Operation Lakewatch

Once upon a time there was an Operation Lakewatch.

Thomas J. Murphy
22 April 2026

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,
committed citizens can change the world;
indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Operation Lakewatch was a project of the Edgewater Community Council (ECC) whose monitoring and reporting on the water quality in Lake Michigan brought about significant improvements. It was directed by five community volunteers from 1981 through 1983. The significant findings were:

• The harbors frequently had unsafe levels of disease-causing microorganisms present.
• The McCormick Convention Center was discharging waste liquids–including sewage, through storm water drains into Burnam Harbor at night.
• ChicagoFest–later The Taste of Chicago, began at Navy Pier. During its years, street sweepings were dumped into the lake and sewage was leaking from pipes.

In 1980 a large amount of untreated wastewater was released into Lake Michigan by a wastewater treatment plant in Indiana. Many days later it arrived as a large plume offshore of Chicago. This led to the closing of beaches for 19 days. People were surprised that there was no regular monitoring of the offshore water that would have warned of its coming.

Two Edgewater women – Kathy Osterman and Mary Ann Smith, concerned by the water quality in Lake Michigan, decided to do something about it. Kathy was a beach person–a day not spent with family and friends at the beach was a day wasted. Mary Ann was an avid environmentalist and an early staff member at the Lake Michigan Federation. The question was, what could citizens do to “clean up the lake”?

Mary Ann knew Tom Murphy, a chemist at DePaul who had worked on Lake Michigan pollution issues and talked to him about a project. But since the immediate threat to lakefront water users was disease-causing micro-organisms from sewage–diarrhea, cholera, pink eye, etc. That could serve as the focus for the project.

The test commonly used to screen for sewage contamination is the fecal coliform (FC) test. FCs are organisms that live in the intestines of warm-blooded animals. While they don’t usually cause diseases, their presence in water indicates that untreated sewage is present, and their number suggests the severity of the pollution. This the most widely conducted biological test on water samples. The results were of importance to all users of the lake–swimmers, boaters, fishermen, beach goers, dog walkers, etc.

Since the FC test is widely used, there is a large testing infrastructure available to serve it. The Millipore Corp. marked a small, self-contained, sterile sampler that was compatible with standard water sampling procedures. A sample of water was drawn into a container, which collect the particles on a filter. A nutrient solution was added, and the sampler was incubated at ≈98 °F for 48 hours. After incubation, colonies of FC bacteria that had grown on the filter, were counted. The value of this device at ≈$1/sampler, was that it was a tested device, in wide use, it was easy to use. and it produced accurate results.

In the summer of 1980, we received a grant of $5000 from the Joyce Foundation and $999 from the trustees of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (WMRD). To run the sampling efforts we needed a person with some technical background and who was also a regular on the lakefront. We found that person in John Berzins– a biology major at UIC studying oceanography. He was a friendly, avid fisherman who easily communicated with others. He quickly became skilled in incubating the samples that he and others collected and reading and recording the results. Marvin Starczyk, a microbiologist at Northern Illinois University was a consultant to the project and Sanford Stein, an environmental lawyer, rounded out our management team. Thursday mornings at 8:00 AM, the group convened around the Smith’s dining room table and planned.

John walked parts of the lakefront daily, collecting samples from the shore and the harbors, and talked to people using the lakefront. He explained our project, shared recent results with them and asked them to report any pollution incidents they had seen in the lake. Our publicity campaign also asked others with a view of the lake–including airplane pilots, to report pollution incidents they observed to our hotline (312-989-8866). Our early results showed mostly low numbers of FC along the shore, sometimes elevated ones from the beaches and regularly higher ones from in the harbors.

ChicagoFest

ChicagoFest was a two-week music and food festival that was held at Navy pier in Chicago beginning in 1978. It attracted a million or so visitors each year. The pier is an old, long building with a flat cement apron that extends 100’ or more over the lake. There were stages for the entertainment and food vendors located throughout the site. Each evening, the debris on the ground was swept into the regularly spaced stormwater drains on the platform.

In the weeks before the 1981 ChicagoFest, Operation Lakewatch collected samples at six locations around the pier and determined a FC background of ≈20/100 mL. The stations were sampled at least daily during the Fest. Many high samples were found, including several >500 FC/100 mL (in 1981 200 FC/100mL closed a beach). Based on our early results, the MWRD and the State’s Attorney’s office did additional sampling. One MWRD sample was 6,000 FC/100 mL, that perhaps indicated sewage input.

