This holiday weekend, before you leave to hop in a kayak and paddle up the North Branch, or cruise south toward Bridgeport, you can check what’s in the water.
Chicago now has real-time monitoring of the river, a result of years of collaboration, developing technology and calls from advocates for a more transparent look at pollution.
Water quality reports, based on measurements taken every 15 minutes, are available through an online platform called H2NOW. The project is led by Current, a Chicago-based nonprofit dedicated to solving local and global water challenges, with more than a dozen partners on board including the taxpayer-funded Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, which manages sewage and stormwater, and the city’s Department of Water Management.
Gauges on the site show readings from the main stem near Michigan Avenue, the North Branch near Goose Island and the South Branch near the Studio Gang-designed Eleanor Boathouse in Bridgeport. Although the site says it’s not meant to evaluate the biological safety of the river, depending on what sensors are picking up, assessments can range from good, meaning bacteria levels are likely within the recreational standards for water quality, to high caution, when swimming, for example, would not be considered safe.
This week, at times the central and south readings hovered in the good range, while the North Branch, more shallow and narrow, was marked as high caution.
Meanwhile, kayakers more worried about their sweat than murky water paddled away near the Riverwalk. A great blue heron flew south during a mellow sunset along the North Branch.
Farther south, Abraham Celio, 39, a longtime Pilsen resident, watched over his fishing line as a barge passed by. Teams of rowers prepared their boats against a sunset so bright you couldn’t help but squint. Celio got a little bite.
“When it comes to monitoring, I don’t think there’s such a thing as too much monitoring,” Celio said. “When it comes to the environment we live in.”
Celio pointed out the signs of industrialization circling the Eleanor Boathouse, the barge “carrying who knows what.” He comes to the river regularly with his family, and sometimes after a heavy rain, is left wondering what’s in the cloudy water.
“If this was a different body of water, I’d love to jump in,” Celio said. But he’s not expecting that to be an appealing possibility in our lifetime.
Looking for better technology
Alaina Harkness, executive director of Current, likened the river reports to a meteorologist’s weather updates, with hopes of the system becoming as valuable to residents as an air quality app.
“We want H2NOW to be real-time water quality information for everybody who cares about the health of the Chicago River because they access it every day, because it runs through their neighborhood, because they kayak on it, because they’ve built their business adjacent to it,” Harkness said.
The river is more than familiar downtown scenes, Harkness said. It acts as a connective tissue.
“The Chicago River cuts through so many neighborhoods in the city, from north to south,” Harkness said. “Everyone in every neighborhood deserves access to a clean river.”
Five years ago, the Metropolitan Planning Council in partnership with Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning and Friends of the Chicago River, released a comprehensive vision for the Chicago, Calumet and Des Plaines rivers. A letter in the report called it “the city and region’s collective next step in what has been nearly five decades of work to reclaim our rivers from a history of environmental abuse.”
Among the more immediate goals: real-time and accessible water quality information — to guide river outings, and ideally raise awareness about making improvements.
Current offered to lead the real-time monitoring effort and, with a major assist in funding from the Chicago Community Trust, started to identify possibilities.
“This just wasn’t possible before because the technology wasn’t in a place to make it possible,” Harkness said.
The real-time monitoring system, which Current says is the first of its kind for an urban waterway, relies on probes that have optical sensors to collect data, which is then sent to an analytics platform.
It’s unclear what operating costs will look like moving forward, Harkness said, but she estimated the development phase at about $200,000 a year.
Testing water quality in a flowing river and gathering meaningful data is complex, researchers say.
Part of the reason the city partnered with Current was to find better technology in the water industry and see what works, said Andrea Cheng, commissioner of the Department of Water Management.
Ideally, more sensors will be added to the river to provide a fuller picture of what’s happening and changing, Harkness said, as well as tracking other concerns, including contaminants.
And partners are interested in expanding to other river systems.
“So what would it look like to roll out real-time water quality monitoring for the Calumet, or the Des Plaines?” Harkness said. “And how can we use it to address those priorities that those communities have?”
The ‘ick factor’
If you’re thinking about swimming at a Chicago beach, there’s an advisory system in place that’s as simple as spotting a red flag.
When the sewer system is overwhelmed, residents can sign up for alerts through the Water Reclamation District, but day-to-day, round-the-clock updates haven’t existed. And after a sewage dump, one location may be suitable for recreation, while another warrants caution.
“Should you stay away from the entire river? For how long? For a couple of days?” Harkness said. “It’s much more valuable to know what’s going on in each particular branch.”
The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District tests for fecal coliform — microbes found in poop and a bacteria used by the Environmental Protection Agency to measure water quality — at various river locations.
“Why are we tracking poop in the Chicago River, essentially?” Harkness said. “There may be a little ick factor there, but fecal coliform, the reason we care about them is they’re indicator organisms.”
Fecal coliform, measured in colony-forming units, or CFUs, indicate other pathogens that can lead to undesired afflictions, including diarrhea, skin rashes and eye infections. Levels tend to spike after sewage dumps and heavy rains.
Some levels in the Chicago River still regularly top an average of 200 CFUs per 100 milliliters, the state standard for recreational waterways that are “fishable and swimmable.”
At Wells Street along the Riverwalk, for example, levels are averaging above 400 CFUs this year, with a peak of 5,200 CFUs, according to district data. Levels sometimes spike by tens of thousands. Last year, fecal coliform levels at Wells shot up as high as 51,000 CFUs.
But testing involves researchers collecting samples and lab work. And then the results end up on the district’s website.
Without the ability to measure fecal coliform in real time, the Chicago River probes measure tryptophan-like fluorescence; researchers say readings spike after rain events or sewage dumps, similarly to fecal coliform levels.
