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| Rehabilitating a 'natural citizen' of west suburbs | |
| Jun 6, 2007 | |
| Clifford Ward | |
| Chicago Tribune | |
| Pertains to West Branch Regional Trail, Winfield, Warrenville | |
| As the DuPage River recovers from decades of neglect and misuse, towns are banking on waterway's resurgence The small flotilla of canoes and kayaks quietly glided up the West Branch of the DuPage River before docking at the launch in the McDowell Grove Forest Preserve in Naperville. The four paddlers came ashore and began unloading a none-too-precious cargo of bottles, cans, hubcaps, plastic lawn chairs, a car tire and even a yellow squirt gun collected during the annual river cleanup in DuPage County. "I heard some people say they were disappointed they didn't get more trash," volunteer and canoeist Ray Ziemer of Warrenville said Saturday. "But hey, that's a good thing." Once little more than a drainage ditch, the river is in the midst of a $74 million cleanup coordinated by the DuPage-based Conservation Foundation and is beginning to assume a prominent role in Warrenville and Winfield. Both towns are discussing ways to better show off the improving river, including expanding access, adding trails -- even river walks similar to Naperville's. The West Branch runs from Hanover Park past Naperville, where it joins the East Branch before flowing into the Des Plaines River near Joliet and into the Illinois River. "It's one of our most vital and most important natural citizens," Warrenville Mayor Dave Brummel said. "We want to take something that's under-appreciated, under-used and not accessible and turn it into something beautiful." Maybe under-appreciated, but it's still rated only as "fair" from a diversity and quality level, according to John Oldenburg, director of natural resources for the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County. "There's no one thing that will improve it," he said. "It will take a lot of different things and a long time, but that's what's exciting." Warrenville's new comprehensive plan for its central area envisions a series of bike and pedestrian trails along the river, which now is almost hidden by buildings and overgrowth as it flows through town. Just upstream, Winfield has formed a river-walk commission and is studying ways of maintaining public access to the river. "How many times do you watch HGTV, and you see people putting fountains and water gardens in their back yards because the sound of the water is soothing, and here we've got these rivers and creeks," Winfield Village President Rudy Czech said. "We're not taking advantage of Mother Nature." Both towns favor a more natural river walk than what was developed in Naperville, where it is a focal point of downtown, featuring meticulous brick walkways, covered bridges, formal landscaping, a snack bar and a marina for paddle boats. Rick Hitchcock of Hitchcock Design Group in Naperville helped design the Naperville Riverwalk and his firm is working with Winfield. He said a river offers economic benefits to a community. "Once you get past the feel-good parts -- the cultural and environmental amenities -- you'll find that downtown waterfront attracts investment," he said. "We don't have a huge lake like in Chicago, we don't have beaches like they do along the coasts and we don't have mountains. [But] we do have rivers." DuPage towns have taken advantage of the river over the decades, though not always in the positive manner imagined by Czech. For early European settlers, it was a seasonal stream. Often dry during the summer months, the streambed was used as a road, according to Brook McDonald, president of the Conservation Foundation. As DuPage County grew, towns built sewage-treatment plants along the river, which also served as a catch basin for run-off from farms and development. In the 1930s, a company called the Rare Earths Facility was established on a tributary. In later years, REF extracted radioactive elements for the U.S. atomic energy program, as well as private companies. It discharged radioactive waste into the creek and downstream into the river. "People turned their backs on the DuPage River 50 or 60 years ago because it was filthy," McDonald said. Brummel recalled skating on the frozen river as a boy, but never swimming there. Anglers avoided it. "There weren't any fish to catch," Brummel said. The federal Clean Water Act of 1972, with its tougher standards for sewage discharge, marked a turning point for the river's fortunes. A year later, REF closed. The Forest Preserve District of DuPage County identified the river as a key conservation area and acquired property along it. Today, 60 percent of the river flows over forest preserve land. In the 1990s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began investigating the extent of the REF pollution, sparking a process that resulted in a private agreement between Kerr-McGee, which acquired REF in 1967, and affected communities along the river. The company, now called Tronox, agreed to fund a $74 million cleanup of Kress Creek and 5 miles of the river. It began in 2005, and is scheduled to conclude in 2009, said EPA Remedial Project Manager Rebecca Frey. Contractors have cleaned Kress Creek, and a riverside renovation complete with swamp white oaks, dogwoods and sycamores is ongoing. Workers have strategically placed rocks to create riffles that almost drown out the traffic noise from nearby Illinois Highway 59 and provide perches for the powder-blue damselflies and big dragonflies that zip along the banks. The riffles and rocks also will help restore a more natural river environment for fish, mussels and insects, Oldenburg said. "It's just human instinct to be attracted to water," said McDonald of the Conservation Foundation. "But not water that's polluted." |
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