WTTW News Explains: How Do Chicago’s Lake Michigan Water Cribs Work? …

Toward the end of the Civil War as Chicago’s population began to boom, water from the Chicago River in Lake Michigan was polluted with raw sewage, chemicals and rotting animal carcasses from the Union Stockyards causing epidemics of cholera, typhoid and dysentery.

Enter Ellis Chesbrough, Chicago’s first city engineer and designer of the water delivery system we still use today.

Chesbrough’s plan: build an offshore structure called a crib to act as a straw and bring clean water from miles out on the lake through a pipeline and into the city.

Sounds simple, right? Not so much.

He had one crew working on the shore digging 200 feet below the lake bottom, a second crew building a water intake crib two miles out on the lake digging down and west from there inching toward the other tunnel. But remember it’s 1864, so the digging was done by hand using picks, shovels and mules 24 hours a day and six days a week.

Fast forward two years and the two crews finally met in the middle….