This "don't miss" story from yesterday's NY Times begins:
CHICAGO, April 21 — Chicago needed mud, and East Peoria, Ill., needed to get rid of it.Chicago's 570 acre US Steel South Works plant was covered with slag, a steel-making byproduct which anyone who has lived near Lake Michigan recognizes immediately, it is kind of like rough lightweight cinders, with an unpleasant odor. More from the story:If the elegant (albeit muddy) solution seems obvious now, remember: these cities are 165 miles apart, and, like most cities, neither had ever devoted much time to pondering the other's problem.
So when United States Steel and city officials began dreaming several years ago of ways to turn the famed old mill into a new development — perhaps with businesses, homes, roads and parks — the slag posed a problem. How exactly would one set a grassy park on slag, where grass will not grow?The best quote: "We needed good quality soil," said Mayor Richard M. Daley, "and basically this solves two environmental problems, one urban and one rural." Posted by Marcia Oddi at April 23, 2004 07:48 AMIn East Peoria, meanwhile, an entirely different question was being asked. More and more sediment was accumulating on the beds of Upper and Lower Peoria Lakes, thanks in part to the development of a navigational channel in the Illinois River, which runs through the lakes. * * * But where exactly would one throw away all this muddy sediment, especially given the high prices of disposal?
That was where John C. Marlin, a scientist so curious about mud that he has taken hundreds of photographs of it (wet, dry, cracked, caked), stepped forward. Dr. Marlin, a senior scientist in the waste management and research center of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, has been fascinated with silt and sediment for more than three decades. * * *
For at least the next six weeks, barges loaded with mud from the bottom of Lower Peoria Lake will make the 165-mile, two-day journey to the edge of Lake Michigan. There, hundreds of truckloads of mud will be dumped on the slag-covered land. And by summer, Dr. Marlin said, grass will grow on the acres meant to become a city park. Seventy barges will make the trip, each with 1,500 tons of mud. In the end, more than 100,000 tons of mud will frost the top of this land.
The mud is safe, the federal Environmental Protection Agency reported after reviewing core samples from the lakes. And most of a $2 million grant from the state is paying to transport it — a deal, in the eyes of Chicago officials who needed clean dirt and East Peoria officials who did not.