Anyone remember when the Chicago River started draining into basements and interlocked tunnels beneath the Loop? It was a spring morning in 1992. According to Wikipedia, a crew sinking new pilings for the Kinzie Avenue bridge did not know about an abandoned utility tunnel under the river and breached its wall.
By the time the hole was plugged, 250 million gallons of river water were pulsing through subterranean Chicago. Settling all the claims cost a reported $2 billion.
Why does this come to mind in Forest Park, 33 springs later?
Last week, on another early spring morning, a computer failed at the public works building in town. That snafu left the valve that controls the flow of Chicago-provided drinking water into the decrepit Forest Park water reservoir under the Howard Mohr Community Center set to wide open.
So the already topped off reservoir just kept getting more inflow until, and excuse our lack of infrastructure expertise, it began overflowing into the community center and then it flowed right out the front door. Luckily a neighbor was awake at 2 a.m., saw the cascade and knew something just wasn’t right. They made a call to the cops.
And the cops called Sal Stella, Forest Park’s public works chief. He knew enough to get the valve shut. And to file an insurance claim. And to sponge out the waterlogged community center and adjacent pumping station.
Computers fail. You’d hope there’d be a backup system. Given the shape of Forest Park’s physical and technological infrastructure, it is not surprising that there was not.
Most immediately, the village will need to reinspect the ceiling of the reservoir to see if more damage was done to an already badly deteriorating facility.
All of this needs to spur the village forward in making plans to build a new reservoir soon and to assess its computer systems.
D209 promises to listen
Lack of communication. Lack of accountability. Lack of access. Lack of community.
That pretty much sums up the mindset of the Proviso Township High Schools’ approach to listening and responding to each and every subset of its constituencies in recent years.
Difficult to ask a question. Hard to find information. Painful to ever get an answer. And that’s whether you are a parent, a teacher, a student, a taxpayer or a reporter.
So just because fixing this dismal situation is low-hanging fruit does not mean that Superintendent Krish Mohip’s move to install a new system that funnels all inquiries to a single platform is not a great start to listening and learning and acting.
The District 209 school board quickly approved the minor cost of installing a third-party platform called Let’s Talk. All incoming questions, concerns, ideas and requests for help will now come to the district in a unified location. An outbound response, even if just acknowledging receipt, is promised within 24 hours.
Likely there will be bugs and hiccups. But the intention of actually listening is an essential change.