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State records obtained by the Tribune show the president’s glass-and-steel skyscraper is one of the largest users of Chicago River water for its cooling systems, siphoning nearly 20 million gallons a day through intakes so powerful the machines could fill an Olympic swimming pool in less than an hour, then pumping the water back into the river up to 35 degrees hotter.
Like other large users that draw water directly from rivers or lakes, Trump Tower is required to follow federal and state regulations detailing how facilities should limit the number of fish pinned against intake screens or killed by sudden changes in pressure and temperature.
Yet of the nearly dozen high-rises that rely on the Chicago River for cooling water, the decade-old skyscraper developed by Donald Trump is the only one that has
failed to document it took those measures, state records show. Trump’s Chicago managers also haven’t conducted a study of fish killed by the luxury hotel and condominium complex — another step required five years ago by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency in a permit for the building’s water intakes.
Estimates of Trump Tower fish kills likely won’t be available anytime soon. A draft of the state’s latest permit gives building managers another three years to complete the ecological study and confirms state inspectors failed to ensure the skyscraper has complied with the fish-protecting regulations.
“I can’t keep a library book checked out for more than two weeks without getting a fine,” said Albert Ettinger, an environmental lawyer challenging the permit on behalf of the Illinois chapter of the Sierra Club and Friends of the Chicago River. “Why should Trump Tower get special treatment?”
Citing the state’s lack of enforcement, Ettinger and Mark Templeton, director of the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Chicago, notified Trump Tower’s managers on Friday that the nonprofit groups are preparing a federal lawsuit accusing them of repeatedly violating the 1972 Clean Water Act.
Questions raised by the lawyers already appear to be having their intended effect.
Kim Biggs, an Illinois EPA spokeswoman, said agency officials granted Trump Tower a four-year permit in 2013 and proposed renewing it this year based on limited information from building representatives. But the agency is planning to revise its draft “to address a number of issues” regarding the skyscraper’s cooling intakes, Biggs said, and will hold a public hearing to discuss the changes. “Your references to the January 2018 draft permit may no longer be relevant once the new draft permit is put to notice,” she said in an email.
Trump Tower representatives did not return telephone calls.
The fact that lawyers are invoking an obscure provision of federal law to protect fish in the Chicago River is another sign of the improving health of a sluggish prairie stream that city leaders once treated as little more than an industrialized sewage canal.
Engineers reversed the river away from Lake Michigan more than a century ago to keep the city’s waste out of its source of drinking water. Advances in sewage treatment and multibillion-dollar stormwater diversion projects have cleaned it up enough that kayaks can be rented along the popular Riverwalk and other spots that draw people to the water’s edge.
Federal and state biologists found nearly 30 types of fish swimming in the murky green water during the past four years, including largemouth bass, bluegill, white perch and walleye. In October, a boy fishing on the Riverwalk a block away from Trump Tower caught the first American eel ever seen in the river.
Most of the fish arrived naturally and appear to be growing in number, based on periodic surveys by federal, state and local officials. Another species found downtown is channel catfish, a relatively easy catch for anglers that the Illinois Department of Natural Resources stocked in the North Branch four years ago after building artificial nesting cavities to encourage reproduction.
A city of Chicago Fleet and Facility Management boat makes its way down the Chicago River near Trump International Hotel & Tower on June 6, 2018. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)
“A politician once told me fish don’t vote,” said John Quail, director of watershed planning at Friends of the Chicago River, a nonprofit group that has pushed for decades to change how the waterway is managed. “But the city and others have invested hundreds of millions of dollars on the river, banking on the idea that it’s going to continue to improve.”
A diverse fish population in the river might not mean much to a tourist looking down at the water from the Michigan Avenue Bridge, Quail said, but it is an important indicator of progress in meeting the Clean Water Act’s goal of “fishable and swimmable” waterways throughout the nation.
Trump Tower’s developers initially failed to get a permit for a new cooling-water intake on the former site of the drab, low-slung Chicago Sun-Times Building. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office filed a complaint in 2012, three years after Trump opened his glistening Chicago high-rise at 401 N. Wabash Ave., and a year later the corporation in charge of the hotel and condo tower agreed to follow the law and pay a $46,000 fine.
In settlement documents, the state said the fine would “serve to deter further violations and aid in future voluntary compliance.”
All of the other users of river water have filed documents with the state outlining how their cooling systems limit fish kills. Most draw substantially less water than Trump Tower and slow the velocity of their intakes to increase the chances fish can swim away safely, records show.
One of the most extensive collections of documents is for 300 N. LaSalle, a 60-story office building that uses about 2 million gallons of river water a day, compared with the nearly 20 million gallons withdrawn daily by the 98-story Trump Tower built during the same period.
Building engineers at 300 N. LaSalle are required to check the water intakes three times a day. The vast majority of the 183 fish found during the past five years were dead, records show.
Most other downtown buildings, including many on the river, rely on different methods to keep cool.
Some have cooling towers connected to the public water system. Others tap into an underground network of pipes that deliver chilled water from a handful of “ice batteries” scattered around the Loop. The facilities act like massive radiators by freezing water-filled coils at night when electricity prices are low, then circulating the cold water to more than 120 buildings during the day through a closed-loop system that returns hot water to be frozen again at the ice plants.
The federal regulations at issue for Trump Tower were prompted by a Clean Water Act provision intended to help restore lakes and rivers by forcing polluters to significantly reduce their water withdrawals. Enforcement was spotty at best until a 2007 court order required the U.S. EPA to revise its regulations, which the agency concluded most users could meet either by installing cooling towers or reducing the velocity of water intakes.
Energy companies are the chief targets of the regulations. The Tribune reported in 2011 that dozens of old power plants on the Great Lakes kill hundreds of millions of fish each year while sucking in massive amounts of water to cool equipment.
As a presidential candidate, Trump repeatedly condemned environmental regulations and vowed to abolish the federal EPA. The anti-regulation agenda he has pushed since taking office is carried out in part by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who as Oklahoma attorney general scaled back enforcement of environmental laws and sued the federal agency 13 times to block or delay clean air and water rules.
Last year the American Public Power Association urged the Trump administration to add the cooling intake regulations to its list of environmental rules to overhaul or abolish.
For now, at least, the rules are still in effect.
mhawthorne@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @scribeguy
Above is from: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-trump-tower-fish-kill-20180618-story.html#nws=true
