If you’ve ever thought about diving into a literal vat of waste and garbage, Steve Buchtel and Josh Ellis have got you beat.
Buchtel and Ellis, along with the executive director of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, David St. Pierre, and other fundraisers, will dive straight into the Cal-Sag (short for Calumet-Saganashkee) Channel to raise money for the Cal-Sag Trail project. The trail is “a 26-mile, multi-use trail” that, when finished, will run from Edgewater to Joliet. It’s currently only halfway completed—hence, the fundraiser.
They’ll dive into the channel in suburban Blue Island on August 27. For those unfamiliar with the channel, it debuted in 1922 to defer pollution away from Lake Michigan and toward the Illinois River. Located between the Little Calumet River and the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, the channel is now so polluted that no creature can survive in it.
A reverend was brought to the channel to exorcise it four years ago, but it didn’t seem to work. The MWRD still has signs along the shoreline warning against drinking, swimming in or even touching the water in the channel. The water has improved a bit since the opening of a deep tunnel project that diverts sewer overflow to a nearby quarry, but it’s still not anything you’d want to ingest.
According to both of their fundraising pages, they’re completing the dive, “To showcase the near miraculous work by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District to clean up area waterways— especially the Cal-Sag Channel.”
Ellis is the director of the Metropolitan Planning Council and Buchtel works as the executive director of nonprofit Trails for Illinois. Buchtel organized the plunge.
“To the person who sponsors me at the highest dollar amount, I will ensure that you personally may stand behind me and shove with all your might,” Ellis says on his fundraising page.
Buchtel, who organized the plunge, promises a similar prize. “The biggest individual donor gets to choose my dive: cannonball, can opener, corkscrew, or windmill,” his page says. “This fit boy man has a broad arsenal of dives for one so afraid of going in headfirst.”
We wish you both the best. Just don’t disturb anything in its depths. Chicago doesn’t need its own radioactive Godzilla.
@shelbielbostedt | sbostedt@redeyechicago.com
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