Public beaches impaired all summer by combined sewer overflows
July 21, 2026
At the height of summer swimming season, nearly every public beach along the lakefront carries an official federal designation as an impaired water body — not a seasonal advisory posted on a sign, but a standing regulatory determination that these waters consistently fail to meet their intended use. The cause is pathogens: bacteria flushed into the lake when combined sewer overflows release during and after heavy rain, pushing untreated or undertreated wastewater through outfalls that discharge directly to the nearshore. This is not an emerging crisis or a newly discovered hazard. It is a chronic, documented failure of urban water infrastructure playing out in plain sight on one of the most celebrated freshwater shorelines in the world.The bitter irony of this moment is inseparable from this city's engineering history. In 1900, Chicago reversed the flow of its river — one of the most audacious hydraulic interventions in American urban history — specifically to stop sending sewage-contaminated water into Lake Michigan. Over the following century, the city built the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan, known as the Deep Tunnel, an underground network of caverns and conduits reaching depths of 300 feet, designed to capture combined sewer overflows before they could reach the lake. That system represents one of the largest and most expensive public works projects ever undertaken in the United States, and yet the problem it was built to solve persists at the public beaches every summer. The engineering was visionary; the operational reality has not kept pace.The regulatory picture makes the gap between ambition and outcome concrete. The Calumet City and Skokie combined sewer systems are both currently in significant non-compliance with their discharge permits, meaning the controls meant to prevent these overflow releases are not holding under real-world conditions — particularly the intensifying rain events that have become more frequent across the Chicago Lake Plain. Combined sewer systems were built when the city was young and storm runoff and sanitary sewage shared a single pipe — a design logic that made a certain kind of sense before the region was paved. Today, even a modest rain event can overwhelm that legacy infrastructure and trigger a release.The lagoons embedded in the city's great West and South Side parks tell the same story with equal persistence. Humboldt Park, Garfield Park, Columbus, Douglas, Marquette, McKinley, Washington, Sherman — nearly every lagoon in that network is officially listed as impaired, and most are still waiting for an active cleanup plan. These lagoons were designed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as civic amenities, places where working-class Chicagoans without access to private green space could experience something of the natural world. Their impairment is not merely an ecological failure; it is a failure of a specific promise about who the city's natural resources are for.What to watch going forward is whether significant non-compliance determinations translate into enforceable timelines and capital investment, or whether they remain paper designations while the overflow season cycles through another year. Intensifying precipitation across the Great Lakes region means the hydraulic stress on these aging combined systems is more likely to increase than decrease. The lake itself remains extraordinary — deep, cold, ecologically complex — and the nearshore recovers quickly when inputs stop. The question is whether the inputs will stop, and when.
Two swallows ride the insect hatch
June 11, 2026
The air above Montrose Beach fills with wings. Bank swallows and northern rough-winged swallows cut back and forth through invisible columns of insects, their flight paths mapping what we cannot see. The longest days of the year bring the richest feeding, and these two species work the same airspace with different techniques.Bank swallows hunt in tight flocks, twenty or thirty birds wheeling together through the thickest swarms. They are smaller than their rough-winged cousins, built for quick turns and sudden dives. Their white bellies flash as they bank sharply, following the shifting columns of midges and mayflies that rise from the warming lake. The rough-winged swallows hunt alone or in pairs, taking longer, steadier passes through the air. They are slightly larger, with duller brown backs and no distinct breast band, built for sustained flight through scattered prey.Both species time their nesting to this abundance. The aquatic insects emerging from Lake Michigan now spent the winter as larvae on the lake bottom, growing through the cold months. As water temperatures climb past twenty degrees, they begin their synchronized ascent. Midges rise first, followed by mayflies, then caddisflies. Each species emerges in pulses that last days or weeks, creating layers of opportunity that the swallows exploit. The bank swallows, nesting in colonies carved into the sandy bluffs nearby, feed their young on this protein-rich harvest. The rough-winged swallows, nesting singly in crevices and culverts, do the same. Different nesting strategies, same food source.The swallows take insects of different sizes. Bank swallows specialize in the smallest prey, snatching midges and gnats that cluster in dense clouds. Their bills are narrow and precise. Rough-winged swallows take larger prey, including the mayflies and caddisflies that bank swallows often ignore. This division reduces competition between the species, allowing both to thrive in the same airspace. The insects themselves represent months of lake productivity concentrated into a few weeks of flight. Each midge carried back to a nest cavity contains algae and detritus processed on the lake bottom, energy transferred from water to air to the next generation of swallows.Watch the light catch their wings as they turn. The bank swallows move like a single organism, the flock contracting and expanding as it follows the insect swarms. The rough-winged swallows trace longer arcs, covering more territory with each pass. Both species will feed like this until the last insects of the day settle back toward the water, then return at dawn to do it again. The longest days mean the most hunting time, and these are the days that fuel the breeding season.
Cook County's soil moisture whiplash, and a compliance flag on the river
August 6, 2026
Cook County's soil moisture has been on a wild ride this growing season. In mid-May the county showed no dryness at all. Within two weeks it had flipped to abnormally dry conditions countywide, and by early June nearly 70 percent of the county sat in moderate drought. Then, just as fast, conditions cleared completely by mid-July. Now, in the first days of August, mild dryness is creeping back in.That's a full dry-drought-clear-dry cycle in about twelve weeks, a lot of hydrological whiplash for one summer. Shallow-rooted plants, lawns, turf, and many street trees draw water from the top foot or so of soil, so they feel every one of these swings almost immediately, going stressed and green again in quick succession. Deep-taprooted prairie natives don't have that problem the same way. Compass plant, covered here in July after its bloom appeared at sites across the city, sends a root down as far as 15 feet, well below where these surface fluctuations reach. That difference in root architecture is a big part of why prairie natives tend to hold steady through a summer like this one while turf grass and ornamental plantings show the strain.Water stress on the landscape isn't only a matter of rainfall and root depth, though. Along the river, River City Facilities is currently listed by EPA as being in significant non-compliance with its discharge permit. A query for the specific pollutants, exceedance levels, and dates behind that listing turned up no further detail, so it's not yet clear what the violation involves or whether it has affected water quality in the river. Still, it's a reminder that the water moving through this system is shaped by more than the season's weather swings \u2014 permitted dischargers are part of that picture too, even when the specifics of a given compliance issue aren't yet public. Even as the prairie's deep roots ride out the surface swings undisturbed, what reaches the river also depends on oversight of facilities like this one.
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