumed to be a
limitless source. But when Chicago-area wells began drying up about 1900, it became
clear that wells were interrupting natural groundwater systems and withdrawing water
faster than it could be replenished.
8. The hydrological cycle is the continuous movement of water over, above, and
beneath the earth’s surface. As water moves, it changes between liquid, vapor,
and ice. It can take seconds to thousands of years for water to move from one
place to another. Despite continual movement, the amount of water on earth
remains essentially constant.
1 Precipitation is condensed water vapor 5 Plants absorb water and release it
that falls to the earth’s surface in the into the atmosphere via
form of rain, snow, hail, and sleet. transpiration. Healthy ecosystems
with a flourishing understory of
wildflowers and grasses do a much
better job of sequestering
stormwater runoff than degraded
ecosystems.
2 Infiltration is the flow of water from 6 Evaporation is the transformation
the ground surface into the ground. of water from liquid to gas. The
Once infiltrated, the water becomes source of energy for evaporation is
soil moisture or groundwater. primarily solar radiation.
3 Subsurface flow is the movement of 7 Advection is the movement of
water underground into and through water — in solid, liquid, or vapor
bedrock. Groundwater tends to move states — through the atmosphere.
slowly and is replenished slowly. It can Without advection, water that
remain in deep aquifers for thousands evaporated over the oceans could
of years. not precipitate over land.
4 Runoff includes the variety of ways 8 Condensation is the transformation
that water moves across the land. As it of water vapor to liquid water
flows, water may seep into the ground, droplets in
evaporate into the air, become stored in the air, producing clouds and fog.
lakes or reservoirs, or be pumped out
for agricultural or other human uses.
“In the late 1970s we were withdrawing up to three times the sustainable yield of
groundwater in northeast Illinois,” says Dan Injerd, chief of the Lake Michigan
Management Section of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR). The
resulting cone of depression was so extreme that it began sucking surrounding
9. groundwater toward it, drawing it south from Wisconsin, west from Lake Michigan, and
northwest from Indiana.
The effect of those groundwater drawdowns on current water policy, Injerd says, “is
complicated.” In the 1960s, after accusing Chicago and the state of Illinois of “water
thievery,” the seven other Great Lakes states and the U.S. Department of Justice filed
suit. In the eyes of the Great Lakes community, the Great Lakes are a single aquatic
system, not a collection of separate lakes. Water robbed from Lake Michigan, therefore,
is robbed as well from lakes Huron, Superior, Erie, Ontario, and the St. Lawrence River.
The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 1967 that Illinois could
withdraw no more than 3,200 cubic feet per second — 2.1 billion gallons per day — from
Lake Michigan. That volume, enough to fill five Sears Towers, included the amounts
used for drinking water and other consumption as well as the water diverted from Lake
Michigan into the Chicago River, which is controlled by locks under the jurisdiction of
the Army Corps of Engineers.
Managing that water is a daunting task. 50 to 55 percent of the daily allotment of 2.1
billion gallons goes to domestic, commercial, and industrial needs. About 25 percent —
some 525 million gallons a day — is directed from the lake into the Chicago River to
maintain navigable levels in the canal and lock systems. The remaining 20 to 25 percent
of the state’s water budget is the estimated amount of stormwater runoff that leaves the
Great Lakes water basin and drains to the Mississippi. Why should Illinois be responsible
for water that falls as rain and snow and drains away to the Gulf of Mexico? Because if
the Chicago River had never been reversed, it would funnel the runoff from that
precipitation into Lake Michigan, as it had for thousands of years, contributing to the
water budget of all five lakes and their connecting waters. The 1967 Supreme Court
ruling saw this as a kind of water theft and determined that Illinois must make up the
difference.
This green roof — topping the Apple store in Chicago — reduces stormwater runoff,
cools the urban center, and makes for a better view.
