Peoria City Hall updates on Sewer Overflow Control Program progress
A meeting in South Peoria at the Peoria Public Library's Lincoln branch took an extra meaning as City Hall sent out another alert of a combined sewer overflow due to the large amount of rain from Wednesday's storm.
Nick McMillion, a spokesman for the city's public works department, explains the safety precautions of the alerts.
'Typically with those alerts when they happen, it's recommended don't make contact with water in the Illinois River for at least 48 hours,' McMillion said. 'So that alert of the combined sewer overflow will be in place for the next couple of days.'
The city's public works department was behind the meeting which updated the community on the municipal separate storm sewer system and combined sewer overflow control program, along with informing them on how they can prevent excess sewage.
For years, runoff from a large rain event would combine with sewage and flow into the river instead of the city's treatment plant. The problem had City Hall and the federal government at odds since the 1980s.
Referred to as a combined sewer overflow, the sewage contributes to elevated bacteria levels in the river and poses health risks.
In December 2020, the city and the federal Environmental Protection Agency entered into a consent decree where the city agreed to spend more than $100 million to fix the aging system over an 18-year period. In return, the EPA agreed to not ley millions in fines against Peoria.
'We have 18 years to implement all of these projects, this is just year four,' McMillion said. 'So with this project, it is another huge project that we're excited to get started on.'
Now in year 4, the CSO project has spent millions working on both green approaches to the sewer issues as well as replacing old and outdated pipes.
For more information, go to the city's website regarding CSOs.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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San Francisco Chronicle
a day ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
These 24 city-owned San Francisco buildings could collapse in a major earthquake
When the next major earthquake strikes, at least 24 of San Francisco's city-owned buildings could collapse, and over two dozen more could suffer major damage. The at-risk buildings include the Hall of Justice — where tens of thousands of San Franciscans report for jury duty each year — as well as multiple fire stations, police stations and homeless shelters. That's according to the city's own Seismic Hazard Ratings (SHR), a 1 through 4 score that classifies how seismically sound — or unsound — a building is, as determined by a structural engineer. Two dozen still-unretrofitted buildings in the city's portfolio have the highest SHR score of 4, according to data shared with the Chronicle. When a sizable quake strikes those buildings, per the SHR 4 definition, 'extensive structural and nonstructural damage, potential structural collapse and/or falling hazards are anticipated which would pose high life hazards to occupants.' Twenty-six more of the city's buildings notch an SHR of 3, which means a quake is likely to deal enough damage to pose 'appreciable life hazards' to people inside. For both categories, there's a chance that the damage could be too severe to repair. The damage estimates are based on an earthquake that would produce ground shaking more intense than the 1989 6.9-magnitude Loma Prieta quake; the city calculated a 10% probability of such a quake occurring over a 50-year period. Since 1990, San Francisco has spent over $20 billion on seismic retrofits for some of its most essential public infrastructure, including City Hall, the Veterans War Memorial and Laguna Honda Hospital. City officials say San Francisco is ahead of other Bay Area cities in having a standardized and thorough method for assessing the seismic risk of its buildings. But there are still dozens of city-owned buildings that have not been retrofitted and could collapse in a major earthquake, and the Bay Area is due for one. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates a 72% chance of a 6.7-magnitude quake, a 51% chance of a 7.0-magnitude quake and a 20% chance of a 7.5-magnitude quake hitting the region in the next 30 years. Only about one-third of the city's roughly 900 buildings have been given SHRs, because conducting the assessments the ratings are based on is expensive and labor-intensive, said Raymond Lui, section manager for the Department of Public Works' structural engineering division. Some of the unassessed buildings could be SHR 3 or SHR 4s, but a computer simulation of the buildings' risks suggest that the probability of that is 'slim,' he said. State law does not require San Francisco to retrofit its existing buildings. Under