Through a dim hallway, past a huge chamber filled with chugging generators and wheezing boilers, the jewel in Dominican University’s green crown sits quietly in a dank antechamber dappled with sunlight. It’s an ancient concrete water cistern, and for more than 90 years it has studiously collected rainwater runoff from nearby buildings. Overlooked and forgotten for decades in the basement of one of the oldest buildings on campus, the old reservoir is now the centerpiece of the River Forest-based university’s green initiative.
 
The story of how the ancient cistern was put back into use at Dominican is a combination of fortuitous discovery and sensible sustainability.

“We knew [the cistern] was there, we knew it collected rainwater off all these buildings here, but it had been dormant for years,” said Dan Bulow, director of building and grounds for the university.

Exactly where the cistern came from is a bit of an enigma. The reservoir, which Bulow estimated to hold about 60,000 gallons of water, is located beneath the university’s East Science building—but it doesn’t appear on any archival blueprints of the original university.

For many years, Dominican staff wasn’t entirely sure what to do with the rainwater collected by the cistern. Most of the time, they pumped it out into River Forest’s sewer system to avoid flooding East Science’s basement. But in 2004 when Dominican set out to construct Parmer Hall, its new, high-tech science facility, the university’s staff decided to add a well so the university’s daily irrigation needs—some 30,000 gallons of water—could be quenched using groundwater instead of River Forest’s potable drinking water, as had been the case for many years.

“We were watering the whole campus and especially the soccer field,” said Bulow. “It was millions of gallons of water. We thought, let’s get a well in here so we can use groundwater to do this.”

The new well made good sense in conjunction with Parmer Hall, which architecture firm Holabird & Root according to green building principles. The building is situated to maximize its use of natural light, and it contains recycled material from the university’s previous science building. Inside, overhead lighting is controlled by motion sensors, which switches off lights if the room is vacant.

Even better, Bulow realized the university could use the old cistern to provide extra water for the well setup. The whole team was excited to find a use for the long-abandoned basin, and they assembled a group to clean out the ancient concrete grotto.

That’s when they discovered just how big Dominican University’s cistern truly was.

“They discovered all this debris that had fallen down there over the years,” Bulow said. The three-day cleaning project turned into a two-week effort, and the team was shocked at the size of the mystery cistern.

Today, the immense reservoir provides all of Dominican University’s sprinkling needs. It’s recharged frequently by rain runoff from nearby buildings. The engineering team recently hooked the cistern into Parmer Hall’s mechanical system, allowing the basin to provide water for some of the science building’s water-hogging processes—such as the cooling tower, which can use as much as 900 gallons of water an hour.

Working together, the new well and the old cistern save about 4 million to 6 million gallons of water per year, greatly reducing River Forest’s overall water usage, according to the university.

This fall, the final part of the water-recycling network will be put into place: a valve that will capture water pumped out of the basement of Dominican’s newest dormitory, Centennial Hall, which was built atop an underground river that feeds into the Des Plaines River. The water, which had been discharged into the sewer system at a rate of about 30 gallons per minute, will now go to help re-charge the cistern.

“It’s just a matter of sitting down and talking with the contractor,” said Bulow. “That will probably [provide] enough water to where we won’t have to use the well.”

None of this matters to the cistern itself, of course, which burbles quietly as water flows steadily into its thick concrete basin. It’s carrying out its decades-old mission. The only difference is that Dominican University, imbued with a renewed sense of sustainability in the 21st century, has fallen back in step with this ancient—but still quite functional—relic of a bygone era.

—By Patrick W. Rollens | Tribocal.com reporter

—Photos by Kristin Peterson, Dominican University