The Blue Death

by Dr. Robert D. Morris

  This vast city of animals brought with it many of the same problems as the human city to its north including the sewage that poured from the Union Stockyards into the South Fork of the Chicago River. That small tributary became the recipient of all things undesirable from the stockyard and its environs. At times the dried crust of sewage on the river’s surface was thick enough to support a man’s weight. Before long the bubbles of gas that rose from the fermenting accumulation of animal manure, carcasses, and human waste on the river’s bottom gave it a new name. The South Fork of the Chicago River would henceforth be known as Bubbly Creek.

  The stage had been set for the next waterborne disaster. It was only a matter of time and weather. As Chicago grew the vile waters of Bubbly Creek and the city’s sewage reached out farther and farther into the lake until they began to choke Chicago’s water supply. In 1873, with water levels low, cholera struck again, but other diseases had already begun to pose a greater threat. Cholera came occasionally and did not stay long. Improvements in Europe’s sanitation and water supply were reducing its chances of crossing the Atlantic. But dysentery and typhoid fever could linger through the winter. These diseases became endemic. They came and stayed. And killed.

  By 1891 Chicago had a rate of typhoid higher than any major city in Europe or North America. Afraid that the city’s reputation as a center for endemic typhoid would scare away visitors, the organizers of the Columbian Exposition in 1893 laid a hundred-mile-long pipeline to bring in spring water from rural Wisconsin and installed a plant to distill any city water used on the fairgrounds.

  Something had to be done. Chesbrough was gone, but the city fathers hatched a plan worthy of his legacy. Chicago saved its grandest, most audacious trick for last. When this project, at that time the largest civil engineering project ever undertaken, reached completion no dignitaries spoke, no bands played, and no cannons fired. Instead, at the last moment, a select few received hushed invitations to a christening held under the cloak of secrecy and darkness.

  In the dim predawn of January 2, 1900, B. A. Ekhart stopped his carriage at the intersection of Kedzie and 35th Street and jumped out into the bitter cold with seven shovels, dropping them on the frozen mud face of a dam. One side of the dam formed part of the bank of the Chicago River. On the other side of the dam, the most remarkable of all the water projects in Chicago’s history was almost ready.

  The six other trustees of the Sanitary District soon joined Ekhart and the seven men rushed down the dam with their shovels. After scraping up a few token spades of frozen ground, they turned the task over to Dredge No. 7. The air throbbed with sounds of the powerful steam engine as the massive shovel began to claw through the dam. Eight feet from its goal, the dredge stopped, unable to reach the remaining wall of frozen clay and ice that blocked the path between the river and the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal.

  The secretive opening ceremony stretched on for anxious hours. When four large charges of dynamite failed to breach the dam, the trustees grabbed their shovels and tried to finish the job by hand. When that failed they set fire to the wooden structures on the dam in hope of melting it open. In the end, workers managed to reposition Dredge No. 7 and the teeth of its huge bucket scratched through the final frozen jumble of ice and earth. Water began to seep into the canal. It would take more than a week for the canal to fill.

  Once the vast canal that lay hidden on the far side of the dam was in operation, it would radically redefine the watershed for Chicago, its rivers, and Lake Michigan. The idea had first occurred to the French explorer Louis Joliet soon after he became the first white man to see the region in 1674. He recognized that a barely discernable ridge just ten miles west of Chicago separated two of the most important watersheds in North America. On the east side, all water flowed toward Lake Michigan and ultimately the St. Lawrence River. On the other side, all water flowed west toward the Mississippi. Joliet imagined a canal cut through the ridge that would allow him to travel from Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico. The idea was simple, but 325 years would pass before the convergence of knowledge, ambition, technology, money, and necessity brought it to full fruition.

