Sewer Cop
Yarnik regularly consults shop vacs in industrial parking lots throughout Chicago and the western suburbs, making a couple hundred site visits a year. The data he collects on industrial wastewater play a big role in his mission, which he describes as “keeping the sewers free of substances having a deleterious effect on the district’s treatment capabilities.” He translates: “If you put something in the sewer that shouldn’t be there, we find you.”
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If lab tests reveal illegal substances in a company’s wastewater, the MWRD can take a number of actions, depending on the severity of the contamination and the company’s record of compliance with the law. It might issue a warning or levy a fine for a mild infraction. It might file criminal charges in a more serious case. Companies still sneak illegal substances into sewers, most often to avoid paying for their proper disposal, but clues usually turn up somewhere. “The investigative responsibilities,” Yarnik says, “are my favorite part of the job.”
Illegal tie-ins tend to occur in newer communities where the sewers are separated into two systems instead of one: a storm-sewer system that handles rain and snow (relatively untainted water) and a sanitary system that accepts household and industrial waste (sewage). Drains located outside buildings generally run into the storm-sewer system, while drains located inside buildings run into the sanitary system. Two such systems drain the area along Silver Creek, and both eventually run into the creek, though they take different routes. The storm system leads directly into the waterway, while the sanitary system makes a detour through the sewage-treatment plant. An illegal tie-in happens when a company attaches its plumbing to the storm rather than the sanitary system.
On August 1, 1989, sometime between midnight and 2 AM, a supervisor at P & H Plating Company on West Belmont removed a 1,000-gallon drum of used metal-finishing solution from storage and emptied it into the sewer. Roughly 15 minutes later alarms went off throughout the MWRD’s north-side sewage-treatment plant. Sensors in the sewer line had detected large concentrations of cadmium cyanide coming down the pipes–enough to knock the plant out of commission for months. The operators on duty had no choice but to close the intake valves, forcing the raw sewage to bypass the plant and run directly into the Chicago River. The next morning the North Branch was clogged with the bodies of more than 10,000 dead fish. “This was an extreme case,” says Yarnik, “the worst pass-through event in my memory.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Greg Yarnik photo by Cynthia Howe.