the California building code, most new buildings are held to a 'collapse prevention' standard — strong enough that they won't collapse during an earthquake at least as powerful as the 7.9-magnitude quake that devastated the city in 1906. Buildings deemed more essential, like hospitals and police stations, are held to a stricter 'life safety' standard — resilient enough to provide some life safety services post-quake. That means the retrofits San Francisco has undertaken are, essentially, voluntary, and funded through voter-authorized bond measures. But funding is never a guarantee among the competing priorities in the city's capital plan. Brian Strong, the city's chief resiliency officer, said the city will be able to keep checking off retrofits if San Franciscans keep voting to support bond measures. The next Earthquake Safety and Resilience bond measure, for $350 million, is expected to go before voters in November 2028. 'It's not something that's going to happen overnight,' he said, 'but I'm confident that we're making really good progress.' Here are five of the city's most important buildings that have SHR ratings of 3 or 4 and for which there is either no plan or guaranteed funding to upgrade or replace the structure. Hall of Justice — 850 Bryant St., SHR 3 'Severely overstressed.' 'Substantial cracking.' 'Significant rocking.' Those are all descriptors of what a major earthquake could wreak upon the nearly 70-year-old Hall of Justice, per a 1992 seismic assessment report. The city has known for decades that the eight-story concrete behemoth, which houses the county's criminal courthouse, is seismically unsound. Two of the building's basic specs are enough to alarm any structural engineer: its year of construction (1958) and its main building material (concrete). Before the 1970s, some structural engineers had raised concerns that concrete buildings could be seismically unsafe. But it wasn't until after the 1971 6.6-magnitude San Fernando earthquake, which caused two brand-new concrete hospital buildings to nearly collapse and killed dozens, that those concerns were translated into major changes to California's building code. Old concrete buildings like the Hall of Justice are especially dangerous because they can collapse suddenly and spectacularly, said Bob Pekelnicky, a senior principal and structural engineer at Degenkolb Engineers. 'It's nothing and then it's just — boom,' he said. The city has been slowly relocating people from the building — the offices of the Medical Examiner and District Attorney, San Francisco Police Department's headquarters, and two county jails which previously occupied the 6th and 7th floors have all been moved out. At least 76% of the building is now vacant, according to the Superior Court of California. Aside from a few police and sheriff units, there's really only one function left in the Hall of Justice, but it's a critical one: the courts. Almost every day, judges, attorneys, journalists, people on trial and their families navigate the building's crumbling courtrooms, often out-of-service elevators and leaky sewage pipes. Close to 30,000 San Franciscans enter the Hall of Justice each year for jury duty. Because of the high cost of retrofits, city and county leaders have long sought to replace the failing building altogether, but funding has been elusive. And the Hall of Justice can't be shut down until there's somewhere to relocate the courts, city staff said a lot has been selected just north of the current building. Funding for a new courthouse would have to come at the state level. The Judicial Council of California, which oversees new courthouse construction, includes building a new Hall of Justice with 24 courtrooms in its five-year infrastructure plan. Fire Station No. 7 — 2300 Folsom St., SHR 4 The fire station on Folsom Street in the Mission District is one of eight fire stations in the city rated SHR 4. Four more stations are rated SHR 3. All of those stations have Fire Chief Dean Crispen 'very concerned' about seismic safety, but Station No. 7 is top of mind, he said. That's because in the case of a major earthquake, the station is slated to play an important role in the city's emergency response. Station No. 7 is one of the three stations that would take charge of a section of SFFD's operations after a quake, as part of a decentralized approach in the event that communications are down. One of the other two stations, Station No. 2 on Powell Street in Chinatown, is also an SHR 4. 'You can only imagine,' Crispen said, asked what would happen if Station No. 7 collapses just when it's most needed. 