The Steampunk World
Bubbly Dynamics, Part I
Chicago is well-known and appreciated for its architecture, but less so for its engineering. For example, this city has far more moving bridges than any other. Another amazing aspect of the city is the water system and the river, the lore of which are well-known by residents but not by non-residents, other than the fact that the Pipefitter's Union dyes it green on St. Patty's Day (leading to the joke "well then why can't they dye it BLUE the rest of the year?!?!"). Part of that lore is the tale of Bubbly Creek, possibly the second-most-famous polluted river in America.
As the swampy mouth of the Chicago river slowly grew into a city, the growth of the human population brought with it a nasty problem: Call it pollution, call it human waste, but what we're really talkin about here is poo juice. The poo juice from the people all went into the river, and the river went into the lake, and the lake is where the drinking water comes from, and nobody with the exception of a few sick individuals on the Internet wants to drink poo juice. An estimated 80,000 people died in the 1800s, though, from exactly that.
So they built a big pier out into the water to suck fresh(er) water into a reservoir for drinking. It wasn't long enough, and it tended to suck up fish, and people complained about bathing in chowder, which I would gladly suffer if it meant somehow that I could avoid drinking jus du poo. But it didn't, so they built some longer pipes, and it was a little better, but a cool glass of ice water still had that distinct tangy aftertaste. So they undertook Amazing Engineering Feat #1, they built a crib (basically a house with a drain in the middle), floated it two miles out, filled it with bricks until it hit the bottom, and then hired the Irish to dig a tunnel under the lake floor two miles back to a pumping station on shore. It was the longest tunnel ever bored at the time. Nowadays there are several cribs out there, you can see little houses out in the water, and before the advent of the outboard motor men would row out there and live for a week at a time on the crib (it had living facilities and may just be the world's first "crib") and keep gunk out of the drain, including busting up any ice that would form in the winter. Now, in The Wake Of September Eleventh(tm), those cribs are patrolled by the Coast Guard and anyone who gets too close in a boat is blasted out of the water like the muthafuckin Spanish Armada.
But, whenever it rained a lot, the poo juice would even reach the cribs, and though mama said it wouldn't hurt, you shouldn't have it for dessert. Now, humans, when confronted with the shitting of their own nest, rarely consider options such as reducing the number of humans or figuring out something to do with our post-sausage, so to speak. Instead, we think, "how can we alter nature in a way that will still allow us to shit our nest and get away with it until it's our children's problem and not ours?" So in 1900 they accomplished Amazing Engineering Feat #2, they reversed the flow of the Chicago River so that the poo juice would flow inland! They dug the Chicago Shipping and Sanitary Canal connecting the Chicago to the Des Plaines, and there was a great sound of squealing brakes as the river turned around and flowed in the other direction, draining the lake into the Des Plaines and down through the Mississippi and out to the Gulf of Mexico. The poo juice was out of Crook County and therefore out of mind. Eventually, the river drained so much of Lake Michigan that the Great Lake states sued to reduce the amount of diversion, because other lakefront cities were finding their lake slowly sneaking away from their shoreline. The Supreme Court decided that Chicago had to put the brakes on the amount of water being drained, so they cut it back with the lock system.
There was another problem. Even with all this crazy engineering, the river just didn't dump the poo juice into the canal fast enough. The solution was Amazing Engineering Feat #3, where they dug another river, 200 ft below the existing one! Being engineers, they creatively named it the Deep Tunnel. I would have at least called it the Lower Chicago, if not the Massive Subterranean Poo-Juice Shunt.
Alas, poo juice was not the only nasty thing lurking in the river. This is where Bubbly Creek comes in. Chicago is famous for da Blues, da Bears, da Cubbies, and park sassidge. And, although the home of Vienna Sausages ensures that a healthy amount of killing-floor sweepings still makes it into a processed meat tube, there were still plenty of unwanted hog parts lying around, and without any Pennsylvanians in town to use it in scrapple, it got dumped into Bubbly Creek. So much so that the constant decay caused the creek to churn like the Bog of Eternal Stench, and nearby residents prayed for flatulence to improve the smell in the air. Passing by Bubbly Creek might require you to grab the nearest cat and hold its butt to your face, inhaling deeply, just to endure the noxious fumes.
Plus, every other industry was sloughing their deadly waste products into the creek, like so many drunken Cubs fans lined up at a trough-style urinal. At one point, the pollution caused the river to crust over, and chickens were seen walking around on it. This was no doubt misinterpreted by other chickens as a sign that the chicken messiah had arrived, eventually causing chickens to rustle up large messes of their offspring on Sunday mornings down at the chicken church. If only someone had taken a hint from the Cuyahoga and set the river aflame, the river could have provided an endless supply of river-fried chicken. Fortunately, unlike in Cleveland, the creek never caught fire, and as the slaughterhouses moved on, the creek stopped being so choked with rotting pork (the other rotting white meat) and nowadays is only polluted by heavy metals and nasty chlorinated organics from the industries. Unfortunately, unlike Cleveland, the mayor did not catch fire, so the river is also clogged with the bodies of dead Republicans who dared to run against da Machine.
Nowadays there are efforts to clean up the rivers before the only thing that can live in them are throngs of snakeheads. Also, the city has a huge water treatment plant smack-dab in the middle of the lakefront disguised as a tourist attraction. So as I draw a glass of icewater from my tap, I can be confident that- thanks to some amazing engineering- it came to me through two miles of Irish-dug tunnels and was filtered very close to an Imax theater and a Forrest-Gump-themed restaurant, and not from a chicken-dotted seething trough of pork and a split-level river. I can take a swig and say, "Ahhh, that's good lake water, and not a hint of poo."
