New plant helping clean Little Calumet River

Photo courtesy of MWRD via FaceBook.

Susan Hedman reminisced Friday about how she “eventually found my way to the Little Calumet River” while kayaking Chicagoland waterways.

But Hedman — a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator — was unaware the Little Calumet was classified as recently as 2011 as unsafe for direct human contact.

“What I didn’t know is that I was kayaking on an effluent-dominated waterway,” she said, referring to all of the industrial waste discharged into the river over many years…Please click here to read Dennis Sullivan’s story in the Tribune/Daily Southtown. A related story is here.