Engineering
This process began in 1900 with MWRD’s construction of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. It was aimed at protecting Lake Michigan, the source of the region’s drinking water.
What is the reversal of the Chicago River?
A roadmap that helps illustrate how the MWRD will take various steps to lower its carbon footprint.
What is the Climate Action Plan (CAP)?
What does MWRD stand for?
“The lights provide a green glow that emanates through the treated water. The system uses light to deactivate the bacteria in the water.”
What is ultraviolet ray (UV) disinfection technology?
Water that has a low level of dissolved parts, is suitable for aquatic life and human activities, and is also safe water for drinking and domestic use.
What is clean water?
Sometimes referred to as “Deep Tunnel,” this is a system of deep, large diameter tunnels and vast reservoirs designed to reduce flooding, improve water quality in Chicago area waterways and protect Lake Michigan from pollution caused by sewer overflows.
What is the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan (TARP)?
A partnership between the MWRD and the Illinois Monarch Project to help save monarch butterflies. Residents of Cook County can pledge online to receive free milkweed seeds - milkweeds are the only source of food for monarch caterpillars.
What is the Save the Monarchs program?
The year the Illinois General Assembly created the MWRD to protect Lake Michigan, Chicago residents, and area waterways from toxic waste buildup.
What is 1889?
This substance produced in MWRD’s anaerobic digesters is used as a fuel for boilers to produce steam to heat the facilities’ buildings and treatment plant processes.
What is biogas?
Large containers that collect and store rainwater from a roof. They help conserve water and reduce treated water use. (Pro tip: they can be purchased for a subsidized price on the MWRD website and one is on raffle today!)
What are rain barrels?
This wastewater treatment facility is the largest in the world, serving 2.3 million people in a 260-square-mile area, including the central part of Chicago and 46 suburban communities.
What is the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant?
This initiative empowers the residents of Cook County with an opportunity to restore our region’s depleted tree canopy. Residents receive free bare-root saplings or potted saplings from MWRD.
What is the Restore the Canopy program?
What is Cook County
The MWRD views used water as a collection of raw resources to be recovered and reused beneficially. Through this program, the MWRD is aiming to reduce greenhouse gases and create a more sustainable environment.
What is the Resource Recovery program?
Which water reclamation plant is local to the Frisbie Senior Center?
What is James C. Kirie WRP.
This MWRD reservoir, located in one of the world’s largest aggregate quarries and alongside the I-294 highway, has prevented over 50 billion gallons of combined sewage from entering the waterways.
What is the Thornton Reservoir?
This MWRD partnership with the Chicago Public Schools, the Chicago Department of Water Management, Healthy Schools and Openlands transforms elementary school playgrounds using green infrastructure.
What is the Space to Grow program?
What is nine Commissioners.
The MWRD collects these at 28 locations throughout the agency’s 882-square-mile service area throughout Cook County. They are analyzed in a lab for dozens of chemical and biological constituents.
What are water samples?
Terms for two types of water that are often used interchangeably but, in fact, refer to two different and distinct types of liquid waste that the MWRD manages.
What is stormwater and wastewater?
Built by the MWRD in 1907 and located where the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal connects with the Des Plaines River, this facility allows the MWRD to control the levels of the waterways and provides financial benefits from hydroelectric power generation.
What is the Lockport Powerhouse?
The informal title of an MWRD restoration effort, converting strip-mined land to productive farmland. The project was honored by the American Society of Civil Engineers as the outstanding engineering achievement of the year in 1974, and has now become an ideal site to develop and test best management practices to reduce non-point source nutrients.
What is the “Prairie Plan”?
The names of the seven Water Reclamation Plants MWRD operates, some of which are named after celebrated engineers and commissioners of MWRD past.
What are Calumet, John E. Egan, Hanover Park, James C. Kirie, Lemont, Terrence J. O’Brien, Stickney?
A process which occurs at MWRD’s Stickney Plant, home to the largest nutrient recovery facility in the world. This process reduces algal bloom in rivers, preventing toxic conditions that would destroy aquatic life and severely limit recreational enjoyment of lakes and rivers.
What is phosphorus removal?
The average number of gallons of water treated per day by the MWRD’s Water Reclamation Plants.
What is 1.3 billion gallons?