You have to admit that we`re different. In other parts of the country, they have serious earthquakes, mudslides, forest fires, and hurricanes. Even our suburbs have genuine floods when rivers and creeks overflow their banks.
Here in the city we have a river that springs a leak. Has that happened in any other city, a leaky river? It may be a first.
It was so new that most of us didn`t know what to make of it when word first came in.
I had just left the house and turned on the car radio and heard Bob Collins trying to make sense out of what a WGN reporter was saying. I don`t have the exact quotes, but it was something like this:
”Uh, it`s not that serious. You see, the real problem is that there`s a lot of fish in the water. This water is coming out of the river, see, and there are fish in it. And the fish are getting into the basements.
”And these fish, you see the firemen have these pumps and with the smaller pumps, the fish get stuck in the pumps. There are bigger pumps, but with the smaller ones, the fish clog up the pumps.”
He went into a long, rambling attempt to explain how the different-sized firemen`s pumps worked, and what a nuisance it could be when fish clog them up.
To Collins` credit, he sensed that there was more to the story than fish getting stuck in a pump, and, in exasperation, he finally said: ”Take a break, take a break.”
By the time I got to my office, a call came from a friend who works in the suburbs. He said: ”What`s going on down there? I heard they`re evacuating buildings. Are you being evacuated?”
”Yes,” I said, ”but I can`t get out because the water is already up to the third-floor ceiling and I`m on the fourth floor. So I might have to climb down a rope ladder.”
”Holy smoke,” he yelled. ”You can`t get out?”
As kindly as I could, I said: ”Idiot. Don`t you think we would have the sense to open the doors and let it run out?”
But that showed that people don`t quite know what to make of a leaking river.
And there was evidence of this in Mayor Daley`s obviously frayed nerves and loss of composure.
Imagine that you are the mayor of one of the great cities of the world and it`s a Monday morning and you are about to go about your mayoral duties when one of your aides rushes in and says: ”Mister Mayor, the river has sprung a big leak.”
What do you say to that? You say, ”What?” Or, ”What the hey?”
And the aide says: ”Yes, Mister Mayor, and the leak is flooding the basement of City Hall and Marshall Field`s and who knows what else.”
What do you say to that? Probably, ”What the foo?”
We expect our leaders to be ready for anything, and to respond with poise and efficiency. But would you know what to do with a leaking river?
So it shouldn`t have been surprising that Daley did one of his flip-out routines during an early afternoon press briefing when a reporter tried to ask him whose fault it was that the river sprung a leak.
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Daley had to have anticipated the question, since this is Chicago, and Chicagoans always assume that whenever something bad happens, it`s somebody`s fault. And the press in Chicago asks whose fault something is even before they know what happened.
If Daley hadn`t started blustering in his finest chip-off-the-old-block manner, the questioning might have gone like this:
”Mister Mayor, is it true that someone from the Department of Streets and Sanitation left a faucet open?”
”Yes, Mister Mayor, what about reports that some of your river-leak inspectors saw water dripping but didn`t do anything except put a pot on the floor to catch it?”
So the mayor yelled. I`m not sure what it was he yelled, but it worked. Nobody asked him if it was true that somebody had driven a river piling so deep that our river was now leaking into China.
Because a leaking river is so rare, I walked over to the bridge to see how they were going about sealing the leak. When I got there, they seemed to be throwing something in the water.
I asked a fellow sidewalk gawker: ”Any idea what they`re doing?”
”They`re throwing sandbags in there,” he said. ”Before, they were throwing rocks. I think they`re nuts.”
I had to agree, although I wasn`t sure how you go about fixing a leak in a river. But throwing rocks and sand on it didn`t seem the thing to do. I mean, in this high-tech age, you would expect to see some huge machine lowering a giant bathtub plug.
But, amazingly, it did work. Some rocks, sandbags, and quickie concrete, and the leak was fixed by about 5 p.m. I don`t know what the record is for patching a leaking river, but this should be submitted to the Guinness Book of World Records.
It`s even more amazing if you have ever seen a city crew spend days fixing a leaking water pipe under a street, or dodged the same giant pothole for weeks, or stared at the same abandoned car for months. One of the early builders of this city said: ”Make no small plans.” Now we can say: ”Fix no small leaks.”
So now the leak is patched and we can watch in fascination as they drill a giant hole through the flooded old tunnels to the even deeper new tunnels so the water can drain.
Maybe they will use a giant plunger.