Pa.ate Foar CLic:a.ato San.day Triban.e

The Drama of Chi

r ,

Pumping Itation and tower in 1854,after new Iystem had been inltalledfollowing politic:al battle over c:ity'l ac:quilition of water IYltem.

Quenching a City's ThirstMade Engineering History(Continued from page one. )

engine which could raise. 25 bar-rels of water a minute into areservoir 35 feet above the lakelevel.This reservoir was built of

wood at the corner of Lakestreet and Michigan avenue, andit was big enough to hold 1,250barrels. Out of it the waterfiowed by gravity through wood-en mains to the part of theyoung city that is now the loop.In 1851 an issue was made on

the question of public ownershipof the water system. Walter S.Gurnee was elected mayor andthe rights and franchises of theChicago Hydraulic com pan ywere taken over by the city.Naturally the primitive wood-

en water system, which wascontinually getting .clogged upwith fish and other unwanfedmatter, was no longer consid-ered adequate, and an engineerfrom New York named McAlpinewas summoned, with the resultthat in 1854 an entirely new sys-tem was put into operation onthe site of the present old watertower on Chicago avenue.A building and standpipe were

erected, within which was' in-stalled a great vertical beamengine that was a wonder in itsday. Its cylinder was 44 inchesin diameter and its piston strokewas 9 feet. The great fiywheelhad a diameter of 24 feet andweighed 12 tons. The" walkingbeam" was 30 feet long.For half a century, until 1903,

this venerable piece of machin-e~y continued in service and at-tracted many sightseers andvisitors. It was affectionatelyk now n to the engineers as" Sally." The water intake wasa timber crib about 600 feet off-shore surrounded by a basin athousand feet across formed bybreakwaters of r 0 ugh stoneblocks through which the waterhad to percolate into the basin.After being raised by the

pumping engine the water wasdistributed to three reservoirs-one at Chicago avenue and Sedg-wick street, one at La Salle andAdams streets, and the third atMonroe and Morgan streets.Each of these reservoirs heldtwo or three days' supply andsupplied a large section of thecity through iron water mains.

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This new water system, won-derful though it seemed at first,could not. long be sufficient toa city growing at the recordpace of early Chicago. Duringthe first four months the pumpoperated but nine hours a dayand not at all on Sundays ex-cept in case of fire. After thatit was given longer hours, buta second and more powerfulpump had to be installed andstarted working in 1857.Then more trouble came. The

increasing amourits of sewageand pac kin g plant· wastesdumped into the river were re-sulting in widespread pollutionof the lake. The growing prev-alence of typhoid fever, diar-rhea, and other water- bornediseases In the city becamealarming. Obviously the intakemust be moved farther out inthe lake. And also obviously abigger pumping station and dis-tribution system must be pro-vided to keep step with the pop-ulation.

Accordingly a board of pUblicworks was created on May 6,1861, and Chief Engineer EllisS. Chesbrough was entrustedwith the job of planning for thefuture. The Chesbrough plan,adopted two years later, em-braced the bold idea of buildinga: tunnel under the lake to anintake two miles offshore atChicago avenue, with a new andbigger pumping station andwater tower. The completionof this ambitious project in 1867marked the beginning of theChicago waterworks of today.The earlier water tower, built

to hold the water high enoughso that it would flow to the varl-ous reservoirs, was of brick,fourteen feet square at the bot-tom and tapering slightly to itstop, 136 feet above the ground.The new water tower, which isthe one that still stands at thecorner of Michigan and Chicagoavenues, reached a height of 150feet. A report in 1868 spoke ofthe new buildings as follows:"Chicago has outgrown her

waterworks of sixteen yearsago. Today upon the site of theold buildings s tan d in theirstead w hit e stone structureswhich for beauty, strength, andmagnitude are probably. unsur-passed by any bU\\dings in theUnited States for e purposes."But, of cours I e most re-

markable featu 1.0' the Ches-brough water was notthe handsome t. r: tower, butthe hidden tunne .,~ch broughtan unlimited pply of purewater to the city roni the ampledistance of two .s offshore.