Photo: Douglas Hoerr Landscape Architecture
Furthermore, under the terms of the ruling, Illinois must repay the debt of any Lake
Michigan water the state uses in surplus of its daily allotment of 2.1 billion gallons.
Likewise, if less than the allotted amount is used, the state may bank it. Illinois has a
vested interest, therefore, in water conservation, and supports and encourages Chicago
and every other community to save whatever amounts they can. Complications arise
because keeping track of the amount of water used, done by the Army Corps of
Engineers, involves such varied and voluminous data that the results are always running
several years behind.
“Based on the estimated diversions since 2001,” says Injerd, “we think we’ve repaid our
water debt. But one of the problems we have to deal with is the time lag. We won’t know
until later this year where we stood in 2002.”
A few years ago, Mayor Richard M. Daley put his
signature to “Chicago’s Water Agenda 2003,” a
10. landmark strategy to ensure that the city maintained a
safe, clean, and plentiful supply of drinkable water.
Water conservation efforts are clearly paying off for
Chicago. Figures provided by the Chicago
Department of Water Management reveal that since
1990, water use in the city has declined from a high
of 800 million gallons per day (mgd) to less than 600
million mgd in 2005, despite a population increase of
approximately 65,000 people.
Among the initiatives outlined in the mayor's plan:
1 A five-year, $620 million program to restore and
repair the water-supply system. Central to the plan
is replacing 50 miles of leaking water mains per
year, saving 120 million gallons of water every
day.
2 Installing drinking fountains with on/off controls in
public buildings.
3 Upgrading 43 swimming pools to recirculate their
water (the Park District is responsible for
upgrading another 10 pools).
4 Installing splash fountains that use recirculated
water.
5 Disconnecting downspouts from directing
stormwater into the sewers at Park District
facilities, and using stormwater for irrigation and to
recharge aquifers.
6 Studying the feasibility of installing waterless
urinals and dual-flush toilets in city buildings.
7 Studying the possibility of using “gray water” to
irrigate landscaping or for flush toilets.
8 Planting drought-tolerant native species that
require less watering.
9 Encouraging industries to conserve water and
energy through the Industrial Rebuild Program.
Figures are not available for how much water
Chicago-area industries consume, but the Chicago
Department of the Environment reports that a
growing number of industries are discovering the
economic benefits of conservation. They cite the
example of the Ford Motor Company’s plant at
130th and Torrence, which has reduced water
usage by 40 percent, solid waste disposal by 60
percent, and electricity by 30 percent.
That time lag makes it difficult for the state to determine how much water is available for
outlying communities that want to replace their groundwater systems with water from
Lake Michigan. Deep-water aquifers have rebounded slightly in recent years, as wells
have declined in number, a trend that the Illinois DNR and other area water managers are
eager to see continue. Injerd says that his department has virtually always granted permits
to Chicago’s collar communities that sought Lake Michigan water, as long as they could
demonstrate that getting it would be cost-effective and would prevent significant amounts
from being withdrawn from the deep aquifer. “Cost-effectiveness” is largely a matter of
distance from the lake. Nearby communities, even those beyond the watershed boundary,
have always been given priority.
With the Chicago region’s population expected to rise by 1.5 million in the next 20 years,
demand for Great Lakes water is certain to increase at an equal or greater rate. Most of
the population growth, according to the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, is
projected for suburbs more than 30 miles from downtown Chicago. A spokesman for the
Chicago Department of Water Management reports that the city’s existing system of
11. filtration plants, pumping stations, and distribution network currently has “excess
capacity” to meet projected demands in the city and its nearby suburbs.
