Ike Strikes Chicago

When you live aboard Noah's Ark, three days of rain - 8.54 inches - is nothing.

We even found the source of the dripping water in the cabin (unexciting story) and spent the weekend floating happily as the water around us rose.

According to Tom Skilling's blog, U. S. Army Corps of Engineers meteorologist Keith Kompoltowicz estimates as much as 877.5 billion additional gallons of water have now been added to Lake Michigan.

Maybe more, considering how much water the City of Chicago added into the lake.

By Saturday morning at 7:30, the underground Chicago water storage network called "Deep Tunnel" was full. The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District opened the sanitary canal locks in Wilmette, near Navy Pier, and at 130th and Torrence to release the water into Lake Michigan. According to the MWRD, most of the liquid was storm run-off; only 1% was raw sewage, as quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times.

But if you read a little further, when the MWRD opened the locks, it released four billion gallons of water per hour.

One per cent is still 40 million gallons per hour of raw sewage being dumped into the lake.

What do you do when the City dumps that much raw sewage into the lake that you live on?

Well, on Tuesday my friend Anne and I went swimming at Montrose Beach. We were careful to keep our heads above water.