A check of the drains on the cement apron showed that they were not connected to anything! If you opened one of the covers and looked, you were looking at the surface of Lake Michigan. Thus, all the debris being swept into them was going into the Lake.

Many of the samples showed elevated FC counts. The State’s Attorney’s office tested the integrity of the sewer system by putting dye into some drains. They found two cracks in the pipes where the dye–and therefore also sewage, was leaking into the lake.

In preparation for the 1982 ChicagoFest, the organizers made significant efforts to do a better job in handling wastes. We planned for additional sampling, and we also needed more help with public relations. To help with efforts, Leslie Nickels was added to the Lakewatch team. Sampling by Operation Lakewatch, the MWRD and the State’s Attorney’s office found much less pollution than in 1981.

Pump-out Stations in the harbors and Freedom of Speech

It is not surprising that numbers from beaches and harbors could be higher because that is where people were regularly in the water.

An important cause of FC in the harbors was the pump-out stations. Larger boats and many smaller ones have toilets on board. The wastes are collected in a holding tank that must be periodically emptied. Each of the twelve Chicago Park District (CPD) harbors had one or two pump-out stations to accommodate boaters.

The problem arises when the pump-out is out of operation. Intermittent pump outages were common and outages at individual harbors could last for several weeks. On one occasion pump facilities were not available at four adjacent harbors from Diversey to Montrose–what’s a boater to do?

With Labor Day coming up and expecting much activity in the harbors, we put up signs in several harbors stating, “…our samples of the water in the harbors had found elevated levels of pollution on several occasions” and warned people not to swim in the harbors. The Park District went ballistic, denigrating our results and asked for a gag order on further signage. Operation Lakewatch claimed freedom of speech. We said that the CPD rules were, “No swimming in the harbor”, and we were simple emphasizing this rule. This set-off a three month’s long court case about free speech.

• The case was assigned to Judge Harold Siegan who put a restraining order in place against us and ordered additional sampling by an independent laboratory.
• While we used an approved sampling method and equipment, our analysts were not certified, therefore we could not publish our results. The independent lab results were closer to our results than to the CPD’s. It turned out that the Park District’s lab also was not certified.
• There were numerous editorials and articles in the press over the next three months about the CPD trying to muffle the citizens group whose monitoring work highlighted deficiencies in the operation of the pump-out stations and in the sampling and analytical procedures of the Park District.

Burnham Harbor and McCormick Place

One July, several boaters who had docking spaces in Burnham Harbor, on its west side–due east of a parking lot for the McCormick Exposition Center, complained to John Berzins that their boats were regularly immersed in floating debris and oily substances. They complained to the Center and were told that some painters had cleaned their brushes and other craftsmen had tidied up their trucks, and debris must have gotten into the storm drains that went into the harbor by the boaters.

We reported this to the MWRD and they took samples and thoroughly checked-out all the storm drains and their interconnections. Astonishingly, they discovered that McCormick Place had an undocumented, 50,000-gallon tank in the north end of the building with the tank outlet connected to their stormwater drains. Liquid wastes, spilled liquids, sweepings and some sewage from the building was accumulated in the tank. On regular occasions–at night, it was emptied into the pipes that discharged into Burnham Harbor! They were fined $50,000 by the MWRD!

We ran a smaller effort in 1983 program due to less funding. We also partnered with Dr. Janet Holden, a biologist at the Univ. of Illinois at Chicago to do the water analysis in her certified laboratory.

Conclusions

In 1980, the need was there, the timing was right and Operation Lakewatch succeeded beyond all reasonable expectations. In Lake Michigan, pollution threats were evolving and monitoring agencies had not kept up. A group of volunteers from a citizen’s organization developed a robust monitoring project involving regular users of the lakefront to monitor and report pollution problems in the lake. Fortunately, when problems were discovered, the agencies responded, followed up, and improved their procedures where required.

The MWRD was initially skeptical of the project but Nicholas Melas, their General Superintendent became a good supporter and the agency jumped in with both feet on the McCormick Place problem and ChicagoFest, and they began long-term monitoring of the lake. In 1983, ChicagoFest moved to a larger and more appropriate site in Grant Park. And the Park District greatly improved the availability of the pump-out stations.

Footnote.
In 1989 Kathy Osterman became the Director of Chicago’s Office of Special Events, the agency that runs the Taste of Chicago. Most of the Dining Room Table Group convened one last time to draft a letter to the Director of Chicago’s Office of Special Events reminding her to do a good job in managing the pollution from Taste of Chicago as Operation Lakewatch was watching!