Tryptophan is an amino acid, and with the help of ultraviolet light from the probe, it essentially acts as a glow-in-the-water estimate of microbial pollution.
“What we’re testing over the summer and what we’re testing with this technology with our partners is how effective is that optical sensor at telling us how much poop’s in the river,” Harkness said. “We’re actually doing that conventional sampling and saying, OK, there’s a pretty strong correlation between what these optical sensors are telling us, and what we actually pulled out of the river at that spot on that day.”
Colleen O’Brien, a Northwestern University graduate student in environmental engineering, has helped analyze data from the sensors and compare it with sampling data. When tryptophan is higher, that usually indicates changes in water quality, she said, and researchers will continue to track trends.
“From a science perspective, more data is better,” O’Brien said.
Harkness is betting the water quality is often better than Chicagoans would suspect.
“You get people advocating for: Everyone should be swimming in the river. Or people that say you should never go anywhere near it,” Harkness said. “And the reality is that most days, it’s somewhere in between.”
Overall, the river may be on an improvement trajectory. But, Harkness said, “with climate change, and the wetter weather that we’re experiencing, that could change those patterns and risk those improvements.”
“We can’t just rest on our perception of how we think the river’s doing.”
Wetter weather
A major report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a few weeks ago warned that time is running out to avoid increasingly severe consequences of human-caused climate change.
In Illinois, a state-specific climate assessment released earlier this year outlines a changing climate that’s warmer — and wetter.
The city’s combined sewer system handles runoff and waste, and a storm can quickly lead to capacity being reached, the need to release sewage into the river, and in the worst cases into Lake Michigan.
The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District’s $3 billion Deep Tunnel system, an underground storage vault, aims to limit sewer overflows, curb flooding and keep pollution out of water and people’s homes. But even after the planned completion of the final reservoir in 2029, some dumping is likely to continue, officials have said.
Already, less than an inch of rain can lead to an overflow; billions of gallons of gunk still ended up in waterways throughout the last decade, according to Tribune reporting. More frequent and intense storms mean there’s the potential for more sewage dumping in a city built on a swamp.
Margaret Frisbie, executive director of Friends of the Chicago River, said that along with the public health aspect of the monitoring system, the new data can hopefully help pinpoint sewage problem spots in the river, especially if more sensors are added.
As for why a monitoring system may have taken a long time to launch, Frisbie said she thinks it’s the usual discrimination.
“That the river system isn’t viewed as a recreational body of water, and therefore it wasn’t worth the investment,” Frisbie said. “However, we know that that’s not true.”
Positive signs
Most Chicagoans may not be casting out lines to the river to catch their lunch — the safety level once floated by former Mayor Richard J. Daley — but, on a recent late afternoon near the North Shore Channel bridge south of Devon Avenue, two men, canned beverages by their sides, were fishing.
Water quality has improved from the sewage canal days, when engineers flipped the flow of the river to keep waste away from the lake — the city’s source for drinking water.
Between Chicago area waterways, 60 species of fishhave been counted since 2000 alone, up from 10 in the 1970s. A major turnaround came after 1984, when sewage treated with chlorine — toxic to fish — stopped being pumped into the river. Most of the fish are safe to eat, at least occasionally; the state warns against eating certain species with high levels of toxins including PCBs, or methylmercury.
The species boom, a sign of more oxygen for fish, is a result of overall cleanup and a series of improvements. For decades the Chicago River was exempt from the most stringent regulations of the Clean Water Act. The district, which once fought the standards, added disinfecting technologyfive years ago.
Today, the Wild Mile boasts floating parks with plants. Beavers and otters can be spotted making their homes in the river. Drinking along the river’s edge on a Friday night is more date night than dare. Dragon boats race down the South Branch.
Howard Moy, 50, is regularly out on the river as a member of the Greater Chicago Dragon Boat Club, sometimes paddling all the way from the North Branch to the South Branch. His team won gold at the recent Chinatown festival.
“Many people do the water sports on the river and they have a fear of touching the dirty water, many of our members included,” Moy said.
The new monitoring system could give users confidence to enjoy the river, Moy said.
Paige Webber, 34, of Albany Park, has spent many days along the North Branch, biking and kayaking, finding some pandemic relief in nature. But finding a buddy willing to get in the river near a sewage pumping station can be a tough task, she said.
“There’s definitely days where you wake up, you go outside and you can smell it,” Webber said. “That’s definitely disheartening and discouraging and I won’t go in the water.”
Jordan Arbus, 30, started regularly paddling during the pandemic, as the social distance-friendly activity turned into a daily hobby for the River North resident.
Spending time on the river is a great way to decompress, said Arbus, who works at a downtown restaurant.
“It’s a great way to get out of bed in the morning, start my day,” Arbus said. “I try to be out there every single day with the idea that, hey, I’ll have built-in days off when it rains.”
He’s aware of the history of the river reversal, even the infamous Dave Matthews Band poop dump in 2004 that unloaded nearly 800 pounds of waste into the North Branch — with the heads of passengers on the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s river cruise acting as receptacles.
Yet Arbus said he’s more disgusted by his own sweat than an occasional water splash.
“So many of my friends, when I tell them I’m on the river, they think, oh you know, the water’s gross,” Arbus said. “To me it’s no grosser than being on the ‘L’ or on the bus.”
Arbus said he’d check out the monitoring out of curiosity. Overall, he thinks the river is underutilized and underappreciated.
“And I’m proud,” Arbus said. “When I tell friends who live out of town that I’m in the middle of the city, in the river, just paddling around.”
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