Every July, tens of thousands of speedboat-racing enthusiasts descend on DePue, Illinois, a tiny village that sits at the elbow of the Illinois River, a hundred miles southwest of Chicago. Around the edges of the town’s namesake lake, these fans set up to watch some two hundred competitors participate in one of the premier events in American outboard racing: the Lake DePue National Championship Boat Races. For four days, the normally quiet shorelines of Lake DePue are transformed into a party, a theme park, and a celebration of boating as sport. This year’s festivities began Wednesday.
“It’s amazing,” Eric Bryant, DePue’s village president, said recently. “We’ve got about a half-mile shoreline, and it’s packed eight, ten people deep.” Boat races have been held on the lake since the early nineteen-fifties, and the yearly championship generates much-needed funds for the town. “We’ve made anywhere from two thousand dollars on this race to forty thousand,” he said. “And, for a town of our size, that’s a lot.” The money helps support community activities DePue cannot otherwise afford, including Little League baseball, high-school athletics, Girl Scout events, and E.S.L. classes at the town library.
But a few thousand dollars a year can’t help DePue with its most pressing problem: the entire area, including the lake, is contaminated by toxic substances left over from the town’s days as a hub of chemical manufacturing. For decades, local factories smelted zinc, produced phosphate fertilizer, and manufactured lithopone paint pigment. The last plant was shut down in 1990, by which time DePue and its once pristine lake were awash in arsenic, lead, mercury, barium, copper, cadmium, zinc, and a host of other heavy-metal contaminants. In 1995, the corporate owners of the last of DePue’s plants signed an agreement with the state of Illinois promising to assess the damage and come up with a cleanup plan. Four years later, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared DePue one of the top priorities in its Superfund program, which is responsible for cleaning up the country’s most polluted sites. And yet, in the years since, little, if anything, has been done to decontaminate the town. The most visible evidence of DePue’s chemical legacy is a sixty-five-foot-high, seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-ton pile of toxic waste that residents refer to as “the pile of black death.” The heap runs alongside the town’s main road, Marquette Street, for a quarter of a mile, and looms over the area like a malignant, weed-infested tumor.
As for Lake DePue, it’s a soup of chemical pollutants. The silt is now so high in some areas that the town has had to pump in water from the Illinois River to meet the water-level standards for boat racing. Dredging is not a viable option; doing so only stirs up the pollutants. According to Bryant, the town attempted to dredge the racecourse in the early nineteen-eighties, but the agitated contaminants killed scores of carp and bass. These days, many boat racers avoid practicing in the lake.
Beverly Harrison, an eighty-year-old retired legal secretary, has lived in and around DePue for most of her life. Her father worked in the zinc plant, and died of a stroke at sixty. Three of her neighbors, she said, died of multiple sclerosis at young ages. She is healthy, but she remembers that, in the nineteen-sixties, when she was a young mother, she was wary of what came out of the smokestacks that towered over the village. “Something came out that was like droplets that would burn your face and run your nylons,” she said. “There was definitely something in the air.” Like many residents, Harrison stays in DePue because of her deep roots in town, but plummeting real-estate prices don’t help. “Anywhere else my house would probably be worth seventy thousand dollars,” she said. “I probably would be very lucky if I get twenty-five.”
Paul Bosnich III, a top-level speedboat competitor and a fourth-generation resident of DePue, lives a block from the lake. Unlike some racers, Bosnich has no problem practicing out on the lake in the weeks leading up to the championships. “They don’t want to deal with the contamination,” he said, of his competitors. “They’re afraid of what could happen. I mean, there’s always that ‘what if?’ ” Bosnich has been racing in the lake since he was eleven. He won his first championship race in DePue in 2007, at the age of twenty, and repeated the feat again at competitions in 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2014. This year, he will again race in the two most competitive events, the 250cc Runabout and the 350cc Runabout, where participants compete on flat-bottomed boats that can reach speeds close to a hundred miles per hour.
Bosnich’s father, Paul Bosnich II, helps organize the races. Speaking on the eve of the festivities, he said that conditions on the lake looked good—the water level was up. “We had a bunch of rain a week ago,” he said. “Mother Nature helped us a lot this year. We’re in fantastic shape.” When asked if he thought the contamination would discourage spectators from coming to DePue, he said no. “This is the granddaddy of boat racing,” he said. “It’s like Daytona. People just flock here.”
Arsenic, lead, and mercury notwithstanding, this week there will be traffic jams in DePue. Racers will be camping out in the village park, or crashing with friends and relatives. Spectators will arrange lawn chairs and blankets near the edge of the lake. Beverly Harrison will be there, along with some of her children and grandchildren, who have turned the boat races into an annual reunion. Eric Bryant will be there, too.
“I have a huge amount of love for this little village,” Bryant said. “Our lake is a natural harbor—could be a natural harbor—for a marina, floating docks, mooring for houseboats. That’s my dream.”