  There had been several efforts to create a canal, but the resulting waterways were small, shallow, and ultimately inadequate. The project that was to be completed at the opening of the new century had no such failings. The Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal was longer and wider than the Suez. It would redefine the course that the Chicago River had followed since the last ice age, moving it into an entirely new watershed. In an instant the river would begin to flow backward. The lake, which had been fed by water from the river, would now pour water into the river, taking with it the sewage of Chicago and carrying it into the Illinois River, across the state to St. Louis, and down the Mississippi to New Orleans.

  The canal would be a great boon for Chicago, not only providing a permanent separation of its sewage and drinking water, but also making the city the connecting point between two great watersheds. Cities on the Illinois such as Joliet, Peoria, and St. Louis would have access to the canal, but they would also find themselves suddenly downstream from Chicago and on the receiving end of its raw sewage. Given that Chicago had recently recorded the highest rate of typhoid fever in the country, these cities were less than delighted at the trade-off. Fears that this displeasure might inspire lawsuits motivated the trustees to embark on their furtive midnight opening of the canal.

  But even after they breached the dam, the canal’s future was uncertain. Unless the city received clearance to open the gates at the far end of the canal in Lockport, they would have nothing more than the world’s largest, most expensive, and most polluted swimming pool. As the canal slowly filled, the future recipients of Chicago’s feces rushed to the courthouse. But which courthouse? Missouri courts had no jurisdiction over a canal entirely within the boundaries of Illinois. There was no hope that the courts of Illinois would help them stop the canal. The power brokers from the city of big shoulders could manipulate the Illinois legislature and legal system to their own ends. In a case without precedent, St. Louis could only turn to Washington for help. The trustees of the Chicago Sanitary Commission had no intention of letting that effort succeed.

  So just after midnight on January 17, as the attorney general for the state of Missouri sped by train toward Washington to seek an injunction from the U.S. Supreme Court, the trustees of the Sanitary District of Chicago slinked onto a train to Lockport. Once again they hoped that the cover of darkness would shield them from the opposition. In the midst of a midwestern winter night, with the canal full, they opened the gates and Chicago’s wastewater seeped into the Illinois River on its way to the Mississippi. They hoped that it would be far harder to stop the canal once it was in operation.

  The legal battle would roll on for decades and would spark an international confrontation with Canada as water levels throughout the Great Lakes dropped almost half a foot, but the gates remained open. Chicago got its canal and with it a clean source of water for years to come. Typhoid, which had killed almost 2,000 people in Chicago in 1891 (far more than the Great Chicago Fire), killed only 322 in 1908 despite a doubling in population. Ultimately Chicago would treat its sewage and would build the largest water treatment plant in the world, but Chicago owes much of its success as a large city to a two-mile-long tunnel in blue mud and a river that runs backward.

  Sitting on the largest contiguous body of liquid fresh water in the world, Chicago and other cities on the Great Lakes had alternatives unavailable to most other cities. Few cities could simply stretch intake tunnels miles out into a relatively pure natural body of water and perhaps no other city in the world could exercise such complete control of the sources of contamination that threatened its water.

  Far more common was the situation faced by cities like Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., St. Louis, and New Orleans. Drinking from the America’s great rivers, these cities inherited sewage from growing populations upstream. Major European cities on the banks of the
Rhine, the Seine, the Danube, and the other grand rivers of the Old World had long faced this challenge and most had long since built filtration plants. On the heels of Robert Koch’s discoveries and the epidemic in Hamburg, those cities that didn’t filter were rushing to do so and many of those that already had filtration plants were improving them.

  As American water supplies grew turbid and the consequences of that pollution grew apparent, many cities chose to follow the lead of the Europeans and install huge water filtration plants. Others, however, took a new course. Unlike Chicago, these cities did not have a vast lake of fresh water at their door. Undeterred, they chose to build their own.

