By: Eric Sharp  

The Environmental Protection Agency wants to make ships that enter the Great lakes kill potential invasive species by treating ballast water under the standard set by the International Maritime Organization.  What the EPA press release fails to mention is that the IMO standard is largely window dressing written by the international shipping industry that might slow but won’t stop the introduction of invasives to the lakes and other American waters.  The agency also fails to mention bills in U.S. Congress that would prevent the EPA and states from passing and enforcing ballast treatment rules.  Nor does the EPA mention that it opposes immediately closing the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to protect the lakes from imminent invasion by two species of Asian carp that represent a potential environmental disaster.

 William Creal, head of the water resources division for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment, says, “We looked at the same (ballast water) data the EPA did. To be effective in controlling the invasion rate the standard would have to be 100 times stricter than the IMO standard.”  As for Asian carp, Patty Birkholz, director of the Michigan Office of the Great Lakes, says it will cost at least $8 million a year to run electric barriers in the Chicago Canal that may not work. That’s in addition to about $200 million already spent on research, construction and emergency response measures that include poisoning invasion sites with rotenone.  “Look how much money we’re throwing at this. We’re looking at at least $8 million a year, forever. When does permanent separation of the Chicago canal and Lake Michigan become less costly?,” Birkholz asks.

 The EPA’s response is to have the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers continue studies that began a decade ago, haven’t produced a proven solution and won’t be finished until 2015.  Birkholz says, “There’s no reason why the Corps needs to spend three more years studying this. The Corps knows what needs to be done. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.”   

 Over the last 20 years governments and businesses in the Great Lakes region have spent more than $2.5 billion cleaning up after zebra mussels alone and at least another $150 million trying to keep Asian carp out. And if Asian carp become established in the lakes they would threaten sport and commercial fisheries valued at over $4 billion annually.  Yet a study by economist Dr. John Taylor found that the annual cost to the regional economy from closing the Great Lakes to salt water shipping, the best way to block most invasive species, would be about $55 million.  Other studies have estimated that sealing off the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to keep Asian carp from reaching Lake Michigan would cost the economy another $25-$50 million a year

 Even if the proposed ballast water treatment for saltwater ships was 100 percent effective there’s evidence it wouldn’t stop continued invasions.  Ballast water is inside the ships. Dr. David Lodge from the University of Notre Dame decided to take a look at the outside of one. Growing on the hull were colonies of plants and invertebrates that harbored hundreds of small creatures and bacteria.

            Someone else interested in potential harm from very small invaders is Dr. Jeffrey Ram, a professor of physiology at Wayne State University in Detroit . He is trying to determine how effective our systems are at detecting invasive species and how soon we can spot them after they arrive.  “It’s a tough trip for these organisms to make. Even if they reach the lakes, the odds are against them. But when you match that against many opportunities for organisms to come in, there are going to be a few that make it,” Ram says.  He adds that zebra mussels probably reached the Great Lakes in ballast, “but some people suggest they could have been attached to an anchor. And genetic testing suggests that there wasn’t just one introduction of zebra mussels but several over a period of years.”

 Ram is looking for tiny invasives in western Lake Erie and the Port of Toledo, second only to Duluth-Superior Harbor on the Minnesota-Wisconsin border for the amount of ballast water dumped by seagoing vessels.  “The only other place where multi-gear oversampling has been done is in Duluth-Superior. When they examined sediments and fish to learn how effective the techniques were and if these methods would work, they found several species that had never been reported before,” he says.  

Creal says discoveries like that are why the EPA should mandate even stricter ballast control rules, as well as order the closure of the Chicago canal. But those actions are anathema for some members of Congress and the Obama administration, who have been influenced (not to say bought off) by companies that would see their costs increase.  And Obama’s home base, the City of Chicago, could no longer send human manure south to the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. Instead, it would have to spend billions to remediate a hopelessly antiquated sewage treatment system.

