They reversed the river, they just need to reverse the AC
1 year ago
| 1,600
You also recently electrified said river to keep the carp from breaching into the lake. Not nearly as big a project as the other two, but the giant fish taser is probably my favorite piece of Chicago infrastructure outside of the loop itself.
1 year ago | 742
"We can't" is often code for "I don't want to change".
1 year ago | 25
Heck, even the initial funding for the interstate highway system cost several times that of the latest infrastructure bill. We used to do big hard things but not anymore apparently!
1 year ago
| 602
As a Michigander I didn’t even know about that highly electrified river until a year ago. Honestly an amazing way to keep invasive species out
1 year ago | 25
Remember that when people say any infrastructure is too hard/costly
1 year ago | 24
As a citizen of the City of St. Louis, I’ve definitely heard this story…
1 year ago | 11
Helping my mom clean my late gramdna's house, I ran across a peculiar set of tools in a pouch: a cork screw, a couple drill bits, a saw blade, screwdriver blade... all with the same grooves to fit the missing handle. I learned that they were used to rebuild Chicago after the fire by my great great granpa (maybe 3 greats)
1 year ago | 5
Eh, that sounds like a lot of work and I really don’t mind drinking sewage. Plus, the river has been flowing that way for a while, and if something isn’t the way I remember it being when I was younger I’ll get scared and angry
1 year ago | 91
This has big “What If?” By Randall Munroe energy and I for one am here for it.
1 year ago | 2
I love the "we can't just..." argument when the simple answer is "of course we just can" if it's local megaprojects like this or global ones like the leaded fuel ban, asbestos, ozon hole... we can just ban stuff and either force or incentivise change in industries.
1 year ago | 133
What's most amazing about dying the river is that it still makes the local news every year.
1 year ago | 7
There's also a hugely bigly huge underground system for intercepting stormwater to prevent dumping raw sewage into the rivers. I worked on CUP McCook - located between the river and the canal - one summer about 20 years ago.
1 year ago | 7
I remember my great uncle getting a heat pump when he got a new furnace back in the 90s. Pre cold climate heat pump, and he thought it was the greatest thing ever that the furnace only ran in the night when it was literally freezing or below out. He really thought that was something, and it did save him a lot to run it over paying for gas.
1 year ago | 3
As someone from Milwaukee we did our part through most of the nineties to dump enough waste into the lake to counteract that. (God i wish i was joking)
1 year ago | 13
People don't understand just how badly we have been impoverished. Those types of tasks have been out of our reach for decades.
1 year ago | 1
Don't forget the cribs. Chicago dug several MASSIVE tunnels miles into the lake in order to extract clean(er) offshore water than could be found by the lakeside. I've sailed around Wilson(1918), Harrison(1900)-Denver(1935), and Four Mile (1881) cribs many times and they still impress.
1 year ago | 0
I also love that in doing so, they sort of polluted the river downstream...to St Louis... LMFAO... STL sued and won, but Chicago was like "nah, it's too hard to re-reverse it" so they just kept it as is.
1 year ago | 76
Technology Connections
As we in Chicago repeat our silly tradition of dyeing the river green for St. Patrick's Day, I think it's a good time to remind people that our ancestors *reversed the flow of the river* to keep Lake Michigan, our source of drinking water, clean and safe.
And earlier, in the 1860's, the central core of the city and all of its buildings were *lifted by several feet* to allow for the installation of sewer systems which improved drainage and public health.
Remember that the next time someone says heat pumps and electrification are hard.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_River#Reversing_the_…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
(edited b/c the buildings were lifted differing amounts)
1 year ago (edited) | [YT] | 9,589