  The first Europeans in America had found a country laced with pure rivers and streams. Even as the twentieth century approached, that pristine wilderness still existed in the minds of urban Americans. It seemed that if one turned from the city and walked far enough into the forest, one could always find another mountain stream. By 1900 Boston and New York had already undertaken vast engineering projects to build rural reservoirs and pipe the pure water to their burgeoning populations. Other cities made their own plans to redesign watersheds to suit their needs. Most of these projects were steeped in controversy, power politics, and financial sleight of hand. The same powerful thirst that had Chicago digging under lakes and reconfiguring watersheds unleashed powerful, irresistible forces in the search for water. The huge projects that followed rolled over towns and left thousands of workers injured, maimed, or killed in the name of progress. But it was a reservoir in New Jersey that forever redefined the treatment of drinking water.

  Bill Hoar pulled a wool hat over his thick red hair, lifted the fifty-pound diving helmet, and lowered it onto his head as if it were little more than a derby hat. His assistant, John Dobson, reached up like an attentive grandfather to tighten the twelve bolts that held the helmet onto Hoar’s rubberized canvas suit. The cool spring sky spit rain as their raft bobbed on the water of the Jersey City Reservoir. Hoar was about to climb down into the water when Dobson grabbed him by the shoulders and stared through the glass faceplate.

  “You’d better be careful, Bill,” he warned, shouting so he could be heard through the brass helmet, “this ain’t no jowk.” (Dobson had somehow picked up a cockney accent on the streets around New York’s Fulton Street Market, where he had been born and raised.) In 1904 any dive was dangerous. Dobson had assisted Hoar on hundreds of them, but something about this one worried him. He could see Hoar laughing at him through the glass of his helmet as the hulking Swede sank into the silence of the steel gray water.

  The joke in Hoar’s mind as he descended may have been the failed schemes of the dam’s contractor, failures that now brought the two men from New York to the reservoir for the second time. Those problems began when, with the reservoir half full, a valve controlling one of the dam’s sluiceways jammed. Like two giant drains on either end of the dam, the sluiceways allowed the dam operator to control the level of the reservoir as if it were an immense bathtub. Buried deep inside the dam, the gate valve should have allowed him to control flow through the four-foot pipe. Once it jammed, the operator had no way to stop the cataract that screamed through the dam and rushed out its far side in an angry torrent.

  The reservoir was leaking, but the surging water in the pipe made it impossible to repair the gate. The contractor could have simply drained the reservoir, but that could take a week or more, and filling it would take two more weeks. The project was already almost two years overdue and every day of delay was costing him a hundred dollars, over two thousand dollars in today’s money.

  To avoid further expense, the contractor had designed an enormous two-and-a-half-ton wooden ball to solve the problem. He had to go 140 miles to Troy, New York, just to find someone who could machine a ball five feet in diameter and fill it with lead. He planned to lower the ball onto the pipe like an enormous bathtub plug that would shut off the water. With the pipe empty, a mechanic could easily climb into the sluiceway and fix the gate. But in the damp chill of early April, nothing was going according to plan.

  A train had delivered the massive plug just before Easter. The following Monday morning, a steam-powered crane lifted it and swung it out over the water. As the crane began to lower the ball into place, the harness snapped. With a single explosive splash, the reservoir swallowed the plug. It plummeted to the bottom and dug into the mud of what had been, just two weeks before, a farmer’s field.

  Hoar and Dobson had made their first trip to the reservoir to rescue the ball from uselessness. Hoar succeeded in reattaching the harness and the crane had raised it to the surface. His job complete, Hoar returned to his small apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He lived alone, but the work paid well enough that he could support his sister who lived just across the East River in Queens.

  The contractor made a second attempt to lower the ball into place. This time the harness held as the crane operator eased the ball onto the sluiceway. The water in the twelve-mile-long reservoir rushed toward the four-foot-wide pipe and sucked the immense ball toward its intended perch. The contractor stared intently at the cable that held the ball. The cable slackened and, sure the plug was now in place, he rushed to the other side of the dam and looked down its face. Below him he could still see a huge jet of water escaping from the sluiceway. He watched, waiting for the flow to stop. When it didn’t, his heart sank. The ball had failed to seal the pipe.