Chicago is well-known and appreciated for its architecture, but less so for its engineering. For example, this city has far more moving bridges than any other. Another amazing aspect of the city is the water system and the river, the lore of which are well-known by residents but not by non-residents, other than the fact that the Pipefitter's Union dyes it green on St. Patty's Day (leading to the joke "well then why can't they dye it BLUE the rest of the year?!?!"). Part of that lore is the tale of Bubbly Creek, possibly the second-most-famous polluted river in America.
As the swampy mouth of the Chicago river slowly grew into a city, the growth of the human population brought with it a nasty problem: Call it pollution, call it human waste, but what we're really talkin about here is poo juice. The poo juice from the people all went into the river, and the river went into the lake, and the lake is where the drinking water comes from, and nobody with the exception of a few sick individuals on the Internet wants to drink poo juice. An estimated 80,000 people died in the 1800s, though, from exactly that.
So they built a big pier out into the water to suck fresh(er) water into a reservoir for drinking. It wasn't long enough, and it tended to suck up fish, and people complained about bathing in chowder, which I would gladly suffer if it meant somehow that I could avoid drinking jus du poo. But it didn't, so they built some longer pipes, and it was a little better, but a cool glass of ice water still had that distinct tangy aftertaste. So they undertook Amazing Engineering Feat #1, they built a crib (basically a house with a drain in the middle), floated it two miles out, filled it with bricks until it hit the bottom, and then hired the Irish to dig a tunnel under the lake floor two miles back to a pumping station on shore. It was the longest tunnel ever bored at the time. Nowadays there are several cribs out there, you can see little houses out in the water, and before the advent of the outboard motor men would row out there and live for a week at a time on the crib (it had living facilities and may just be the world's first "crib") and keep gunk out of the drain, including busting up any ice that would form in the winter. Now, in The Wake Of September Eleventh(tm), those cribs are patrolled by the Coast Guard and anyone who gets too close in a boat is blasted out of the water like the muthafuckin Spanish Armada.
But, whenever it rained a lot, the poo juice would even reach the cribs, and though mama said it wouldn't hurt, you shouldn't have it for dessert. Now, humans, when confronted with the shitting of their own nest, rarely consider options such as reducing the number of humans or figuring out something to do with our post-sausage, so to speak. Instead, we think, "how can we alter nature in a way that will still allow us to shit our nest and get away with it until it's our children's problem and not ours?" So in 1900 they accomplished Amazing Engineering Feat #2, they reversed the flow of the Chicago River so that the poo juice would flow inland! They dug the Chicago Shipping and Sanitary Canal connecting the Chicago to the Des Plaines, and there was a great sound of squealing brakes as the river turned around and flowed in the other direction, draining the lake into the Des Plaines and down through the Mississippi and out to the Gulf of Mexico. The poo juice was out of Crook County and therefore out of mind. Eventually, the river drained so much of Lake Michigan that the Great Lake states sued to reduce the amount of diversion, because other lakefront cities were finding their lake slowly sneaking away from their shoreline. The Supreme Court decided that Chicago had to put the brakes on the amount of water being drained, so they cut it back with the lock system.
There was another problem. Even with all this crazy engineering, the river just didn't dump the poo juice into the canal fast enough. The solution was Amazing Engineering Feat #3, where they dug another river, 200 ft below the existing one! Being engineers, they creatively named it the Deep Tunnel. I would have at least called it the Lower Chicago, if not the Massive Subterranean Poo-Juice Shunt.
Alas, poo juice was not the only nasty thing lurking in the river. This is where Bubbly Creek comes in. Chicago is famous for da Blues, da Bears, da Cubbies, and park sassidge. And, although the home of Vienna Sausages ensures that a healthy amount of killing-floor sweepings still makes it into a processed meat tube, there were still plenty of unwanted hog parts lying around, and without any Pennsylvanians in town to use it in scrapple, it got dumped into Bubbly Creek. So much so that the constant decay caused the creek to churn like the Bog of Eternal Stench, and nearby residents prayed for flatulence to improve the smell in the air. Passing by Bubbly Creek might require you to grab the nearest cat and hold its butt to your face, inhaling deeply, just to endure the noxious fumes.
Plus, every other industry was sloughing their deadly waste products into the creek, like so many drunken Cubs fans lined up at a trough-style urinal. At one point, the pollution caused the river to crust over, and chickens were seen walking around on it. This was no doubt misinterpreted by other chickens as a sign that the chicken messiah had arrived, eventually causing chickens to rustle up large messes of their offspring on Sunday mornings down at the chicken church. If only someone had taken a hint from the Cuyahoga and set the river aflame, the river could have provided an endless supply of river-fried chicken. Fortunately, unlike in Cleveland, the creek never caught fire, and as the slaughterhouses moved on, the creek stopped being so choked with rotting pork (the other rotting white meat) and nowadays is only polluted by heavy metals and nasty chlorinated organics from the industries. Unfortunately, unlike Cleveland, the mayor did not catch fire, so the river is also clogged with the bodies of dead Republicans who dared to run against da Machine.
Nowadays there are efforts to clean up the rivers before the only thing that can live in them are throngs of snakeheads. Also, the city has a huge water treatment plant smack-dab in the middle of the lakefront disguised as a tourist attraction. So as I draw a glass of icewater from my tap, I can be confident that- thanks to some amazing engineering- it came to me through two miles of Irish-dug tunnels and was filtered very close to an Imax theater and a Forrest-Gump-themed restaurant, and not from a chicken-dotted seething trough of pork and a split-level river. I can take a swig and say, "Ahhh, that's good lake water, and not a hint of poo."
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home