It's a dirty job

Most people probably don't think much about what happens after they flush their toilets.

But in Cook County, those millions of gallons of wastewater pay a visit to one of seven treatment plants in the Water Reclamation District of Great Chicago system.

One is the John E. Egan Water Reclamation Plant on Meacham Road in Schaumburg, which serves at least portions of Arlington Heights, Elk Grove Village, Rolling Meadows, Hoffman Estates, Roselle, Palatine and Schaumburg.

Since 1975, the plant that originally cost $43 million to build has been processing the surrounding area's raw sewage -- an amount that today averages about 23 million gallons a day.

That might sound like a lot, but it's dwarfed by the south suburban Stickney facility, which processes about 800 million gallons a day and is touted as possibly the largest plant of its kind in the world.

Others plants that serve the Northwest suburbs are in Des Plaines and Hanover Park.

Because such facilities are considered possible terrorist targets, the water reclamation district has kept its plants largely closed off to the public since Sept. 11, 2001.

But tours of the facilities are resuming, beginning with local government officials. A group of Elk Grove Village and Schaumburg officials recently toured the Schaumburg facility.

"We're proud of what we do. We just don't brag about it very often," plant Manager Stephen Carmody told them. "Most people don't think about it when they flush the toilet."

How it works

Initially, waste water comes to the plants and is pumped up to an elevation from which gravity can do most of the work.

The sewage is first filtered through screens and grit chambers before moving to aeration tanks where microbes eat up most of the remaining toxic elements.

Solids sink to the bottom of the tanks where they are separated and go through their own digester process before ending up as biosolids that are shipped to farm fields. About six trucks are filled each day.

The treated water goes through a final process of chlorinating, filtering and dechlorination before it's pumped into the nearby Salt Creek, as well as used for irrigation of the adjoining golf course.

The sprawling plant stands on 275 acres, 10 of which are used for the growth of native prairie plants.

There's no system by which one treatment plant can take over the load of another, Carmody said. Instead, there are multiple backup systems and redundancies in the operation to insure against plant failure.

ComEd has two separate power lines to the plant, which is its first priority for power restoration when outages occur.

Long history

The reclamation district was created by state lawmakers in 1889 to protect Lake Michigan from contamination.

Famously, one of its first tasks was changing the course of the Chicago River away from the lake, but the first plants weren't built until the 1920s.

The agency received its current name in 1989, and in 2004 it also was put in charge of the region's storm water management.

Commissioner and Storm Water Management Chairwoman Patricia Young said the district was in the best position to provide a single responsible party to deal with the previously problematic issue of storm water management.

The district has been working since the 1980s on the Chicago area's Deep Tunnel Project, as storm water can more than double the amount of water in the system.

The agency employs about 2,100 people and is overseen by a board of nine commissioners. The current president of which is Terrence O'Brien.

"This agency has always been one of the best kept secrets," O'Brien said. "We've never gotten any complaints that we haven't taken a flush."

However, since the district took over the responsibility for storm water management in 2004, flooded basements have become its problem as well, O'Brien said.