Oh, absolutely not. All you have to do is go where there are boats, and you can see that
A
a lot of people have no regard for safety at all. They charge around with those high speed
motors without even knowing what they're doing. A lot of them hardly even know how
to start it let alone act safely.
Q ..
Of course, the Corps can't control that because they don't have the authority to license
those people. On the reservoir, all they can do is charge them a fee to use it,
A
Well, they have rangers that if people are misbehaving, [acting] in an unsafe manner, they
can ask them to leave; but still--I don't know that they have power to arrest them and take
them to jail or anything like that. But they can ask them to leave. Their rangers or
whatever they call them. Water resources types.
Management: Chicago
Q ..
Let me change a little bit. You talked before about stormwater management. When I was
out in Arizona talking to Major General Richard M. Wells, he talked about when he was
a Chicago District Engineer and they had the TARP project, the Tunnels and Reservoir
Project, that they wanted under the city. He had to come to some kind of agreement with
the EPA on the proportion of stormwater to wastewater. Were you involved at all in those
discussions?
A
Well, not too much. The district engineer did most of the negotiations and that sort of
thing. That was a special, really a special, project because it wasn't designed necessarily
for flood control. It was primarily a water quality type project to begin with. But they
had to treat all that water, once they mixed the wastewater and the storm runoff, and put
them in the same storage area down there. They couldn't take it out of the storage area
without treating it.
So the bigger mix you have of wastewater with the stormwater, why the more treatment
it takes. I'm sure that the EPA and the Corps had quite a time coming to grips with what
they were going to do in terms of treatment. The idea was that they'd like to cut down on
the amount they had to treat because it cost so dang much money. If they could separate
the stormwater from the wastewater, why then they have not nearly as much volume
connected with the wastewater. That's one of the things, most of the old cities have
sewers that are combined sewers. They take both stormwater and wastewater.
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