'We'd have to rescue our own members out of a fire house.' Though the department initially planned to look for funding to make seismic improvements, it's now hoping to replace the aging facility altogether. An estimated $65 million project to replace it was deferred from this year's 10-year capital plan. If funding can't be identified, the city plans to prioritize the project in 2028. Taraval Police Station — 2345 24th Ave., SHR 4 Five of San Francisco's 10 police stations are rated SHR 3, and two — Taraval and Ingleside — are rated SHR 4, with no plans for retrofitting yet. Taraval Station in the city's southwest corner serves San Francisco's most populous police jurisdiction, extending south from Golden Gate Park down to Daly City and east from Ocean Beach to 7th Avenue. About $168 million to make structural improvements to or replace Taraval Station was deferred from this year's capital plan. The project was deferred from last year's capital plan, too. Police and fire stations are overrepresented on the list of the city's most unsafe buildings. That's because they tend to be older buildings, and because the stations are essential, so it is difficult to take one offline to perform the upgrades, Pekelnicky said. MSC-South Shelter — 525 Fifth St., SHR 4 Every day, more than 340 homeless people flock to the South of Market shelter for a warm bed and a hot meal. The building, which has distinctive maroon awnings, is more than a century old. Two other city-owned shelters, at 260 Golden Gate Avenue and 1001 Polk Street, also have SHR 4 designations. All three are older, concrete buildings, like the Hall of Justice, meaning they lack the steel reinforcement that resists side-to-side shaking. According to the city's capital plan, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing and the Department of Public Works are in the process of designing a seismically safe shelter to be built on the same site, but no funding has been identified. Human Services Agency headquarters — 170 Otis St., SHR 4 The city long knew that the eight-story concrete building that houses the Human Services Agency was vulnerable, but a 2018 seismic assessment showed it was more dangerous than previously thought. During a 1906-level earthquake, the 1975-constructed building is expected to be 'on the verge of partial or total collapse,' with damage including 'extensive shear wall failure' and the potential for debris to block the exits, according to the assessment. That could be catastrophic for the hundreds of people who work in the building — and for the scores more who frequent the building for services like food assistance and job training. One Human Services Agency employee said they are so scared to work in the building that they have told friends and family to sue the city if they die inside during an earthquake. The employee asked to withhold their name for fear of retaliation. In a statement, an HSA spokesperson said the agency signed a lease last month for several floors of 1455 Market Street and plans to relocate staff from 170 Otis and 1235 Mission, another SHR 4 building. The agency also plans, in the next two years, to acquire a site on the southeastern side of the city to accommodate any employees who can't fit in the Market Street building. The spokesperson did not give a timeline for the relocation out of 170 Otis and 1235 Mission but said the Market Street building is currently being renovated. A 'very real cost tradeoff' San Francisco is not an outlier in owning buildings that could collapse in an earthquake. In fact, experts say, the city is somewhat of an outlier in even knowing which of its buildings might collapse. Sarah Atkinson, a senior policy manager for hazard resilience at urban planning nonprofit SPUR, said she does not know of other cities in seismically active areas that have developed seismic hazard ratings for their portfolio of buildings. San Francisco is far ahead of both Oakland and San Jose, she said. 'I would contend that the city's probably doing more than the average,' Pekelnicky agreed. 'Could they be doing more? Of course.' Some advocacy groups have pushed for more stringent standards to be added to the building code for both new and existing buildings — to require, for example, that buildings aren't just standing after the Big One, but are functional and habitable, too. But requiring those long-term reinforcements would mean higher construction costs. 'There's a very real cost tradeoff,' Pekelnicky said. 'You get into the really hard challenge of 'who's paying for that? ' and 'is it worth the investment? ' because this is a rare earthquake that may not happen for 100, 150 years.' The high cost of building seismic resilience into construction underscores just how powerful earthquakes can be, a wakeup call for San Franciscans as public memory of the Loma Prieta quake continues to fade. 'There is no such thing as an earthquake-proof building,' city structural engineer Lui said. 'It's just gonna be how much damage you're going to sustain.'
