The Prairie State Generating Station, seen here on Sept. 16, 2021, is among the top 10 industrial sources of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the United States, emitting as much as 2 million cars combined every year. (E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune)
Residents who’ve had enough of the toxic pollution next door. A smell so strong it could jolt you awake. A number of replaced lead pipes so paltry you can count them on one hand. Trillions of invasive mussels blanketing Lake Michigan. The plight of bumblebees, beavers, box turtles, monarch butterflies, cicadas and piping plovers.
These were just some of the environmental topics the Tribune covered this year, sending reporters into Chicago neighborhoods, across state lines and even on boats in the Great Lakes to bring readers along as we tried to make sense of the natural world, the region’s changing climate and environmental injustice affecting Chicagoans’ lives.
This year, we worked to bring you in-depth, on-the-ground reporting to help you understand the world around you with more complexity, wonder and, when warranted, worry.
While we were reporting on pollution, climate change and invasive and endangered species, many stories only raised more questions. We hope to answer some of them in the new year.
January: Coal-fired power plant a major obstacle
As President Joe Biden pushes the nation toward 100% carbon-free electricity to combat climate change, a coal-fired power plant in southern Illinois is one of the biggest roadblocks.
The Prairie State Generating Station is among the top 10 industrial sources of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the United States, emitting as much as 2 million cars combined every year.
Most of the other big U.S. coal plants still operating are at least 40 years old. They are either past or close to the end of their expected life spans. But Prairie State could keep churning out climate-changing pollution for another half-century — decades past Biden’s 2035 deadline to purge fossil fuels from the power sector, according to a new analysis published in the journal Science.
The findings renew questions about why five Chicago suburbs and dozens of other municipalities across the Midwest agreed to collectively borrow more than $5 billion to build a new coal plant in Washington County, about 300 miles southwest of Chicago. More.
February: The shrinking groundwater supply
On a rainy day in northeastern Illinois, you might have stepped outside and wondered when the downpour would end, without realizing a century-old and potentially life-changing deficit was growing hundreds of feet below.
Less than 50 miles away from one of the largest freshwater systems on Earth, groundwater is running out.
Water has long been discussed as a resource capable of creating conflict. Now communities are seeking solutions for a shrinking groundwater supply. More.
Jay Rivera, Joliet chief water plant operator, walks away after checking the water level at well 24D in Joliet on Feb. 23, 2021. He said 24D is drilled to a depth of 1,500 feet and measured the water level at 970 feet below the ground. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune)
March: Tired of being city’s dumping ground
Roman Villarreal, 71, a second-generation steelworker, artist and mentor, grew up in a rough-and-tumble section of South Chicago known as “The Bush” and lived across the street from the South Works mill.
“We grew up with the noise, the sound ... the graphite. I remember playing in it. We called it the silver rain,” recalled Villarreal.
The jobs at the mighty U.S. Steel South Works and Wisconsin Steel mills, among others, paved middle-class lifestyles from South Chicago to Gary for generations of European immigrants, before the arrival of Mexican and Black workers in the early 1900s.
But a toxic legacy remains for residents of the Southeast Side. And they say they are tired of being the city’s dumping ground, so they are fighting back. More.
Lead found in tap water from most Illinois communities
More than 8 of every 10 Illinoisans live in a community where brain-damaging lead was found in the tap water of at least one home during the past six years, a new Chicago Tribune analysis found.
The alarming results are from a limited number of samples collected under federal regulations by the state’s 1,768 water utilities. Depending on the number of people served by each utility, only a handful or a few dozen homes are occasionally monitored, but when combined the tests provide snapshots of a widespread threat to public health that for decades has been largely ignored.
Most exposure to lead in water can be traced to pipes known as service lines that connect homes to municipal water supplies. Illinois has more service lines made of the toxic metal than any other state. Chicago has more than any other city. More.
An old lead service line removed from a Galesburg home is seen on March 4, 2021. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)
April: Intense storms raising flooding risks
As a longtime chronicler of Black history on the North Shore, historian Morris “Dino” Robinson Jr. runs into a recurring snag while documenting life in Evanston.