But what if population increases at a higher than projected rate — if, for instance, global
climate change results in mass migrations of people from desert and coastal regions to the
Great Lakes? I asked this question of Dr. Derek Winstanley, chief of the Illinois State
Water Survey, who is an expert in both water resources and climatology. “The Water
Survey will be conducting studies that incorporate a wide range of possible future
conditions to 2050,” he says. “We call these scenarios rather than predictions, because
they will state what likely will happen if we assume certain conditions. We cannot predict
the future,” Winstanley stresses, “but we will be able to lay out what could happen if
population increases to different levels, if the economy grows at different rates, if water is
conserved, and if climate changes. We will look at the impact of these possible conditions
on the level of Lake Michigan, water diversion from Lake Michigan, groundwater
recharge, streamflows, and water demand.”
A planning agency forecast that 11 townships in five counties would experience severe
water shortages by 2020, a number that may double by 2030.
Regardless of whether population growth meets or exceeds the projected 1.5 million, the
majority of growth will occur in communities in the outer rings around Chicago that will
probably need to rely on groundwater to meet their water needs. Already, many of those
communities have initiated water rationing, with restrictions on lawn irrigation, for
instance, during summer drought periods. But mere rationing might not be enough.
The Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission forecast in 2000 that 11 townships in five
counties would experience severe water shortages by 2020, a number that may double by
2030. Aurora and Elgin, both among the fastest-growing cities in Illinois, rely on the Fox
River for their water. Can the Fox provide enough water to meet the need without
reducing the base flow needed for aquatic life?
Here are a few ways that you can save water
in your everyday life:
1 Conserve at home. Keep a pitcher of water
in the refrigerator (a running faucet uses
about two gallons of water per minute).
Turn off the tap while brushing teeth or
shaving. Install low-volume shower heads
to save more than 2,000 gallons a month.
2 Use appliances wisely. Adjust water levels
to the size of the load in a washing machine
or wash full loads only. Scrape dishes
rather than rinse them before loading into a
dishwasher. Replace old washing machines
and dishwashers with water-saving
“Energy Star” appliances.
3 Maintain an efficient toilet. Check for leaks
by adding food coloring in the tank and
watching for the color to appear in the
bowl. (A leak can waste 3,000 gallons a
month). Reduce the amount used to flush
by displacing tank water with two half-
gallon plastic jugs filled with pebbles or
water. Replace worn-out toilets with more
efficient low-flush models that use less
than 1.3 gallons of water per flush.
4 Irrigate lawns and gardens sensibly. Water
during the cool temperatures of early
mornings to reduce evaporation, set
sprinklers so that they water lawns and
gardens but not streets and sidewalks, and
12. use soaker hoses and trickle irrigation to
water trees and shrubs. Rain barrels are an
excellent way to capture water that would
otherwise enter the stormwater system and
use it for irrigation.
Photo: Phyllis Cerny
So many private wells have gone dry in Kane County’s Campton Township, that the U.S.
Geological Survey was called in to produce a detailed computer model of aquifers
beneath the township. Armed with the results of the study — among the first of its kind in
the Midwest — the township will be able to restrict development only to those areas with
sufficient groundwater to support new homes and businesses. Such restrictions are
common in the arid west and southwest, but Campton Township is one of the first
communities east of the Mississippi to implement them. Kane County administrators
have taken the problem seriously enough to commission a five-year, $1.8 million study of
groundwater reserves by the Illinois State Water and Geological Surveys. The study, due
to be released in 2007, will provide a three-dimensional map of all groundwater reserves
beneath the county and will be used as a tool for guiding the region’s expected growth.
In Lake County, where proximity to Lake Michigan would seem to guarantee plenty of
water, about 40 percent of residents, primarily in the western half of the county, still
depend upon private and municipal wells. The director of planning, building, and
development for Lake County, Philip Rovang, cites figures estimating that by the year
2020, about 280,000 of his county’s residents will rely on groundwater. He points out
that the availability of an adequate supply is critical for economic development. “One key
question we always hear,” says Rovang, “is about water and waste treatment. If a
community can assure a new business that the water supply is adequate, it could be a
deciding factor in whether they locate here.”
