BLOOMINGTON - In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Bloomington's precarious water supply threatened to stunt the city's development. Pumped from a string of relatively shallow wells, the water was highly mineralized, making it one of the hardest and most unpalatable municipal supplies in the state.
The city also struggled to pump enough to meet industrial and residential demand, and water shortages, especially in the summer months, were not uncommon.
Although local government and business leaders long fretted over the city's water woes, it wasn't until a 1920 typhoid epidemic at the Chicago & Alton Railroad Shops that the issue became one of life and death. The outbreak lent much-needed urgency to solve the costly and technically difficult problem of establishing a safe, long-term supply. In the end, the answer was the creation (in 1929-1930) of Lake Bloomington, a reservoir that continues today to slake the city's thirst.
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Typhoid is often contracted when sewage contaminates drinking water. For decades, typhoid was a frequent and often deadly visitor to Bloomington, though the early 1920 outbreak was likely the largest in city history.
From January through March 1920, tainted water sickened about 800 C&A workers, according to an estimate by the Illinois Department of Public Health. Most suffered from serious (though nonfatal) intestinal ailments, while a small percentage came down with full-blown typhoid. In the end, the three-month epidemic left 24 dead.
Beginning in the post-Civil War years, the west side C&A Shops were the city's largest employer. At the time of the outbreak there were some 1,200 men building and repairing steam locomotives and rolling stock. The sprawling facility included a roundhouse, locomotive repair shop, foundry, paint shop, wheel and axle shop, powerhouse, offices and rail yards.
Bloomington had only recently established the position of health director, and it was readily apparent that Dr. J.M. Furstman had neither the staff nor budget to tackle an outbreak of this magnitude. Early on, some thought the "Alton sick" (as it was called) might be influenza.
However, an increasingly large number of shop workers bedridden with severe diarrhea caught the notice of Furstman and he began investigating around Feb. 10. At the time, The Daily Bulletin newspaper reported that 300 C&A employees were "off duty," either sick or caring for sick family members. Even at this early point, city officials and the local press knew to suspect polluted drinking water as the source of the problem.
The state health department arrived at the C&A Shops around Feb. 17, quickly realizing the widespread incidence of diarrhea pointed to a looming typhoid epidemic. Many workers were experiencing intermittent or acute dysentery, vomiting and fevers as high as 104 degrees.
The state conducted two postmortem examinations in early March and confirmed the existence of typhoid. By the end of the month, 22 C&A employees were dead, with 15 attributed to typhoid and the other 7 influenza or pneumonia, though with the latter group it's likely bad water was a "contributory cause" of death.
To supplement the often-inadequate flow of city water, the C&A relied on what was called the "industrial" supply, pumped directly from nearby Sugar Creek or pulled from wells south of the Shops. In either case, this water was not fit for human consumption, and instead was used for things like toilets, blacksmith slack tubs and locomotive boilers.
State investigators eventually determined that the source of the outbreak was a cross-connection (what was called an "interconnection") between one set of pipes carrying city water and another carrying the industrial supply. The culprit was a leaky 4-inch valve that was supposed to separate the good water from the bad.
Even after identifying the source, C&A management dragged its feet on correcting the problem. On March 15, infuriated C&A employees walked off the job. "Even when they found out what was wrong they wouldn't change it and we'd go out on a strike to make them take care of things," remembered J. Thornton Belz, a former shop foreman.
The strike ended March 24 after C&A President W.G. Bierd agreed to install new drinking water pipes separate from the industrial supply, though he balked at the demand to sack two C&A officials who labor leaders believed were most culpable in the epidemic.
