coal

Power Station's Closing Could Create Problems

Mon, 02/13/2012
For years, environmental and health organizations have called for the closing of the 83-year-old coal-fired State Line Power Station, one of the Chicago area’s top polluters. Now the plant, which is in Hammond, just across the Indiana border on Lake Michigan and adjacent to Calumet Park, is burning through its last stores of coal. It will stop...

Study Stirs Debate on Future of Chicago Waterways

Mon, 01/02/2012
A new Army Corps of Engineers study of Chicago-area waterways has stirred the debate over whether to sever the connection between Lake Michigan and inland waterways that were created by the construction of canals a century ago. The study, released on Dec. 7, is part of the Corps’s nearly decade-long process aimed at preventing invasive species,...

Touring Toxic Chicago

Tue, 04/26/2011
Much of the steel that built Chicago was made there. And in decades past, most of Chicago’s trash ended up there. Much of our sewage still does, and it has the city’s only Superfund cleanup site. The Southeast Side, including the neighborhoods of Hegewisch, South Deering and Pullman around Lake Calumet, also was the stomping grounds of one of the...

Notre Dame Professor Leads Effort to Keep Asian Carp Out of Great Lakes

Thu, 03/31/2011
When the United States Fish and Wildlife Service decided in March to ban the import and transport of bighead carp — one of the infamous Asian carp — under a century-old law called the Lacey Act, David Lodge had one reaction. “It’s about time,” he said.  It figures that Mr. Lodge, 54, a professor of biological sciences at the University of...