San Francisco Chronicle
3 days ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
When the Golden Gate Bridge turned 50, and a good city descended into chaos
It was a day for San Francisco to honor the Golden Gate Bridge. But by mid-morning on May 24, 1987, the gridlocked horde trying to celebrate its 50th anniversary got so desperate people were urinating off the side of the landmark. 'For a few, necessity overcame modesty, producing a rush to the railing and relief into the choppy waters below,' the Chronicle's Carl Nolte wrote the next day. That was just one indelible memory from the bridge's golden anniversary celebration, where bridge officials planned for 50,000 revelers and more than 800,000 showed up. Muni service was brought to a standstill. Hundreds of children were lost. And, most alarmingly in the moment, the bridge itself visibly flattened and warped under the weight of the masses. I called my mother, Jeanne Hartlaub, who attended the event, and she raged like it happened yesterday. 'What a freaking s—-show,' she said. 'We had no control over where we were going. I lifted my feet off the ground, and I was being carried by the crowd.' A recent search in the Chronicle archive revealed unpublished images — including one of a frustrated walker who hopped over the bridge railing to shimmy precariously sideways over the San Francisco Bay, plus time-lapse photos taken from high on the span that document the mounting chaos. I searched further in the archive to get the full story. Bridge organizers had reason to anticipate massive crowds would show up. More than 200,000 people arrived for the bridge's opening in 1937, when the Bay Area population was one third its 1987 size. A similar fiasco occurred in 1982 at the first 49ers Super Bowl victory parade, when City Hall planned for 25,000 fans, and half a million flooded Market Street. But when the Golden Gate Bridge Authority suggested closing the bridge for its 50th birthday, Marin County drivers were furious. A compromise was reached for the bridge walk to last just three hours and finish at 9:30 a.m., with a fireworks show later. Organizers said they expected just 50,000 attendees. They were off by a factor of more than 15. A growing crowd on the city side burst through the barricades at 5:45 a.m., and found another tidal wave of humanity coming from the opposite direction. 'For about 45 minutes it was fun,' the Chronicle reported. 'Then, at 6:10 a.m., a human wall from Marin hit a human wall from San Francisco and the Great Golden Gate Bridge Walk turned into the Great Golden Gate Gridlock.' Chronicle photos show a chaotic scene, including a baby in a stroller being passed above the throng like a crowd surfer at a punk rock show. In an era before texting and widespread cellular phone use, thousands were separated and lost. Walkers on the sidewalks shivered in 35-mile-per-hour winds, while those in the center shed clothes in the sweltering body heat. My mother's strongest memory was of a high school band from Pennsylvania who came to perform, but quickly pivoted to survival mode. 'Those kids in the band were fainting,' she said. 'They were passing them hand over hand over the crowd.' The Chronicle's Steve Rubenstein reported from a small 'lost and found' shack where Mayor Dianne Feinstein was helping children looking for their parents. 'I started out with four children,' bridge walker Sue Madrid said, as she approached the lost and found. 'Now I have one.' 'Officials lost count of the lost,' Rubenstein wrote. Miraculously, the Chronicle reported the next day that no one was seriously hurt or killed. The walk's organizers apologized and admitted the bridge should have been opened to pedestrians all day with a clearer flow of traffic. Days after the event, photos emerged showing the roadway flattened and slightly twisted under the mass of humanity, which led to some alarmist media reports. Engineers then and now insist there was no danger. ('There is no way to put enough people on that bridge to cause any structural failure,' bridge engineer Dan Mohn said at the time. 'You'd have to stick them three high and even that wouldn't do it.') But the day is still remembered by those who were on the shaking bridge as a near-catastrophe and a good time. While some were stuck at downtown BART stations — a frustrated crowd of 5,000 waited at the Embarcadero for buses that never arrived — there was a spirited we're-all-in-this-together mood at the bridge. Many brought bottles of champagne and shared with neighbors. 'I love this bridge,' Ollie Oliviera told the Chronicle, pulling out a bottle of cognac. 'It kept me sane in my younger years. I used to walk across the bridge to keep it together.' And my mother reports that my grandmother Louise Leal, a Mexican immigrant who loved San Francisco and walked the bridge on opening day in 1937, had the time of her life. My mother said she was also grateful … that she brought my grandmother's heart medication.
