Chicago Needs a Lift-- Part 3: Reversing a River and Chlorination

There are stories of people getting stuck in traffic jams because someone was moving a building from one place to another.  They lifted an entire hotel while people were still init.  Today, all parts of downtown are about ten feet above the natural level of the city because of Ellis Chesbrough.

It was interesting that he borrowed technology from another field, the jack screw from railroads.

Before building it, Chesbrough had gone on a grand tour of Europe, but not to see sights like the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre.  He visited sewer systems.  A man dedicated to his work.
But, even with the new sewers, people were still getting sick after drinking the water.  This led to the more famous story of Chicago reversing the flow of the Chicago River so not to dump the contaminants into Lake Michigan, but instead to send it elsewhere.

And then there is the story of chlorinating the water, which is actually poisoning it.  So, you poison the water to make people healthier.

--Cooter

Chicago Neede a Lift-- Part 2: Ellis Chesbrough

Steven Johnson, host of the series said, "What we wanted with this episode (Clean) was to tell the stories basically of how we came to have things like clean drinking water that doesn't kill us with cholera or typhoid."

Chicago grew from tiny settlement to huge metropolis almost immediately with no infrastructure.  It was "just this kind of muddy, mucky, overcrowded, incredibly smelly and disease-ridden place."  All this occurred from the 1850s to 1970s.

There was no natural drainage because of its flatness.  Even when the need to build sewers became much apparent, there was no where to build it.  Most city have a natural flow down to a river, lake or sea which it is located by.  Even with it being next to Lake Michigan, the flatness prevented that.

"And so this guy, Ellis Chesbrough, has this crazy but ultimately brilliant idea that you could actually just lift the entire city up and create an artificial flow by raising downtown Chicago by about ten feet.  So, using thousands of guys with jack screws, he lifts up these buildings.  They fill the roads with landfill, build sewers down the middle of the road, attach buildings to that."

--DaCoot

Chicago Needed a Lift-- Part 1: Too Low? Raise It!

From the October 15, 2014, Chicago Tribune "In order to get clean Chicago Needed a lift" by Steve Johnson.

"Chicago was the first American city to have a modern sewer system, and because it is so flat, it also had one of the hardest obstacles to achieving that.

"The story of, essentially, the jacking up of downtown Chicago to allow the waste system to be constructed underneath us the start of 'How We Hot to Now,' an engaging new six-part PBS series about ideas and achievements that shaped the modern world."

This episode is called "Clean,"  It goes from the man named Ellis Chesbrough, the city engineer who determined to use railroad jacks to raise the city and goes to Chicago's newest thing, the ongoing Deep Tunnel stormwater management project.

--Cooter