Diagrammatic: drawing of ••Sally,"mec:hanic:almarvel of ita day.

crib 40 .feet high and 58 feet ona side. It consisted of two tim-ber walls of similar pentagonalshape, the outer one being sep-arated .from the inner one by agap o.f25 feet, and the five sidesof the outer exactly parallel tothe five sides of the inner, thespace between to be filled witha compact body of masonryafter the crib was placed in po-si tion. Theengineer's re-port .furtherdescribes it:"Threerec-

tangularope ni ng s,each 4 feetwide and 5.feet h ig h,were madethroughthe sides soth a t watercould bedrawn ...as mightbe required.Each ofthese open-ings wasprovid·ed withgates. . .'. The hollow wallswere made water-tight and abottom o.f planking provided, sothat when launched the cribwould fioat, which it did accord-ingly."It took more than a year to

build this massive brain childof Chesbrough's, and naturallythere was great public intereston the day it was launched andtowed two miles out to its ap-pointed position and there sunkinto place preparatory to beingfilled up between its walls withstone.The water was thirty feet

deep at this point, and so the

After the great fire. Chic:ago has adopted the water tower al a Iymbolof the Ipirit whic:hdeveloped the c:ityand rebuilt it after the dilalter.

This first water tunnel in Chi-cago was a daring engineeringproject, and its success broughtinternational fame to EngineerChesbrough. The story of itsbuilding, which was to be re-peated scores o.f times in lateryears as more tunnels werecopied from its principle in Chi-cago and other lake cities, is anepic of the modern world.After the somewhat skeptical

legislators had finally passedthe necessary ordinances for theproject, work was begun on theland end o.f the tunnel on March17, 1864. A vertical shaft wasdug nine .feet in diameter andsixty-six feet deep, and fromthere the tunnelers turned east-ward, digging horlzontally outunder the lake and building asthey went a tube o.f brick andconcrete five feet in internaldiameter, laid sixty feet belowthe water level.As the tunnel was being dug

outward from shore; construc-tion work was also going aheadon a massive five-sided intake

crib walls rose ten feet abovethe surface, forming an etfectivebreakwater against the wavesonce the walls were filled. Butunfortunately a very violentstorm arose on the lake beforethe workmen had time to fillthe crib more than a quarter ofthe way up, and the scows car-rying stone to it had to abandonwork until the storm subsided.This happened only after threedays of tremendous waves, dur-ing which time it was feared thecrib might be totally destroyed.Luckily it was not, however,

and the builders were overjoyedto find it whole after the stormand only thirteen feet out ofposition and slightly tilted." There would have been great

difficulty in restoring the cribto its exact position," said theengineer's report, ••and the fearthere might be another stormmeantime prevented any at-tempt being made. The veryslight deflection this renderednecessary in the line of the tun-nel was of no practical impor-

go's Water System

tance whatever, though regret-ted, and the variations of thesides of the crib from perpendie-ular . . . did not affect its sta-bility."The filling of the crib was

proceeded with as fast as thecontractors could, and since itwas completed, about the middleof August, 1865, no variationwhatever in the position of thisstructure has been perceived."

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Once the space between thecrib's outer and inner walls wasfilled with stone, a huge ironcylinder of nine-foot diameter,and open on the ends, was sunkwithin it, reaching from thelake's fioor to the surface. Thisgreat tube was then pumped dryand a crew of men began diggingdownward from inside it until,on reaching the sixty-foot-below-water level, they continued in ahorizontal direction toward thetunnel approaching from theshore.••The daily average of prog-

ress was nine and one-third feet,and, havtng reached a point2,290 feet from the crib, the twodigging parties met. The twofaces were brought together onNov. 30, 1866,when it was foundthat the masonry at the eastface was only about 7% inchesout of the line from the westend.'The enthusiasm of the public

