The Des Plaines river is the reason that Riverside is where it is.
First came the river, then later the railroad, then the Riverside Improvement Company, then Olmsted and Vaux. When Olmsted came here he saw the broad water above the first dam and he liked it, he thought it should be enlarged. There have been dams on the river for 184 years, and it is the unique looping bends of the river and the broad water impounded above the dam that makes Riverside unique.
In the 1930s, when the WPA was creating its great works, it built river walls and other amenities in Riverside on both banks of the river. The WPA also removed the damaged wooden top of the old 1908 horseshoe dam which effectively lowered the water level above that dam by a little more than two feet. This immediately caused the river to reduce the area it covered at lower flow levels, resulting in a narrow and greatly reduced stream flowing between wide, weedy banks that gave off obnoxious odors and provided places for standing pools of stagnant water to gather where millions of mosquitos were hatched.
It got so bad that, back in 1950, the Riverside Village Board of that day joined forces with Lyons and the Forest Preserve and Mosquito Abatement Districts to go to court to have the present dam built at the old height of 605.5 ft, because if it was restored to that former height “it would reestablish the natural shoreline to which thousands of dollars of river walls have been constructed, particularly in the Maplewood subdivision.” People were quoted in the Riverside News as saying that “ The present naked walls and masses of mud and weeds are objects of scorn to all who view them.”
All this is documented for those that care to look. You can read about it at the Riverside library on microfiche.
The residents of that era wanted those unsightly areas covered. They wanted a little more water in the river so that ducks and frogs and other species might thrive there and in doing so devour a few million mosquitos. Look at the river today. It is down to a three foot depth and there are already mud banks uncovered and rocks showing. If the dams are removed it will be much lower, and remain that way for 6-8 months of the year.
The Army Corps has still not provided a finished plan or verifiable data for their oral statements, which are worth absolutely zero. No one has ever factually refuted what I have given you as predictions, because they can’t. Contrary to the propaganda that the Corps and IDNR have thrown around, the USGS data supports my claim that the river has fallen into the 3 ft. depth range for about 65% of the year over the last nine years. That corresponds to lower water depths which create exactly the conditions I have forecast, and which you can see today.
This year we had one instance of higher water flow that, because of the neglect of the river wall, flooded the Swan Pond. The river rose about 3 ft. in a little over 24 hours to a depth of 7.4 ft. - about 4,700 cfs as measured at the Riverside gage with the result that the Swan Pond park was flooded for six weeks. This could have been avoided with simply one cubic yard of concrete to patch the two areas where river wall blocks are missing, and I offered to do it at my expense. The Village said “No, thank you” and has done nothing since.
I have been recording the height and flow daily, and on June 26th the river dropped below 3.5 ft for the first time since that event. It has dropped steadily and is now at 2.97 feet - less than 150 cfs. This means that just a few inches of water are flowing down the river and over the dam - all the rest of “the river” that you see is impounded water that will no longer be there if the dams are destroyed. USGS data indicates that, for the last nine years, the river has run in the 3 ft. range for approximately 65% of the time, so we can expect to have similar conditions annually.
Yesterday there were perhaps 25 geese sitting on the crest of Hofmann Dam, there was so little flow. If these dams are removed the water level at the crest will be lowered a minimum of eleven feet - from 605.5 to 594./592. ft. There are already broad mud banks exposed far upriver. Below Fairbank Dam, in the Swan Pond, and in front of Hofmann Dam there are “islands" of exposed rocks. Below Fairbank Dam you can walk almost half way out into the river bed and not get your socks wet. This condition will be greatly magnified all along the river if the dams are destroyed and the impounded water lost.
If Fairbank Dam is removed and Hofmann essentially destroyed, where the broad water above the dam is even now several hundred feet wide it will be down to less than 50 feet in width, with muddy, weedy debris filled mud banks exposed. And since the river fluctuates almost 7 ft. in height and increases by a factor of 30 or more in flow several times a year, it is daylight madness to think that plantings that are scoured by that kind of flow and inundated for months at a time will survive, let alone thrive. If this project goes forward it will be a disaster not just in the vicinity of the dam, but much further and all along the river.
Both the Fairbank and Hofmann dams are integral features of the registered and historic Riverside Architectural Landscape District. When the Village accepted that designation in the seventies it also accepted the responsibility to protect and preserve that district, yet now this Board is hell bent on removing the Fairbank Dam entirely and essentially destroying the Hofmann dam and the entire riverscape, and doing it without having any complete, finished and verifiable data as to what conditions we will be left with. You need hard, concrete, proofed and proven documents that can be scrutinized and checked independently - not just palaver at meetings and during walk-arounds. The Village should demand to have a thorough and comprehensive outcome study it can substantiate independently before any work commences.
Now we are told there is a “new” completed plan for this project. If there is, no one in the Village has yet seen it, and the Army Corps says they want to let the contract “next month.” So much for local input. I was told by the Corps project manager that he sent the low flow map of the river to the Village Manager “last week” but Mr. Scalera says he doesn’t have it. He gave me copies of some sheets of the “100% plan” and they show that the contractor will be doing the dam removal from Fairbank Road and that only some equipment staging will take place on the opposite bank. The drawings are tiny and detail is lacking, but it appears they are back to doing “stabilization” from two more large easements in the park along Fairbank Road they expect the Village to grant them.
Even these partial documents are scary to me. How will you maneuver large trucks in and out at that spot? When the plans call for placing “XX cubic yards per lineal foot” of rip rap stone at the new river’s edge and bringing it in through the parkland I would want to know how many hundreds, (thousands?) of heavy trucks will that entail? There’s a hundred unanswered questions in what I saw, and it was just a few pages. How can people be allowed to proceed when we don’t know even these basic facts? Whatever the Corps plans to do, the Board and commissions have never seen it. So how can you let this proceed? The Village has rules, and you can’t issue permits for this work without the requisite documents and going through the required approval process.
Presumably the Board thinks getting “something” - anything - done to the Swan Pond (including the cutting of 36 large trees that have been marked for destruction there) is sufficient reason to put the village at risk and negate its history. This is foolish beyond comprehension. Why should we do something like this without verifiable proof of what the outcome will be? If this goes forward the Army Corps will move on, but the residents will be left with whatever conditions they cause. They won’t come back and build a new dam, and they won’t have the money to fix what they ruin. Why should we let the Feds come in here and spend millions of dollars they borrow from China to “fix” something that isn’t broken?
I want to remind the residents that the Village has no funds to clear, plant or maintain exposed river banks upriver, and the Corps will only be working within a defined area that does not extend even to Indian Gardens. Whet they create we will be left with, and since this project is funded under Section 206, where the rules state that the “local partner” - in this case the Sate. of Illinois IDNR is solely responsible for “Operations, Maintenance, Repair, Rehab and Replacement” we’ll be stuck trying to get funds from an entity that is effectively broke. In effect, if they create havoc, we can sue ourselves.
I may be the only one that comes here and speaks to you about this, but many people have told me to continue to do so and try and stop this thing. Maybe we need to have a “Raise Your Decibels - Honk if you want to save Riverside” program started. The Corps has not met its obligation to provide proof of what will happen and ironclad guarantees that it will correct any negative conditions it creates - up or down river. This Board does not have any basis upon which to judge what the outcome of this work will produce. Therefore, it must do whatever it takes to see that this project does not go forward unless and until all of these questions and conditions are addressed and we see a complete, data-rich and independently verifiable outcome assessment.