Sludge Watch ==> Chicago - Ex-Sanitary Chief and the "Black Box" Sludge Project

[Maureen Reilly]

Ex-sanitary chief comes full circle
Back as contractor 30 years later, 'it's like he'd never left'
By David Jackson | Tribune staff reporter
September 20, 2007


These days, Bart Lynam navigates the Chicago sanitary district's corridors 
as a big-ticket contractor. Thirty years ago, he ran the place.

"The guy comes back here, it's like he'd never left," said Richard Lanyon, 
the billion-dollar-a-year water protection agency's current general 
superintendent. "He walks around and remembers things no one else 
remembers."

A brash and charming West Side native, Lynam joined what is now called the 
Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago as a 20-year-old 
junior civil engineer in 1959 and quickly rose to become its wunderkind 
general superintendent in 1973.



His meteoric career, though, also was marked by scandals that shaped 
planning for today's Black Box sludge pelletizing plant.

Lynam oversaw a precursor experiment -- a futuristic sludge-cooker called 
the Zimpro plant -- that was shuttered in 1970 amid production shortfalls, 
suburban odor complaints and accidents that killed four workers.

And he left office in 1978 after a federal jury found him innocent of taking 
part in a high-profile contract-bribery scheme. Five other men were 
convicted as his administration's signature sludge-disposal contract 
unraveled.

Lynam declined an interview request and in a letter to the Tribune said 
those 1970s headlines had no bearing on his company's current $217 million 
contract.

"[I am] puzzled and, frankly, concerned about your interest in me and in 
issues and projects that date back more than three decades," Lynam wrote. "I 
cannot possibly know how these matters relate to the district's desire to 
establish what will be the nation's most modern, environmentally beneficial 
biosolids pelletizer plant."

He added: "I was completely vindicated, and the allegations brought by the 
prosecutor were all discredited."

When Lynam joined the district in 1959, the agency was expanding Stickney's 
open-air lagoons to divert sewage from the lake.

Sludge-hauling and landfill costs were rocketing up, and that year 19 
suburbs filed lawsuits and legislative petitions against Stickney's 
foul-smelling lagoons.

The district responded by giving a no-bid $11.9 million contract to a 
division of Sterling Drugs, the giant pharmaceutical company that marketed 
Bayer Aspirin and Phillips' Milk of Magnesia.

Sterling's Zimpro plant featured four 70-foot-tall ovens with tops shaped 
like bullet tips. It used a different technology than today's Black Box, but 
the aim was similar: Intense heat and pressurized air would render sewage 
into distilled water and antiseptic ash.

Still, noxious fumes leaked from Zimpro's missile-like silos. The plant 
never lived up to its 300-ton-per-day promise: Its machinery broke down and 
disrupted Stickney's entire treatment process, district memos show. As 
modifications were added, its cost nearly doubled, and a Cook County grand 
jury began probing contract-padding allegations.

Then in January 1970, two workers collapsed from poisonous fumes and died 
while scrubbing Zimpro's massive collection trays.

As the district's chief of maintenance and operations, Lynam said in his 
recent Tribune letter, he immediately directed "a number of changes to the 
plant to prevent a recurrence" of the tragedy.

Despite those efforts, two more workers died nine months later, and the 
ambitious plant was dismantled.

Subsequent design modification has led to the use of the Zimpro technology 
in more than 50 sewage treatment facilities around the world, and today the 
patented method is owned by an arm of Veolia, Lynam's current partner in 
Chicago's Black Box pelletizer project.

In October 1978, about a year after his acquittal in the federal bribery 
case, Lynam created a private consulting firm, Bart T. Lynam & Associates 
Inc. Then he stepped down, moved to Seattle and opened the second chapter of 
his career as a sewage treatment entrepreneur.

Today, that company reaps profits from the nearly finished Black Box 
project.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-black_box_sidesep20,1,6842491.story?ctrack=3&cset=true