“I always asked about archives. ‘What do you have of family history? What do you have of photo albums?’ ” said Robinson, who runs the Shorefront Legacy Center in Evanston. “ ‘Oh, we lost that in the flood.’ And that would be the end of discussion. Sometimes it’s hurtful for families, it’s history that they lost.”
While decades of basement flooding took their toll on family keepsakes, the backups and standing water that plagued some Evanston residents for generations were intended to be mostly a thing of the past. A $210 million sewer improvement project completed between 1991 and 2008 was designed to reduce the backups.
Now though, it seems another source is exacerbating the same old problem.
Evanston, Chicago and other suburbs have taken steps in recent years to upgrade sewer systems in an effort to reduce flooding. But those same towns are now examining how heavier and more frequent storms caused by climate change could result in more water and runoff seeping into homes. More.
Gilo Kwesi Cornell Logan looks through water-damaged family documents in the basement of his Evanston house, on April 13, 2021, where they've had to recover from multiple floods over the years. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)
May: Asphalt plant sparks complaints in McKinley Park
Some mornings, the smell seeping inside Jackie Montesdeoca’s home is so bad it wakes her up. She calls 311 or the Department of Public Health or the 12th Ward office. She tells them she can’t open her windows, and she can’t take her 1-year-old daughter, Ava, outside for a walk.
Asphalt season is starting in McKinley Park, and it announces itself by its stench, residents say.
The $10 million MAT Asphalt plant, which is partially owned by a member of a politically connected Chicago family, quietly went up in 2018. When operations started, residents complained because they weren’t given an opportunity for public input, and they were concerned about potential health hazards because the facility is near a park and at least two schools. Four years later, residents are trying to force the plant to shut down and move to a different location, farther away from people. More.
June: Asian carp and facial recognition
There may come a day on the Illinois River when a fish swims up a chute, slides through a scanner, and, after being recognized as a feared silver carp, is sorted and removed, eventually ending up in a carp burger on your dinner plate.
Keeping invasive carp out of the Great Lakes has involved a series of less-than-silver bullets — from commercial fishing to carbon dioxide experiments to the forthcoming Brandon Road barriers near Joliet from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Now, fish recognition is entering the fray.
Illinois researchers are preparing for another test run of a system that could get Asian carp out of waterways while also helping native fish travel. More.
Asian carp leap near the fish sorting machine at Emiquon Preserve near Lewistown May 17, 2021. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune/Chicago Tribune)
July: Illinois Caverns reopen after more than a decade
About 150,000 years ago, the area that is now known as Monroe County in southwest Illinois was covered in ice hundreds of feet thick.
When the ice melted, the water flowed into fractures in the area’s limestone bedrock. Over time, the water eroded a vast underground landscape of caves, springs and sinkholes.
A tourist attraction dating back more than a century, the Illinois Caverns is the second largest cave in the state.
But in 2010, officials closed the cave to the public in an effort to slow the spread of white nose syndrome, a fungus that kills bats — including the species that roost in Illinois Caverns in winter.
Last month, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources announced the cave would reopen. Visitors can once again don hard hats and wade through an underground stream to explore the cave’s geological treasures. More.
August: Trillions of invasive mussels blanket Lake Michigan
SLEEPING BEAR DUNES NATIONAL LAKESHORE — The divers leaned back from the edge of the boat and splashed into water, bobbing up for a moment before dropping down to a world just a few miles off the northern Michigan coast — and worlds away from the one above the surface.
Today in Lake Michigan, quagga mussels, Eastern European invaders generally smaller than a stamp, reign over an upended underwater ecosystem. The mussels arrived in the Great Lakes more than three decades ago, eating, excreting and spreading zealously ever since, attaching themselves to everything from water intakes to shipwrecks, and all the while filtering life out of the food chain and a $7 billion fishing industry.
But solutions in open water, at least on a small scale, are starting to seem possible to soften the bivalves’ brunt. More.
