Peter Baranyai directs Wastewater Operations for the Sanitary District of East Chicago, Indiana. The plant's effluent channel looks like a natural stream and has apparently fooled wilflide into thinking so, too. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
You might not expect much good
environmental news to come from
sewage plants, but, believe it or
not, there is some on occasion.
And in one case, that good news
even involves thriving salmon.
Shawn Allee has the story:
Transcript
You might not expect much good
environmental news to come from
sewage plants, but, believe it or
not, there is some on occasion.
And in one case, that good news
even involves thriving salmon.
Shawn Allee has the story:
Sewage plants are often out of sight, out of mind, and people usually like it that way. But people who work at the water treatment plant in East Chicago, Indiana, want everyone to know about an ecological come-back story there.
I’m game. So I meet the plant director Peter Baranyai.
Allee: “You’ve got this strange mix of some really striking natural areas, rivers and streams, but then everything’s kind of dotted by industry as well, and has been for a long time. What kind of industries are we talking about in this region?”
Baranyai: “Basic steel mills, oil refineries, chemical industries also.”
Allee: “So, when they’re talking ‘heavy industry’, they really mean it here?”
Baranyai: “Yes.”
Allee: “What are we looking at here?”
Baranyai: “We’re trying to look at our discharge channel. That’s the effluent from our treatment plant. This pipe here’s a 60-inch pipe.”
Allee: “You can see the water moving out of it pretty quickly.”
The treated wast water is from nearby homes and factories. And when it leaves the pipe, you’d swear it’s a natural stream. Apparently, it’s fooled plenty of critters, including Chinook salmon.
Each Fall, salmon swim from Lake Michigan, past shipping canals, steel mills and chemical factories – just to spawn in the treated waste water.
Baranyai: “They’re not being too cooperative today because I don’t see too much.”
The salmon spawned earlier than normal this year, so, I only find dead salmon on the banks.
Baranyai: “This was a, oh, almost 4-foot chinook salmon.”
Allee: “Or the evidence of it.”
Baranyai: “And he died.”
Allee: “Again, they’re kind of programmed to die after they spawn.”
Baranyai: “Yeah, he died on the rocks here.”
The government introduced Chinook salmon to Lake Michigan decades ago, but for a long time, salmon wouldn’t spawn here, and birds and nearly everything else shied away, too.
Baranyai says one problem was that they used to disinfect water with chlorine.
Baranyai: “It’s a very effective way of disinfecting, but it continues to disinfect downstream. It’s not selective, usually anyhthing that’s alive, it usually kills. It pretty much sterilizes everything. And that’s how most water treatment plants in our country do that, still.”
Baranyai says in the late 80s, things turned around. His plant added better filters, and now, when they disinfect water, they kill bacteria with ultraviolet light, not chlorine. In just a few years, salmon started spawning – right in the plant. Plus, fresh-water sponges grow in the plant, and herons showed up. Word got around.
Roger Klocek was a biologist at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium at the time. He learned the news from a fellow scientist.
Klocek: “I thought he was nuts, literally. What are you talking about?”
Klocek says you have to understand, for a long time people ignored water treatment plants or they expected them to remove only the worst industrial pollutants.
Klocek: “I had no idea that waste water plants themselves could actually contribute to an improved ecology.”
Allee: “Maybe the opposite, they were putting chlorine in the water or bacteria, if they weren’t disinfecting.”
Klocek: “Absolutely, you know we hear constantly that technology is going to save us and I really don’t believe that. I think we put too much stock in that, but it sure is gratifying to see when there is some technology that makes a remarkable improvement.”
Klocek says, too often, people assume industrial areas like East Chicago will always be ecological basket cases.
He says, sure there’s room for improvement, but having one concrete example of something that works? That can give you hope about what nature can do if you give it a chance.
For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.
