The Chicago River The Windy City will, at last, clean up its
filthy river THE old-timers down by Bubbly Creek were hoping to
land catfish for dinner. On a sunny afternoon they were fishing
on a southern fork of the Chicago River made famous by Upton
Sinclair in his social-realist novel of 1906, “The Jungle”.
Sinclair described how offal and waste from the meatpacking
industry had created a river so vile that putrid gas bubbled up
from the bottom and made the river literally combustible. Today,
the river hardly ever bubbles but the pollution remains so
serious that the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
has ordered the state of Illinois to clean it up. Earlier this
month, the EPA and the state finally agreed over how clean the
river should be. Until recently the Metropolitan Water
Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRD)—the agency
responsible for dealing with the city's sewage and storm
water—had always insisted that the river was little more than a
series of canals for shipping and drainage