A clump of mussel shells washes up along the shore of Good Harbor Bay Beach July 25, 2021, in Leelanau County, Michigan. (Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune)
September: Goal set to replace 650 lead pipes. 3 have been removed.
Three toxic water pipes gone. Another 399,997 to go.
After denying for years that Chicago has a widespread problem with brain-damaging lead in tap water, city officials are embarking on a long-delayed campaign to eliminate hidden hazards at virtually every home and two-flat built before the mid-1980s.
The Department of Water Management is moving at a snail’s pace so far, though. More.
Coal mining remains huge contributor to pollution
Gov. J.B. Pritzker vows Illinois will help stop — and even reverse — climate change with a new state law that outlaws coal- and gas-fired electricity by 2045.
But the law fails to address the state’s biggest source of climate-changing pollution: coal mining.
During 2020 alone, mostly out-of-state companies that burned Illinois coal released more than 57 million tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to a Chicago Tribune analysis based on a formula developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
By contrast, the state’s coal and gas plants emitted 46 million tons of CO2 during the year.
The difference reflects how Illinois remains a major coal supplier, even as the state and the nation as a whole shift away from burning the fossil fuel to generate electricity. More.
October: Algae blooms in Lake Superior
APOSTLE ISLANDS NATIONAL LAKESHORE, WISCONSIN — The kayakers stood for a moment on the beach, marveling at the clear sweep of blue.
“I would never have guessed it would have happened here,” said Jessie Rubenzer, with a glance toward the water.
Since the first reported Lake Superior algae bloom in 2012, no serious levels of toxins had been confirmed. That changed with a bloom near Superior, Wisconsin, that left a beach’s water streaky green. A toxin more potent than cyanide was detected just beyond the level set for safe swimming by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Lake Superior is among the world’s fastest-warming freshwater bodies and has increasingly borne the force of what used to be considered once-in-a-lifetime storms. Weather extremes fueled by human-caused climate change may imperil a lake whose reputation rests on its unspoiled water.
A group of Midwestern scientists can’t reverse decades of burned fossil fuels or a lack of political will. What they can do is head back out into the water. More.
Reane Loiselle, a water resource specialist with the Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation at Northland College, filters water near Friendly Valley Beach as she collects samples from Lake Superior on Sept. 22, 2021, in Washburn, Wisconsin. Researchers are trying to figure out why the unlikely threat of harmful algae blooms has arrived in Lake Superior and how drastically climate change is altering one of the world's largest freshwater lakes. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)
November: A drinking water crisis in Michigan
BENTON HARBOR, MICH. — Abandoned by industry. Impoverished after white flight. Saddled with crumbling infrastructure, struggling schools and little, if any, money to fix the problems.
For decades this low-income, majority Black community — less than two hours from Chicago on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan — has been ravaged by a litany of woes shared with many other once-thriving American cities.
Now the water isn’t safe to drink either.
A top state official urged Benton Harbor residents last month to drink and cook with bottled water, three years after testing required under a then-new Michigan law revealed high levels of brain-damaging lead in tap water. More.
December: Decades of industrial pollution
Growing up in Waukegan, Eduardo Flores didn’t think much about the presence of inhalers on his playground.
Every couple of months, one of his classmates or a kid from a different grade would suffer an asthma attack while playing tag or soccer at recess.
It wasn’t until Flores got involved with environmental activism that he realized there might be a reason for all the asthma cases in his community.
“I got older and realized, hey, asthma isn’t as prevalent in other areas. It’s prevalent here because we’re so close to the coal plant,” said Flores, who interns at Clean Power Lake County, a community-driven coalition advocating for environmental, economic and racial justice.
NRG, the current owner, said it plans to close the coal-fired units at the plant next year, but battles continue over what to do with the coal ash ponds left from decades of production. More.
The Waukegan Generating Station coal-fired plant can be seen from North Beach, Nov. 30, 2021, in Waukegan. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)
Top environment stories of 2021: A paltry number of lead pipe replacements, pollution next door and trillions of invasive mussels blanketing Lake Michigan
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