MWRD: Biosolids Drying Lagoons

The bus ride to see Phase I of the McCook Reservoir took us past the lagoones the MWRD uses to dry their biosolids. (In the winter, they use their centrifuge building.) Even the Birds-Eye View is not old enough to show all of the lagoons that they used to have. So I fired up Google Earth Pro and went back to 1998. But it just showed some layers, I could not get a background of satellite imagery. So I fired up the New Google Earth. It had satellite imagery, but I could not figure out how to get older images. So I can't see what it looked like before they removed 17 of the lagoons to make room for digging the McCook Reservoir.

Satellite

safe_image for How Chicago’s Poop Becomes Amazing Fertilizer

The first lagoon had the driest material. It was being composted. These are in the order that we drove past them. I flag below the one that was wettest --- waste was actively being pumped into it.

20170806 1556

A closeup of the tractor and pump in the above picture. It appears to be pumping the water into the adjacent lagoon (two pictures above).

This was the wettest because you can see waste is being pumped into it.

The last lagoon catching Phase II of the McCook Reservoir in the background.

One the way out, we passed a storage lot that stored their equipment. For example a tractor that drives a pump that can be used to aerate a lagoon. The two clamshell buckets are probably just antiques now.

The other side of the storage lot has a few more aeration pumps.