Tunnel Vision
Chicago tried to dig its way out of urban flooding decades before climate change made it a national crisis. Did the city, and its imitators, pick the wrong solution?
Slate
- Henry Grabar
Construction
workers lean in to discuss the project over the noises echoing
throughout the Deep Tunnel. Photos by David Schalliol.
"CHICAGO—That
the Chicago River is reborn, that its tree-shaded promenades are
thronged with strolling families, that new buildings turn toward the
water and old buildings have opened new windows to face it, that people
kayak in what was once an open cesspool in the middle of downtown—all of
this is a point of pride here. People laughed when then-Mayor Richard
J. Daley said in the ’70s that he’d one day like to see people grilling
freshly caught fish on the river’s banks. Though it would have seemed
insane in 1980 (or 1880), people do fish in the Chicago River today, and
the number of species to be found here has multiplied tenfold in the
past four decades."
That’s because Chicago built a second river, an infernal reflection of
the first, tracing its course hundreds of feet below ground. On rainy
days, this subterranean passage, a conduit that can hold more than 1
billion gallons of wastewater, welcomes a roaring torrent of shit, piss,
and oily runoff from the downtown streets. This megasewer, a filthy
hidden portrait to the Chicago River’s Dorian Gray, is dynamic enough to
create its own wave action if not properly supervised. That’s what
happened on Oct. 3, 1986, when a geyser blasted through a downtown street, lifting a 61-year-old woman’s Pontiac Bonneville into the air like a toy, nearly drowning the driver in dirty water."
"Altogether, 109 miles of subway-size tunnel lie beneath Chicago and
its suburbs, covering more miles than the L, culminating in three
suburban reservoirs (not the kind you drink from). This is the Deep Tunnel,
formally the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan, and it may be the world’s most
ambitious and expensive effort to manage urban flooding and water
pollution. It is a project, in the visionary tradition of Chicago
engineering, to bottle rainstorms."
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