  The contractor could only guess why. Perhaps the initial fall had damaged the plug so that it was no longer round. Perhaps the ball had never been perfectly spherical or the pipe itself was misshapen. A stone on the bottom might have kept the great ball from settling properly into place. The answer was only a few hundred feet away, but it might as well have been on the moon. He could only stare at the rising water of the reservoir and guess. To solve the problem, whatever it was, he would need help.

  So once again Hoar and Dobson rode the ferry to New Jersey with a pair of trunks laden with hundreds of pounds of equipment. Introduced to diving by his uncle, Hoar had become one of the strongest and finest helmet divers in the city. He enjoyed the close brotherhood that forms among men who share a common danger. He and his colleagues spent their work days walking along the bottom of the murky rivers around New York, searching for the lost, repairing the broken, and assisting in the construction of the bridges and piers that studded the city. With relatively crude equipment made only from wool, cotton, brass, glass, and natural rubber, he had come to feel at home in the crushing darkness of deep water.

  After a quick lunch, Hoar and Dobson had rowed out to their raft and prepared to dive into the reservoir, charged once again with rescuing the contractor from his own incompetence. This time the challenge was far more dangerous than just pulling a giant ball out of the muck, but Hoar laughed off Dobson’s warning and dropped into the cold. As he approached the bottom, the waters that were gathering behind the dam extinguished the last bits of sunlight.

  Hoar felt his way along the bottom, toward the sluiceway. As he approached the ball once again, he could feel the rush of water escaping through gaps between the plug and the edge of the pipe. The strong current pulled at his legs. Careful not to get swept up in the flow, he searched for the reason the ball had failed to seal the pipe. The hazards that swirled around him in the soundless murky depths concentrated every fiber of his being on the ball and the water that rushed beneath it.

  Up above John Dobson waited, wordless. His world had grown as narrow and focused as his partner’s, seventy feet below. He held Hoar’s lifelines as he had on dive after dive over the past eight years, listening with his fingers for any signal from the bottom. The massive granite-faced dam, a hundred feet high and over three thousand feet wide loomed over him. His tiny raft bobbed like a cork as a pair of laborers cranked Hoar’s compressor. They worked in thirty-minute shifts to send air down a narrow rubber tube to Hoar’s helmet. Then Dobson felt it. Four strong tugs. Hoar was ready to return to the surface.


  As he climbed up onto the dock, Hoar had a plan. He told Dobson he would need some sandbags and waited while workers on the dam prepared them. Then with the weight of the sandbags and a diving suit that weighed more than a hundred pounds, he climbed back off the raft and plummeted back to the bottom. He stuffed the first set of sandbags into the gap, but the water still rushed around them. When he was done, Dobson pulled him up once again.

  Almost no one in Boonton had ever seen a diver at work and a crowd had gathered at the dam to watch. An amateur photographer among the onlookers snapped pictures as Hoar prepared to descend. The crowd craned to see as he gathered more sandbags and climbed back into the water. Once the water closed over him, all that remained were the bubbles that rose steadily to the surface and the constant efforts of those charged with keeping Hoar alive. The crowd watched Dobson waiting by the edge of the raft, his hands gripping the lifeline that ran down to Hoar. They watched the laborers who worked in shifts to turn the huge steel wheel, which in turn drove the pump that sent air through the thick rubber hose down to Hoar’s helmet. They watched the torrent of water rushing from the bottom of the sluiceway for any sign that Hoar was succeeding. They tried to imagine what was happening below the surface, but none of them envisioned the nightmare that was about to unfold.

  Out of sight Hoar braced himself against the ferocious flow of water that raced through the narrow opening as he dropped the sandbags into place. Each time he carefully set one of his twenty-pound lead-weighted shoes on the bag and pushed it into the crack. He could feel the remaining current quicken as if the water was growing more desperate to escape as the gap narrowed. He felt his plan was working.