Cleaning up the Rivers and
Streams of Cook County, Illinois
Lewis I. Birdsall, Executive Secretary,
Cook County Clean Streams Committee
River Forest, 111.
Cook County, with a population of more than 5 million, contains
the City of Chicago, much of the Chicago metropolitan area and many
square miles of unincorporated territory that is now changing from farm
land to rural subdivisions. The terrain is relatively flat and stream
flows are sluggish except at times of heavy rainfall.
None of the rivers and streams are now used in Cook County as a
source of municipal water supply and only occasionally is the water
used by industry for condensing purposes. The river waters are not yet
safe for swimming but they do serve for boating, fishing, and for recreational purposes along their banks.
County forest preserves, bordering more than 125 miles of the
three river systems, the Des Plaines, Chicago and Calumet, supply recreational facilities for more than 15 million people each year. An increasingly important use of the forest preserves is for outdoor education
in nature subjects by classes from public and parochial schools under
supervision of trained naturalists from the Conservation Division of the
Forest Preserve District.
Increasing density of population and the growing number of industries has caused an alarming additional amount of pollution in these
waters during the last 25 years. These streams have a much greater
potential value to the welfare of the citizens of Cook County than
merely serving as open sewers.
Due largely to the initiative and foresight of Charles G. Sauers,
general superintendent of the Forest Preserve District, the Board of
Forest Preserve Commissioners in August, 1953, authorized the formation of a Clean Streams Committee for the purpose of searching out the
sources of sanitary and industrial wastes that pollute the streams and
to bring about their elimination through regularly constituted law enforcement agencies. This committee was organized as a county-wide
unit and not to cover a single river system, as has been done in New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere.
Some 60 men and women citizens of the county, many of them
members of the Izaak Walton League, the Illinois Federation of Sports-
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