(MCT) — MILWAUKEE — Sitting in his 27th-floor corner office in the Chicago Civic Opera Building, which rises like a canyon wall from the edge of the Chicago River, David Ullrich says he is convinced a man-made continental divide can be built in the middle of the nation’s third largest city.

“If 110 years ago, from an engineering and financing standpoint, we could dig this huge canal and reverse (the river), 110 years later, with all the advances in technology, we certainly could undo what we have done,” says the 64-year-old former deputy regional administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.