over the tunnel's completionwas extraordinary. A fiag wasraised on the courthouse tower,and Mayor Rice and membersof the council toured throughthe tunnel on a train of dumpcars pulled by a mule. Later abanquet was served in thecrib's kitchen, accompanied bycannon booming salutes bothfrom the crib and the shore, thisfollowed by speeches by themayor, Chesbrough, and othercelebrities. The tunnel was or-ficially dedicated and started.functioning with the pump onMarch 25, 1867. Two years later,in 1869, the new north pumpingstation (now the Chicago ave-nue pumping station) was com-pleted and added to the system.The next improvement in wa-

terworks came after the greatChicago fire of 1871,which clear-ly proved the need for a betterbalanced water supply .for fireprotection in the city. There

Adams Itreet relervoir during thefiftie.. It held three days' lupply.

was an increasing demand formore water' on the west side,and when a water main burstwhere it crossed the river' theboard of water commissionersdecided to build Ii new tunneland pumping station to servethe west side. Accordingly in1874 a second tunnel was dug,parallel to the first and onlyfifty feet from it-but this tun-

nel was big-ger, beings e v.e n feetin diameter,and it con-tinued a longdistance westunder thecity's streetsand b u 11d-ings to a newpumping sta-tion at 22dstreet andAshland av-nue.Up to this

time thetunnel con-tractorsand engi-neers hadbeen lucky.

But as new and bigger tun-nels and new cribs were built,many heartrending difficultiesarose. Water -bearing san dand silt forced changes of di-rection of the third tunnel, andeven abandonment of m u c hwork that had been completed.This tube, from the presentHarrison street pumping stationto a crib off Roosevelt roadknown as the four -mile crib,was eventually put into opera-tion in 1892, but it had provedto be "continuous grief," in thewords of a contemporary en-gineer.QUicksand l!- n d "swelling"

clay which confronted the tun-nelers forced them, at large ex-pense, to abandon their originalintention of making an 8-foottunnel and to substitute for ittwo s-root tunnels. Records ofthose days fail to mention howmany workers lost their lives-but the number must have beenlarge. The crib itself caused

Laying the c:orner Itone of the prelent water tower on Marc:h 25, 1861.The new water IYltem wal put into servic:e later that same year.

marked the introduction of pneu-matic drills. The reason for de-scending into the limestone un-derlying Chicago was that LakeMichigan and various waterpockets under its fioor keptbreaking into tunnels startedthrough the clay.The geological composition of

Chicago is treacherous to- engi-neers. Rock, for example, isreached 140 feet below LakeShore drive, while at Westernavenue it lies nearly at the sur-face. Much water is found atone spot; a mile away, almostnone. In some locations theclay is hard, yet an abrupt bedof "swelling" clay may be en-countered next to it-and that isa headache for the engineers.

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Not untll 1907was the air locksystem perfected, enabling engt-neers to keep tunnels under airpressure as the digging advancedand thus minimizing the tenden-cy of these natural enemies toburst in upon the workmen. Theuse of dynamite,. which is theright-hand tool of the "hardrock" boys, also improved withthe years, Today pneumaticdrills bore holes ten or fifteenfeet deep, which are filled withdynamite. After the charge isexploded the fumes are suckedout of the tunnel by electric fans.Rock shattered by the blast,called "muck," is now loadedinto cars by machine. Formerlythis was the hardest job in tun-neling. Storage battery locomo-tives move the muck cars backdown .the tunnel on narrow-gauge tracks to a large verticalshaft, and there they are hoistedand dumped by power devicesand the rock is hauled away bytruck.In spite of such enlightened

methods, however, the buildersof waterworks still have to facethe unexpected and are continu-ally tackling new adversities.Tragedy, while coming less .fre-quently, is still familiar to them.The worst catastrophe in the

history of the water system oc-curred in January, 1909, at a

Installing the William E. Dever c:rib alongside Carter Harrilon c:rib offChic:ago avenue. The metal c:ribwal towed into position and c:onnec:ted

with a 16·foot tunnel under the lake. (Tribune photo.)

