Bubbly Creek still disgusting

Bubbly Creek in Bridgeport, so-called because (I hope you’re done with lunch) the Union Stock Yards used it as a dump for blood, grease, and animal remains, causing it to, that’s right, bubble. The stockyards have been gone for decades, but according to a recent article in the Chicago Journal, it’s still bubbling, and on hot days the overpowering stench fills the neighborhood. The Illinois EPA and other environmental groups are fighting for the creek to be cleaned up by disinfecting and then raising the minimum amount of oxygen in the water. It’s an expensive and long-term project that the city is reluctant to start. It’s part of a bigger fight from the Illinois EPA and others to get Chicago to disinfect its sewer water before dumping it into the Chicago River and Lake Michigan after heavy rains. The city maintains that it’s not a serious problem because it’s not being dumped into swimming areas, but as Henry Henderson, Midwest directer of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said, “Human excrement — intestinal miasma — dumped into a major city’s river is dumb, bad, stupid. Knock it off.”
Upton Sinclair’s horrifying account of Bubbly Creek from The Jungle after the jump.

‘Bubbly Creek’ is an arm of the Chicago River, and forms the southern boundary of the Union Stock Yards; all the drainage of the square mile of packing-houses empties into it, so that it is really a great open sewer a hundred or two feet wide. One long arm of it is blind, and the filth stays there forever and a day. The grease and chemicals that are poured into it undergo all sorts of strange transformations, which are the cause of its name; it is constantly in motion, as if huge fish were feeding in it, or great leviathans disporting themselves in its depths. Bubbles of carbonic gas will rise to the surface and burst, and make rings two or three feet wide. Here and there the grease and filth have caked solid, and the creek looks like a bed of lava; chickens walk about on it, feeding, and many times an unwary stranger has started to stroll across, and vanished temporarily. The packers used to leave the creek that way, till every now and then the surface would catch on fire and burn furiously, and the fire department would have to come and put it out. Once, however, an ingenious stranger came and started to gather this filth in scows, to make lard out of; then the packers took the cue, and got out an injunction to stop him, and afterwards gathered it themselves. The banks of “Bubbly Creek” are plastered thick with hairs, and this also the packers gather and clean.