Epstein’s River Point Project Wins Green Ribbon Award

Friends of the Chicago River announced winners of its Chicago River Blue Awards at the 13th annual Big Fish Ball Tuesday evening. Held at the Westin Chicago River North, the awards recognized the work of professionals in the planning, design and building industries who are transforming the Chicago River through creative projects that benefit people, water and wildlife.

Epstein is honored to have received the Green Ribbon Award for our River Point project!

We are very pleased to bestow this award on your project which embodies the principles put forth in Chicago River Blue, Friends said of River Point. Projects like yours set a new standard for river-sensitive planning and development and contribute to the ongoing transformation of this amazing natural, recreational and economic resource.

The Green Ribbon Award recognizes projects that exhibit a high level of river-sensitive design and consideration.

Epstein provided civil engineering services for River Point, a 52-story 1,050,000-square-foot office building located along the Chicago River. River Point also includes a 1.5 acre plaza that has been dedicated to the City of Chicago as a public park. The park was built on a platform that spans over the Metra and Amtrak rail lines on a site bordered by the river and Lake and Canal streets.

Our responsibilities included: designing the sanitary sewer connections to the City of Chicago public sewer; dual water main services for the building domestic water and fire protection, as well as a separate water service to serve the private fire hydrant system for the railroad tunnel under the plaza; and storm sewer routing to the Chicago River and the City of Chicago Combined Sewer Overflow outfall culvert.

The storm sewer design also included the use of hydrodynamic separators for both the plaza and the tower to remove a minimum of 80 percent suspended solids prior to the water discharging to the river.

Additionally, River Points river walk utilizes a bio-filtration system using landscaped areas to filter stormwater that is detained in an underground aggregate detention system before being discharged into the river.

We took contaminated stormwater runoff from a gravel parking lot and rail yard and are now returning it back to the Chicago River at a much higher quality, suitable for aquatic habitat and recreation, said Dave Hilty, Epsteins Project Manager of Civil Engineering. This project is just one of many positive stewardship endeavors now happening along Chicagos river system.

In addition to Dave, the following employees attended the ball on Epstein's behalf: Greg Osborne, Steve Marx, Randy Buescher, Gail Pollard, Deion DeBose, Jen Pisano and Tim Gustafson.

The Big Fish Ball is Friends largest fundraising event, year after year bringing together 500 leaders and young professionals from the Chicago community to the river with an opportunity to engage in river wildlife.

The Epstein crew certainly took part in, and enjoyed, engaging with the animals! There was a bat, red-tail hawk, owl, skunk, Burmese python and a wolf cub on hand.

Epstein was pleased to be a sponsor of this years event.