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Comment by macintux | Hacker News Reader

> The advocacy group, founded in 1979, has long worked to protect and restore the Chicago River, for example pushing for discharge from water treatment plants to be disinfected before being released into the river, Frisbie said.

46 years of work to pull this off. Impressive.

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Knowing just a tiny bit about the history of the Chicago River, my first thought when I saw the headline was "Cholera! It's for everybody!"

But learning that they've actually -- finally -- solved that issue really outweighs whatever snark I may have had in mind.

(And for those who don't know: The Chicago River has a really interesting history that definitely includes cholera, and also includes reversing its direction of flow (!) to help solve problems like that.)

10 or so years ago I read an article that thanks to environmental efforts we now have rivers and lakes that haven't been this clean since at least pre-industrial era.

We went from the Great Stink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink to having beaches and swimming competitions inside big cities

> finally -- solved

There are still combined sewer overflows into the Chicago River. There have been 5 events so far in 2025.

https://apps.mwrd.org/csoreports/

Is the massive reduction in manufacturing due to trade policy and other factors over those 46 years a coincidence? Like the manufacturing is what made it dirty in the first place, right? If the manufacturing goes away, the problem of making the river clean presumably becomes a lot easier?

A lot of dirty stuff like stock yards and slaughterhouses also moved out of the main city toward the outskirts.

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