Abstract
For tens of thousands of years, human settlements are built near rivers, lakes, swamps, and seas that periodically flood. The powerful and wealthy inhabit the high ground and everyone else the low ground. There was the magnificent exception of Dutch engineering reclaiming vast amounts of land from the sea. The creation of cultural norms to accompany technical innovation proved crucial. I mention this because Platt’s tale of Chicago offers a detailed account of how social fragmentation, political corruption, and technical hubris increased the scope of flooding while unevenly channeling its impacts on people, property, and ecosystem. But the story also includes episodes of resistance and reform—enough to leave room for hope.
Chicago was built on a vast glacial wetland adjacent to Lake Michigan. The early French explorers reported torrential rains and floods—storm events that continued to this day. Only a small portion of the metropolitan area drains toward Lake Michigan. Most territory sends water toward the Mississippi.
Platt organizes the book chronologically, describing shifts in water management plans, policy, and projects during several long periods of relative drought and surplus. The impacts of short-sighted patronage and public works abuse were modest when rain was scarce, but increased dramatically as storm intensity and duration increased with global warming.
The Sanitary District of Chicago (SDC) was formed in 1890 to help remedy local flooding that found the city with more than a million people using its combined stormwater sewage system to periodically send effluent into Lake Michigan—the primary source of drinking water. The district constructed a twenty-seven-mile Sanitary and Ship Canal that solidified a focus on commercial shipping, willful indifference to nature, and a fixation on a technical fix to a complex ecological reality. The canal tapped water from Lake Michigan to flush vast quantities of untreated sewage down the Chicago river toward the Gulf of Mexico while providing enough flow to support larger commercial vessels.
Platt introduces individual elected officials, reformers, activists, and, most importantly, engineers. Progressive efforts to build a system that separated stormwater and sewage disposal continually failed to obtain approval. Cost was an impediment, but Pratt describes how elected and appointed officials used public revenue to fuel patronage deals serving corrupt self-interest. I learned that in 1909 Charles Merriam mobilized engineers and accountants to investigate and evaluate sewer project contracts uncovering astonishing levels of incompetence, featherbedding, and fraud. The progressive’s efforts to foreground water conservation, treatment, and public health were persistently displaced. Public officials embraced dilution as the primary strategy, increasing flow from Lake Michigan to expand commercial port activity in the central business district.
Platt argues that political officials committed to the short-sighted reliance on billions of gallons of Great Lakes water to flush sewage downstream could avoid costly conservation measures because Chicago’s expansion between 1885 and 1925 was accompanied by below-average rainfall. The periodic typhoid epidemics, basement flooding, and water pollution after storms were dismissed as occasional acts of God.
Planning plays a prominent role in the narrative. The conservation planners merged park and playground planning, seeking a regional approach even as they proposed projects for working-class neighborhoods. The onset of increased rainfall generated more flood events after 1925. Yet the SDC persisted in its efforts to use Great Lakes water to dilute sewage and promote shipping commerce. In 1929, the SDC had squandered its revenues on astonishing levels of graft and mismanagement. Worse still, the SDC defied decades of federal lawsuits that failed to stem the profligate stealth of Great Lakes water.
Ironically, during the depression years, the Roosevelt administration funded the construction of sewage treatment plants that reduced Chicago’s reliance on Lake water for dilution. But postwar suburban expansion dramatically increased storm runoff. Platt tells detailed stories of the political machinations taken to avoid sensible state-of-the-art waste treatment and water management. Reformers emerged who combined increasingly sophisticated knowledge about biotic communities, ecosystems, water chemistry, and treatment with the longstanding activist focus on nature conservancy. Platt describes in detail how different reform regimes publicly protested, lobbied, challenged, and sued the City of Chicago and the new Metropolitan Water and Reclamation District to effectively remedy flooding, treat sewage, and restore the waterway ecosystem.
Despite persistent failures in meeting even the most modest environmental standards, elected and administrative officials managed to protect patronage appointments and contracts for four decades. The increasing severity of the flooding and effluent discharges into the Lake inspired support for even more technical fixes, culminating in the construction of a vast underground tunnel to hold stormwater. Platt shows how even as the engineers trumpeted deep throat salvation in the late 1950s, their critics correctly estimated that future floodwater would be twice what the tunnel could hold. The tunnel cost estimates were several orders of magnitude lower than the actual cost. The sprawling complex of suburban expansion across the region created land cover faster than conventional engineers could imagine or calculate. The culture of patronage combined with a culture of technical hubris generated a blindness to the complex interaction between human land use and climate change weather events.
Platt tells story after story about how short-sighted self-serving political officials responsible for the provision of water management infrastructure not only failed to resolve water and sewage problems but made them worse. The reformers in most cases were not successful, although Platt’s accounts help the reader recognize that the cynical outcomes were not inevitable.
In sum, the book is a good text for undergraduate and graduate students studying the relationship between modern human settlement and water management. I think it would be especially useful for civil engineering as well as urban planning students. However, I have one complaint. Platt decided to combine chronological and thematic periodization. I found this confusing as chapters headlined with one period would include stories from earlier period. Topical relevance did not prove strong enough for me to suspend my sense of misplaced narrative. The excellent index helps, but other less disciplined readers will find it tough going through some chapters.