Increasingly, Rovang says, “we recognize the need for urgency in getting more
comprehensive information more quickly.” What if the population of Lake County
increases at a faster rate than anticipated? “We have a very good monitoring system,”
says Rovang. “We can identify trends quickly, and would detect big changes in
population growth. Also, because we work closely with the 52 municipalities in the
county, we would have the ability to respond right away to those pressures if they
occurred. Lake County is a very attractive place to live and work, so I could easily see its
population increasing over what is projected.”
Moreover, groundwater supplies and Lake Michigan are connected in ways that are
complex and not yet completely understood. For instance, not only is Lake Michigan
replenished by rain and snow falling directly on it, but water flows in constantly from
tributaries that are themselves fed by groundwater and from seepage along the coasts.
13. According to Judy Beck, Lake Michigan Manager with the Environmental Protection
Agency’s Great Lakes National Program Office, 79 percent of the water in Lake
Michigan originates directly or indirectly as groundwater, more than any of the other
Great Lakes. When communities dependent on groundwater pump ever more and ever
deeper, this depletes not only their water supply, but also reduces the amount of recharge
to the lake. An infinite resource, it is not.
New Berlin, Wisconsin, is a community that is bisected by the Lake Michigan watershed
— half lies within the watershed (and is therefore entitled to lake water for its use) and
half does not. “Pumping by many communities in southeast Wisconsin — including
Milwaukee when they used groundwater — has drawn down the deep aquifer so much
that they are now mining old water,” Beck says, “which is often contaminated with
naturally occurring substances, such as radium or arsenic. They’re now not meeting EPA
standards for drinking water.” Indeed, Wisconsin just announced plans to hire an
efficiency chief to coordinate water-saving measures statewide.
Clearly the pressures to allow more use of Lake Michigan water for rapidly growing
communities will only increase. Then there’s global climate change to consider.
Scientists are already seeing some changes possibly attributable to climate change:
reduced ice cover, for instance. “The ice cover on the lakes used to be major and
dramatic,” explains Beck. “When the lakes are not covered with ice, we lose a
tremendous amount of water through evaporation.”
Water is essential for sustaining all life — yet 1.2 billion people around the world
currently live without access to safe drinking water.
Photo: Dave Jagodzinski
Another projection is that the Chicago region will experience more severe storms, though
not necessarily more rainfall. More severe storms mean that our sewer systems will be
overtaxed, less rainwater will be able to infiltrate and recharge underground water
supplies, and we will lose more freshwater from rapid inflow to streams and rivers.
Often overlooked in discussions about increasing human population and the pressure it
brings to bear on water resources, is its impact on wildlife. Water demand projections are
based on population growth and economic growth, explains Joyce O’Keefe, deputy
director of the Openlands Project. When do the absolute needs for the rest of nature get
factored in?
A number of federal- and state-designated endangered species in the Chicago Wilderness
region are at risk should declining groundwater cause further reductions in already
reduced wetlands. Among them, the Hine’s emerald dragonfly is probably the most
imperiled. The dragonfly, which has brilliant green eyes, requires specific habitat: seeps
of cold, calcium-rich groundwater emerging where dolomite limestone lies near the
surface. That habitat is found only along the Niagaran Escarpment, a dolomite remnant of
ancient ocean beds that arcs from southern Lake Michigan, up the Door Peninsula of
Wisconsin, across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, down Georgian Bay, and across
southern Ontario to Niagara Falls.
14. “The challenge, as always, is how to satisfy both human needs and wildlife needs.”
— John Rogner
In Illinois the escarpment emerges only along the lower Des Plaines River, where, says
John Rogner, field supervisor with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the “best
expression” of habitat suitable for the endangered dragonfly is in the dolomite prairie at
Will County’s 254-acre Lockport Prairie Nature Preserve. The seeps and rivulets in the
preserve can support good numbers of the insect, but only as long as enough water is
present on the surface. Although Rogner stresses that until a current study is complete,
there’s no certainty that groundwater subsidence is affecting the volume of seeps in the
preserve, there’s indisputable evidence that in recent years the dragonfly’s habitat has
grown increasingly desiccated.
