»Bargee brings mud!

The New York Times' Monica Davey has a spectacular piece on mud transplantation, from Peoria to Chicago.
In Chicago, United States Steel will use the nutrient-rich mud to slather a slag heap on the South Side, making a 573-acre site habitable.

Meanwhile back at the Salton Sea, another fabulously muddy area: California lawmakers, having settled with Federal agencies on plans to share water running into the Sea, now have a $730 million development plan.

April 22, 2004
CHICAGO JOURNAL

A Mudflow Rolls to a City That Couldn't Be Happier
By MONICA DAVEY

CHICAGO, April 21 — Chicago needed mud, and East Peoria, Ill., needed to get rid of it.

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.

On the South Side of Chicago, 20,000 people had once labored in what used to be the United States Steel Corporation's South Works plant, a symbol beside Lake Michigan of this city's place in building a nation's bridges and skyscrapers. South Works, now empty and closed, filled 573 acres, making it larger than even the Loop, the city's downtown business district. Much of the land was glazed in slag, a byproduct of steel and another reminder of the past.

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?

In 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.

Once six to eight feet deep, the lakes had shrunk to depths more appropriate for a bathtub. Sauger, bass and sunfish were left searching for room to swim. The duck population sank by 90 percent. And people with boats began to fear sucking mud, not water, into their motors.

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.

Standing on the South Works site in the shadow of the old ore storage walls on a recent morning, Dr. Marlin smiled as a crane lifted giant fudgy scoops of mud from a barge that had come from East Peoria.

"There was no real epiphany moment," he said of his realizing that East Peoria's problem could fix Chicago's, and vice versa. "I just started looking at maps and thinking about it."

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.

"We needed good quality soil," said Mayor Richard M. Daley, "and basically this solves two environmental problems, one urban and one rural."

On the rural end, in East Peoria, officials watched with relief in recent days as a public marina in Lower Peoria Lake got deeper.

"We've waffled in the past as to whether our marina could even stay viable or not because of the expense of dredging," said Brad Smith, executive director of the Fon du Lac park district. "This gives us somewhere to take the stuff."

If everything works out here, Dr. Marlin said, he has dreams of similar projects in other places, of other happy marriages between localities separated by so much distance.

"Why not?" he said. The Peoria Lakes alone, he estimated, have gathered enough extra mud to fill a football field that reaches 10 miles high. "Just imagine," he said.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company