Chicago sewer treatment plant fosters fish
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originally posted at:
http://www.chicagowildernessmag.org/issues/fall2007/sponges.html

New Life in East Chicago
By Craig Vetter

In 1989, Peter Baranyai began seeing strange things in the wastewater treatment plant he runs. Today, his plant not only cleans water — it raises wild fish.

Thirty-five years ago, Peter Baranyai took what he thought would be a temporary job at the East Chicago Sanitary District Wastewater Treatment Plant. He’d grown up in East Chicago, Indiana, a swath of nine square miles on Lake Michigan’s southern shore that, to this day, is dominated by sprawling rust-colored steel mills, oil refineries, and the tank farms that surround them.

At age 58, Baranyai, whose father worked in the mills, now runs the wastewater plant. A tall, thin, soft-spoken man with receding gray hair, he knows every pipe, pump, and tank in this state-of-the-art facility. His job is to ensure that 15 million gallons a day of wastewater from East Chicago residents and industries get clean enough to be returned, through a long, straight channel, into the Grand Calumet River. When his plant is done with it, the water is “very clean, top notch, class A,” according to Roger Klocek, senior biologist for the Shedd Aquarium.

But Baranyai isn’t what you might expect a wastewater plant manager to be, some strict pragmatist devoted to absolute sterility and shining, clean surfaces. When nature invited itself into his plant, not only did he let it be, he let it change his whole philosophy about what it means to run the place. By his own admission, he now thinks of himself as a naturalist first and a wastewater plant manager second.
Sponges and salmon video

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Baranyai’s shift began in 1989, a year and a half after the East Chicago plant had changed its final disinfection process. The water district had invested $19 million to overhaul the plant, to comply with federal Clean Water Act standards. Instead of adding chlorine to kill bacteria, which it had done for years, the plant started using long racks of powerful ultraviolet lights

“I was touring some grade school kids around the plant that October,” he says, “and we were looking into the effluent channel, where the water had drastically changed from a murky beige to crystal clear since the new treatment plant and the ultraviolet system had been in use. I looked down, and saw this 30-inch fish, and I was amazed. After it died, we had it identified. It was a Chinook salmon.”

It would be another two years before the full surprise of what was happening would hit Baranyai and the biologists he invited to investigate.

“I was looking into this disinfection contact chamber right here,” Baranyai said, standing above three rectangular tanks that hold the UV lights, the last chamber before the water reaches the channel. “I noticed this weird material among the aquatic plants on the walls and floors of the chambers.”

He called Tim Early of Purdue University’s Aquatic Resource Center, who braved the final disinfection chamber wearing air-tight scuba gear. He identified thousands of freshwater lake sponges, Ephydatia muelleri, in colonies 10 to 20 times larger than those normally found in Lake Michigan.

“Nobody thought the water could be clean enough to support the sponges,” says Baranyai, “but the walls were just encrusted.”
Watching the salmon dart and ferry

Watching the salmon dart and ferry, one can forget that this is
an urban effluent channel, not a country stream.

Photo: Peter Baranyaii

The sponges — actually colonies of small, primitive animals — were flourishing on the microscopic dead bodies of the billions of bacteria being sterilized by the UV lights and washing down the channel. A sponge the size of a little finger can pass 30 liters of water a day through its body, pulling organic material and certain metals from the water and extracting the chemicals it needs for growth.

On his dive, Early, who has since passed away, investigated the tank walls, which by this time approximated a coral reef, complete with clouds of small fish two to three inches long. These fingerlings were more Chinook salmon, an introduced species, one of the most highly prized game fish in the Great Lakes.

Salmon, of course, return to their birthplace to spawn. Since the fingerlings were genetically related and the same age, the biologists concluded that they had been born to parents that had migrated 6.2 miles from Lake Michigan, up the effluent stream, and into a 200-foot exit pipe against a swift flow. The salmon then had to jump a four-foot waterfall into the contact chamber, which became the nursery for their young.

“They’ve been back every October and November since then,” Baranyai told me with a quiet pride as we stood on the verdant edge of the effluent stream. “Last year we had over 200 salmon.” No one knows for sure why the salmon come here. Speculation is that smell and water temperature attract them, along with their tendency to search out the smallest part of a stream in order to protect their spawn from predators.

Some 18 years since the switch to UV, the now annual salmon run is only part of the story. Perhaps a more important sign of the river’s road to recovery is the appearance, according to surveys by the Aquatic Resource Center and Klocek, of white sucker, smallmouth bass, pumpkinseed, and rock bass, all native Illinois fish. Especially promising is the spawning of state-threatened river redhorse, which requires clear, clean water for survival. Recent surveys have also found daphnia, a small, shrimplike crustacean dependent on good water quality, in the water filters for seven months in a row. It isn’t known whether the daphnia’s presence is the result of the sponge colonies.
Sponges help keep things clean

Despite their looks, lake sponges actually help keep things
clean by pulling organic materials and metals from the water.

Photo: Peter Baranyai

The surrounding land has changed too. “These banks were just an arid stretch with nothing growing before we stopped using the chlorine and went to ultraviolet,” says Baranyai. “Now we have 95 species of birds out here, deer, snapping turtles, a colony of beavers, even coyotes. This ecosystem was unimaginable when I was a kid. To me, it means that the Clean Air and Water Acts have brought government, industry, and environmentalists together in a way that is really beginning to show some results. It’s great that our plant is a part of that.”

Forty feet wide and 700 feet long, the effluent channel today looks more like a small stream. Even the occasional exposed wall of concrete appears more like a rock cliff than the industrial structure it is. It’s easy to see how this plant has changed Baranyai’s perspective on what and where nature can be. These days he’s regularly out photographing and observing the animals. He’s excited to play such a large role in this natural process and believes it can be replicated in other treatment plants.

“Do you give the fish names?” I ask Baranyai.

He smiles. “No,” he says, “but I am very protective of the fish. Not long ago we had this government inspector out here, an avid fisherman, who asked me if he could go fishing in the effluent channel. I told him absolutely not.”