The construction of I-355 will cost more than $700 million — money that the ISTHA
does not have — and will degrade habitat for these and other plants and animals.
Tolls collected from I-355 users will only pay for about 35 percent of the cost. The
rest will be subsidized by cash payers throughout the entire system. ISTHA says
congestion relief is the goal, but failed to seriously consider viable alternatives like
road and bridge widening, expanding Metra, and promoting alternative
transportation.
Photos from top to bottom: 1. Black Partridge / Wood Ridge; 2. Keepataw Forest
Preserve; 3. Spring Creek Corridor. All by Mike MacDonald / ChicagoNature.com.
“It’s a grave cause for concern,” he says. “The Hine’s emerald dragonfly in this area is
absolutely dependent on a supply of groundwater seeping along the Des Plaines River. It
happens that this same area is being rapidly developed, with much of the historical
recharge area being paved over. Water that once infiltrated back into the aquifer is now
being directed to stormwater systems and flushed away through the Des Plaines. At the
same time, municipal water demands in the area are causing more wells to be sunk,
putting further demands on the groundwater supply.”
FWS, says Rogner, while working with various partners, including the Illinois State
Geological Survey, the Illinois State Water Survey, and local municipalities, has
identified cones of depression surrounding municipal wells in areas near the Lockport
Preserve. The two municipalities closest to the Lockport Preserve, Crest Hill and
Romeoville, are cooperating in various ways, including monitoring their groundwater use
and planning new development sites so that as much water enters the ground after
development as did before. They might also consider digging deeper municipal wells to
bypass the shallow aquifer that feeds surface seeps and tap into deep aquifers (a strategy
15. that would be complicated by the need to treat the deeper water for radium
contamination, but might prove to be viable).
“Both Crest Hill and Romeoville are on board,” says Rogner. “They view the Hine’s
dragonfly and its habitat as community assets.” The potential tourist draw has inspired
Romeoville to make plans for an annual “Dragonfly Day” festival beginning in summer
2007.
Rogner is encouraged by such cooperation among communities and agencies but is
worried, nonetheless, and not only about the Hine’s emerald dragonfly. Two federally
endangered plant species, the lakeside daisy and the leafy prairie clover, are also at risk,.
“We see disturbing trends,” he says. “The challenge, as always, is how to satisfy both
human needs and wildlife needs.”
One afternoon last August I rode in a car along Lake Shore Drive with Richard Lanyon,
who is the General Superintendent of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of
Greater Chicago. I’d spent the day as his guest at the downtown headquarters of the
District, talking to some of the biologists and engineers who keep the Chicago area’s
wastewater and stormwater systems operating as efficiently as the latest technologies and
most diligent care can manage.
The level of groundwater at this particular monitoring point in Lockport Prairie
has been dropping steadily since 2001. The quality of habitat in this rare dolomite
prairie depends entirely on these water levels. If the groundwater seeps effectively
“dry up,” globally rare species could quickly disappear, perhaps never to return.
The challenge for planners, conservation advocates, indeed everyone, is how to
conserve precious water resources to provide for people and nature.
Source: GAS & Associates, Inc., CorLands;
Photos top to bottom: Dan Kirk, Carol Freeman, Casey Galvin
Now Lanyon was talking about his childhood, growing up in the 1940s on the north side
of Chicago. The North Branch of the Chicago River, although it was terribly polluted in
those days, was his playground. He talked about how much cleaner the river was now.
“The lake, too,” he said, nodding toward Lake Michigan. He remembers the mats of algae
that fouled the city’s beaches when he was a kid, and the stench that came off the lake
when the wind blew from the north and east. He’s seen enormous changes, and knows
better than most people how much effort went into implementing them.
“We’ve come a long way,” he said.
