Runoff sends our water resources down the river
Prospect Heights homeowners whose property includes McDonald Creek are encouraged to participate in a creek clean-up weekend May 4-5.
The city's McDonald Creek Commission is promoting the clean-up in cooperation with the Prospect Heights Public Works Department, Park District and Natural Resources Commission. Homeowners are asked to trim low-hanging branches and remove any debris that obstructs water flow. Woody debris can be dragged to the street for pick-up later in the week by the Public Works Department. This special pick-up is intended only for creek debris. All other landscape debris should be properly tied or bagged for regular Friday waste pick-up.
Volunteers from the McDonald Creek and Natural Resources commissions will be clearing debris from the creek in Country Gardens and Somerset parks on May 5. Interested neighbors of all ages are invited to join in that effort. Meet at 9 a.m. Sunday in the Country Gardens parking lot (east side of Schoenbeck Road north of Palatine Road). Wear boots; bring drinking water and work gloves.
McDonald Creek begins near Route 53 and Dundee Road, flows generally southeast through Arlington Heights., Wheeling, Prospect Heights, and Mount Prospect, and joins the Des Plaines River just south of Kensington Road. It drains a 10-square-mile watershed and is the sole source of surface drainage for 85% of Prospect Heights, including all land west of Wolf Road. As a vital component of city infrastructure, it deserves as much attention as roads and sanitary sewers.
Creek clean-up starts with clearing trash. Plastic bags caught in trees, fast-food containers, candy wrappers, and broken bottles are unsightly, hazardous to children and wildlife, and an invitation for even more litter. Removing litter on the banks prevents it from being swept downstream in the next storm. Theoretically, that Vienna Beef wrapper could travel from McDonald Creek all the way to the Gulf of Mexico via the Des Plaines River, the Illinois River and the Mississippi River. Clearing trash is also the first step toward recognizing McDonald Creek as not just a storm sewer, but also an aesthetic asset, as many other cities including Chicago, Naperville and Lockport have done with their cleaned-up waterways.
The next priority is clearing obstructions to the free flow of water. Homeowners are the primary stewards of the creek on their property and are asked to clear small blockages, which will help prevent flooding in their own neighborhood. Several governmental agencies can help with larger problems. Prospect Heights Public Works Department (www.prospect-heights.il.us) monitors the creek at common chokepoints after major rainfalls and encourages residents to report obstructions that could cause flooding upstream.
The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (www.MWRD.org) removes woody debris from waterways throughout the Chicago area as part of its routine maintenance activities and in response to phone or online reports of blockages to its Small Streams Maintenance Program. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources also has a duty to "prevent the carrying capacity of streams to be limited or impaired…" (615 ILCS 5, RLSA, Sec. 23).
All these efforts to remove obstructions, particularly large woody debris, are focused on preventing local flooding by ensuring that water flows as quickly as possible downstream, especially when storms drastically increase the volume of water in the creek. However, large woody debris obstructing water flow is not the major cause of flooding. Nor are the beavers recently removed from Somerset Park because they built woody obstructions. The major cause of urban flooding is us. Our large homes, patios, bluegrass lawns, roads, shopping centers, parking lots, all the impervious surfaces we have covered the land with that prevent water from soaking in where it lands, that run water off to the nearest stream - this is the major cause of flooding in urban areas.
Regional stormwater management practices still emphasize removing woody debris so that water can flow unobstructed and rapidly downstream, without consideration for the impact that might have on another neighborhood. We've invested millions in detention and retention, levees and dams, miles of piping, Deep Tunnels, larger storm sewers. Still the flooding gets worse.
Perhaps it's time for a new approach. The guiding principle behind current best practices for stormwater management is to keep precipitation where it lands. A major investment in green infrastructure is not required. The half-acre lots in Prospect Heights make retaining rainfall more feasible than it might be elsewhere, and our reliance on individual wells makes this more important because precipitation replenishes the aquifer that feeds those wells. Residential neighborhoods in Prospect Heights were built in the 1940s and 1950s with the vegetated swales now called green infrastructure. However, many swales were poorly graded, held water too long and have been piped, sending run-off more quickly to the creek.
Residents have voted numerous times for small government by rejecting Home Rule. In that spirit, we should strive to manage water on our own property rather than relying on government and tax dollars to do so. Less lawn and more native plants would help soak up water. Rain gardens can be beautiful, and rain barrels useful. But simply directing downspouts and sump pump discharges onto our own property rather than adding that water to swales, and eventually McDonald Creek and the Des Plaines River, would also help prevent flooding both locally and downstream.
Flooding is often described as a "natural" disaster. More accurately, it's a manmade disaster caused by people ignoring or altering natural floodplains. An old commercial warned not to "mess with Mother Nature." Mother Nature has provided plenty of warnings lately. Will we listen? Are we willing to pay the costs of not listening? Early spring is a time we view water as our enemy. Snowmelt, heavy rains and frozen ground frequently combine to leave us waterlogged. But by late summer of a drought year, we are praying for rain. Such is our complicated relationship with water. We are always trying to find a balance between too much and too little. Maybe if we listen more, we will have to pay less.