Boston Globe
21-06-2025
- Boston Globe
Nathan Silver, who chronicled a vanished New York, dies at 89
'By 1963, it seemed urgent to make some sort of plea for architectural preservation in New York City,' he wrote. 'It had been announced that Pennsylvania Station would be razed, a final solution seemed likely for the 39th Street Metropolitan Opera' -- it was destroyed in 1967 -- 'and the commercial buildings of Worth Street were being pounded into landfill for a parking lot.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up He added, 'While cities must adapt if they are to remain responsive to the needs and wishes of their inhabitants, they need not change in a heedless and suicidal fashion.' Advertisement He found images in archives of 'first-rate architecture' that no longer existed, including a post office near City Hall; Madison Square Garden, at Madison Avenue and 26th Street; art collector Richard Canfield's gambling house, on 44th Street near Fifth Avenue; the 47-story Singer Tower, at Broadway and Liberty Street; the Produce Exchange, at Beaver Street and Bowling Green; and the Ziegfeld Theater, at 54th Street and Sixth Avenue. Advertisement A haunting photo of the interior of Penn Station adorns the book's cover. 'The book was a cri de coeur about the losses the city was experiencing,' Anthony C. Wood, the founder of the nonprofit New York Preservation Archive Project, said in an interview. 'It gave comfort to those trying to push back against that, and provided solace to people who cared about preservation and opened the eyes of a wider public.' The city passed the landmarks preservation law in 1965. But, Wood said, 'Out of the gate, it was tentatively administered; it wasn't like once the law passed, preservation was unleashed.' Roberta Brandes Gratz, a journalist who was a member of the Landmarks Preservation Commission from 2003 to 2010, wrote in an email that Silver's book 'added pressure on the relatively new Landmarks Commission to act.' By the time the book was published, Silver had left for Britain to teach architecture at the University of Cambridge. He remained in Britain for the rest of his career. 'Lost New York,' which Silver said sold more than 100,000 copies, was a finalist for the National Book Award in history and biography in 1968. Silver was also a Guggenheim fellow in architecture, planning and design that year. Silver expanded and updated his book in 2000 to include his pantheon of preservation villains: A.J. Greenough, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, 'who wantonly engineered' Penn Station's destruction; Anthony A. Bliss, who took the Metropolitan Opera from 39th Street and Broadway to its new home at Lincoln Center in 1966, which 'ensured smithereens for the old building'; and Robert Moses, New York's midcentury planning czar, 'for his recurrent terminations of any place he autonomously decided upon.' Advertisement In 2014, when Silver made a rare trip to New York City, David Dunlap of The New York Times wrote that Silver believed landmarks 'were vessels of human history,' adding, 'How a building was used, and by whom, were almost as important to him as what the structure looked like.' Nathan Silver was born on March 11, 1936, in Manhattan and grew up in the borough's Inwood section and in the Bronx. His father, Isaac, taught mechanical drawing at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan and was also an architect. His mother, Libby (Nachimowsky) Silver, taught Hebrew school when her three children were young, then became a public-school teacher. Silver, a fan of opera and theater, originally wanted to be a set designer. But he could not find an academic program in that specialty, so he chose to study architecture -- first at the Cooper Union, where he earned a certificate in 1955, and then at Columbia University, graduating in 1958 with a bachelor's degree. After traveling through Europe on a fellowship, he worked at the architecture firm Kramer & Kramer, where he helped design a new location for the Argosy Book Store in Manhattan in 1963. Janet Malcolm of The New Yorker wrote in 2014 that the store had been transformed 'into a room of great charm, a vision of cultivation and gentility as filtered through a mid-20th-century aesthetic.' In 1961, he started teaching at Columbia, where he mounted the exhibition that would become 'Lost New York.' 'He was surprised by the number and quality of buildings that had been torn down and pretty much forgotten,' his brother said. Advertisement He began lecturing at Cambridge in 1965 and earned a master's degree there a year later. He was a partner in a large architectural firm and also ran his own practice; headed the architecture department at the University of East London; edited the newsletter of the Westminster Society, a conservation advocacy group in London; and was the architecture critic of The New Statesman magazine. He also wrote a book about the Pompidou Center in Paris, and another, about improvisation in architecture and other fields, with his fellow architect Charles Jencks. And he designed renovations to the Seven Stars, a 17th-century pub in London owned by his wife, Roxy Beaujolais. In addition to his brother, she survives him, as do a daughter, Liberty Silver, and a son, Gabriel Silver, from his marriage to Helen McNeil-Ashton, which ended in divorce; and four grandchildren. His first marriage, to Caroline Green, also ended in divorce. ( This article originally appeared in