(Other photo. and drawln •• c:ourteay Chic:a••• Hi.toric:" Soc:lety.)

long delay. First, as the greatsteel shells, 54 feet high and 75feet in external diameter, werebeing transferred 1. rom theshore to a scow, they fell intothe lake and had to be takenapart again. L ate r suddenstorms wrecked the crib's foun-dations twice, making the pres-ent foundation under that cribthe third structure built for thepurpose.Another harrowing job was

the bullding of the Lake Viewtunnel, which was completed in1896 after eight years of effort.Two miles long, this 6-foot shaftwas the first to be driven partlythrough sol i d rock, and it:

temporary crib being used inconstructing the 14-foot tunnelout to the Dunne crib off 68thstreet. Several.hundred poundsof dynamite mysteriously caughtfire while being thawed out inthis temporary crib. The dyna-mite burned rapidly without ex-ploding and trapped rorty-elghtmen in a lower level of the struc-ture, burning them all to death.Scores of other men who wereable to leap off the fiaming cribwere drowned or crushed by icein the frigid water be.fore helpcould arrive.For a while, as Chicago grew

as rapidly as ever toward theclose of the nineteenth century,

engineers thought that the pu-trid water of the Chicago riverpouring i n t 0 Lake Michiganmight make it necessary to movethe intake cribs still farther outfrom shore. But the building ofthe sanitary canal, connectingthe river with the Mississippisystem and reversing its flow,removed much of the danger,and the rest has been removedsince by a gigantic new systemof sewers which convey all ofthe city's sewage to huge treat-ment plants, where it is chem-ically treated and the solid partof it dumped, leaving the harm-less Ilquld residue to flow south-ward with the river into theGulf of Mexico.The effectiveness of this han-

dling of the problem is indicat-ed by the sensational drop in thetyphoid death rate just after the

sanitary can a 1was opened in1900. !<'rom 65persons per 100,-000 populationbefore the open-ing of the canal,the annual deathrate for the dec-ade following itsopening droppedto 22.7 persons

per 100,000, and by 1922, withsewage treatment in operation,the typhoid fever germs wereclaiming only 1 victim a yearout of 100,000.Since then Chicago's health

has been improved even moreby the division of water purifica-tion, which supervises the test-ing of water at each of the

. twelve pumping stations thatnow pump water to the differentparts of the city. After thewater is carefully tested .for pur-ity at intervals o.f less than anhour, chlorine gas is forced intothe water at the pumping sta-tions in sufficient amounts torender it absolutely safe fordrinking.

Ellia S.Chesbrough

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Meanwhile the greatwater system of the presentroars on unseen and unsung inclean channels far below thegrime of the streets. The latestbig unit, the 16· foot Chicagoavenue tunnel, completed in1936, is one of the greatest singleengineering jobs in the world,and few people know anythingabout it. Running 130 to 200 feetbelow the surface, this 11%-miletunnel was blasted out of bed-rock with 3,000,000 pounds ofdynamite. An eight-foot circusgiant could stand on the .shoul-ders of another eight-foot giantin the tunnel without bumpinghis head against the vaultedroo.f.The extreme demands which at

times the Chicago water supplysystem must meet and plan foris illustrated by the great stock-yards fire of May, 1934. Ninety-three pieces of fire apparatusresponded to the various alarms,and this constituted by far thegreatest concentration of fire-fighting equipment ever knownin history. According to CityEngineer Lor anD. Gayton:"The demand for water wasthree times that ever before re-corded and .far beyond any re-quirements called .for by theNational Board of Underwriters.. . . A maximum rate of 1,000gallons of water a second wasdelivered by the fire departmentupon the burning area." Headded: "The system was ableto meet this extreme demand ona hot summer day and maintainpressures over the entire city."