Mayor Lori Lightfoot joined Ald. Michael Rodriguez (22nd) and different town officers Sunday to specific their frustration with Hilco Redevelopment Partners’ dealing with of Saturday’s implosion of a smokestack on the former Crawford Power Generating Station in Little Village.
“My team has already begun the process of working with the Little Village community to remediate the situation, including conducting a thorough review of what took place and strengthening our protocols to ensure incidents like this never happen again,” Lightfoot stated.
On Saturday morning, throughout the most recent degree of the Crawford Power Generating Station demolition, an implosion despatched clouds of mud debris cascading throughout the Southwest Side group.
Once she was once made acutely aware of what occur, the mayor stated she took a number of movements to “remediate the impact of Saturday’s event” and save you identical occasions someday, together with issuing a stop-work order, starting up investigations into the town’s regulatory approval procedure and ordering Hilco to behavior a complete clean-up and elimination of mud within the surrounding group.
“The fear and anxiety that residents feel about COVID-19 have only been exacerbated with this situation,” Rodriguez stated.
Before Saturday’s demolition, the alderman stated Hilco informed him it might ensure no mud would depart the website online and stated it might mail close by citizens realize of the demolition forward of time; it didn’t, he stated.
“At this point, I wish I had communicated it to residents, and I did not. And for that I am very sorry,” Rodriguez stated.
While Hilco did obtain the correct allowing to behavior the implosion, the promised precautions taken via the corporate weren’t sufficient to comprise the unfold of mud, the mayor stated.
“They were supposed to have huge water cannons on site to spray down the smoke stack before, during and after,” Lightfoot stated. “The videos I’ve seen don’t suggest that there were any of these high-powered water cannons on site that would contain the dust.”
Hilco has been issued a quotation from the town that can lead to a superb, and the Chicago Department of Public Health might be offering citizens within the rapid space with mask.
“Our health investigators were on the scene to monitor an approved procedure, for which we were assured the impact to the community would be minimal,” stated Dr. Allison Arwady, the town’s public well being commissioner.
While the incident is below assessment, the Chicago Department of Buildings has put a quit to all non-emergency demolitions during the town for the remainder of the week, pending a assessment of same old procedures for the allowing and tracking of the implosion procedure.
“What happened yesterday was utterly unacceptable, and the city of Chicago will never hesitate to enforce its environmental safety regulations to the fullest extent possible when encountering violations like these, big or small,” Lightfoot stated.
In a observation issued past due Sunday afternoon, Hilco Redevelopment Partners CEO Robert Perez stated, “We are working cooperatively with the City of Chicago to review yesterday’s demolition event undertaken by our contractor. We are sensitive to the concerns of the community, and we will continue to work in full cooperation.”
Ald. Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez (33rd) is amongst a bunch of aldermen who in an e-mail observation Sunday known as for a probe of the incident via the town’s Inspector General. “The main job of the government during this pandemic is to protect the health of our communities and it failed,” Rodriguez-Sanchez stated. “People of color continue to be at risk of illness and death and that is unconscionable.”
The different aldermen searching for the investigation are Ald. Daniel LaSpata (1st), Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th) and Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th), in line with a observation from Sigcho-Lopez’s place of work.
Community leaders are hard solutions too.
“This tragic event was entirely avoidable,” stated…