Originally published at: Chicago tricked residents by 'canceling' annual green river, then surprised them | Boing Boing
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I posted this in another thread, but it is appropriate here as well:
https://www.chicagonow.com/eye-on-chi/2012/03/march-17-1972-mike-royko/
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Chicago tricked residents
If you ask me that’s not the only thing Chicago is tricking the residents about. But I digress…
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Yeah, seems “hinky” to me.
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Can you spell the name of that green dye. It’s the one in day-glo yellow and in spirit levels. Yeah, it’s flourescein. Aww, you were so close!
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anyone know what’s IN the dye? i mean, it seems bad for the river and everything in it to be dying it any color at all.
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I mean, I’m not sure it could be worse than the base-line state of the Chicago river which was so polluted that they made it run backwards to avoid contaminating drinking water pulled from the lake.
According to wikipedia they changed from Fluorescein to a “vegetable based dye” that may be better?
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hmm, interesting. still sounds like it isn’t going to, you know, HELP the river any, either. such a weird city tradition.
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If they were trying to avoid crowds on St Patrick’s Day, then wouldn’t it have been better to keep the surprise until tomorrow?
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Yah, this can’t possibly be good for the waterways in the area and feels like a relic of the Manifest Destiny Man Over Nature way of thinking. Maybe time to retire this one.
Also that video is three clips looped over and over with slightly different cropping to stretch it to a minute. Grr.
Okay, I’m done being crabby now. Carry on.
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Fluorescein.
Appropriately enough for St. Patrick’s day, you’ve run afoul of Muphry’s Law.
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Back in the day we (EPA) used a red fluorescent dye to trace water flow from factories in Michigan and Ohio to confirm that their effluent was ending up in public waterways. (We didn’t always have to do this, only with factories that tried to hide the flow of their wastewater by channeling it through underground culverts.) The first time my partner and I (both rookies) were sent out on a case by ourselves, they gave us a bottled of the dye to use; it was tiny, less than an ounce, but we were told “a few drops” would be enough.
We were tracing the flow from a cement factory where we believed their effluent went underground, then into a little creek, then into the Black River (which empties into Lake Erie). We put a couple of drops into the water near the first underground entry, and ran to where we believed the water was emerging. Nothing. We decided that we hadn’t used enough dye, so returned to the first spot and used more. Still nothing. Finally, we ended up using half the bottle. At the emerging spot we finally saw a little red. Then more. Then much more, until it looked like a massacre had taken place upstream. Vegetation - and probably wildlife - at the creek’s edge was soon all bright red.
When we got back to the office we learned that local residents had been frantically phoning authorities about the bloodbath. We later learned that our survey ships out on Lake Erie had picked up the die on their instruments.
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Throwing dye in the water for, what really? Do the Irish, or anyone, need this? Seems short-sighted, mindless and pretty adolescent to me.
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This is just plain stupid
Safety
Topical, oral, and intravenous use of fluorescein can cause adverse reactions, including nausea, vomiting, hives, acute hypotension, anaphylaxis and related anaphylactoid reaction causing cardiac arrest and sudden death due to anaphylactic shock.
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Good news and bad news. As d_r notes, fluorescein (sounds like he was using eosin, but it’s the same stuff with one atom changed) is a recognised way of tracing watercourses. It is pretty inert and very visible at low concentrations. You can detect some isotopes at much lower concentrations, but it is pretty good for an ordinary chemical. If I was going to have to dye a river, that is what I would use. But I feel your instincts are correct: the attitude “I am Man, apex predator, and I will dye a whole river green with my techno-piss because it’s Saint Paddy’s Day, begorra, and even God ain’t gonna stop me” is unhealthy, even if we cannot prove this particular practice has consequences just yet.
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IIRC it started as a plumbing mistake, but was quickly embraced as part of the city’s 60s dominant ethnic identity. (That’s the thing Royko is poking fun at in my link upthread.)
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