(Frank McNamara / Flickr)
Rachel Havrelock, GCI faculty affiliate, director of UIC’s Freshwater Lab and associate professor of English, was a featured panelist on WTTW-TV’s “Chicago Tonight” for a discussion about the health and maintenance of Lake Michigan.
“I definitely, in a very physical way, have been experiencing some of the negative factors in an otherwise really grand body of water,” said Rachel Havrelock, founder and director of The Freshwater Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Havrelock, a lifetime Great Lakes swimmer, says she recently experienced eye irritation after taking a swim at Oak Street Beach. She suspects it was a reaction to the runoff from excessive rain.
“We just get (hit) these days with a lot of water, pounding us very quickly,” she said. “We’ve got some big, decent infrastructure at play, but at the same time, the way the development is going–I would say we’re not doing very well when it comes to thinking about how to hold, how to store, and how to filter our rain water so that it doesn’t cause damage to people’s homes and lives.”