 The federal government’s dirty fingerprints have been detectable for decades in the Asian carp debacle. These fish were imported by Mississippi and Arkansas fish farmers over 40 years ago to eat algae and disease-harboring snails in their ponds.  The fish farms were mostly along the Mississippi River, and carp escaped into the river during massive floods in the 1970s. With an ideal habitat and few predators or diseases they easily outcompeted native species and spread through much of the Mississippi-Missouri-Illinois watersheds.  A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist named Jerry Rasmussen, whose job was to monitor the Mississippi basin, said publicly that the fish farmers should pay for the damage.  The farmers ran to their friends in Congress and President Bill Clinton’s Interior Department, and Rasmussen’s job was eliminated. There was so much anger from environmental groups that eventually he was re-instated, but his experience is a reminder that while Democratic presidents perform marginally better on environmental issues, that’s only when it’s in their interest to do so.  

 About 160 exotic species have been identified in the Great Lakes, ranging from unwanted water fleas the size of a grain of rice to introduced Pacific salmon that exceed 30 pounds. Before the 1950s there were only a handful, but in 1958 the floodgates opened with the completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway, a 2,500-mile system of dredged channels, locks and canals stretching from the Gulf of St. Lawrence on the Atlantic Ocean to Duluth.  The Seaway was boosted as a vital national security measure during the cold war. But it was built mostly to benefit Canada ’s internal shipping network and some Great Lakes steel manufacturers and a company that supplied them with iron ore.

 When the Seaway project was proposed under Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt it was labeled “a socialist ditch” by George Humphrey, later President Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of the treasury. Humphrey converted to the Seaway’s biggest booster after he became a partner in a firm that discovered iron ore deposits in Newfoundland and needed a cheaper way to get it to Great Lakes steel mills.  Initial plans called for much bigger locks on the Seaway, but congressmen from U.S. East Coast ports used their clout to insure that the locks would be too small for the big container ships that were revolutionizing the industry.  Instead of an inland waterway that would have made places like Detroit, Cleveland and Toronto major international ports to rival existing facilities on the Atlantic seaboard, we built an undersized system that was obsolete before it was begun.  Initially most of the shipping came from just a few places in North America. But with the fall of the Soviet Union saltwater shipping increased dramatically, and by the 1990s ships from Baltic ports were hauling steel and manufactured goods in and grain and other bulk cargo out.

 Not all exotics came by accident. Steelhead trout and Pacific salmon were planted in the Upper Lakes starting in the 1870s, but the Pacific salmon didn’t make it until Michigan began massive stocking in 1966, the start of a regional sport fishery now estimated to be worth more than $4 billion a year.  Salmon were introduced to control the alewives, whose population in the 1950s had exploded to the point where millions died each summer and washed up on beaches in stinking windrows two feet high and 100 yards long.  By 2006 the wonderful salmon fishing in Lake Huron collapsed because invasive zebra mussels wiped out the bottom of the food chain, and alewives that fed the salmon disappeared. Ironically, some anglers today want the DNRE to try to increase Lake Huron’s alewife population to restore the salmon.

 I’ve been learning and writing about exotic species in the Great Lakes since 1969, when I was a cub reporter for the Associated Press in Buffalo, N.Y., and spent three days on Lake Erie with scientists who were trying to figure out why a walleye species called the blue pike had disappeared.  My opinion after four decades of reporting on these subjects is that Asian carp probably have reached Lake Michigan already and all we can do is hope they can’t survive and reproduce.  And I’m more convinced than ever that the only sensible way to minimize further invasions, and the one that makes the most economic sense, is to seal the lakes off by closing the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal with a solid dam and to ban saltwater ships from ascending above the tidal region of the St. Lawrence River near Montreal. 

 Only idiots or politicians could continue to play invasives roulette with the world’s biggest and most valuable freshwater ecosystem.

 Order his book “Fishing Michigan” for $15.95 at www.freep.com/bookstore or by calling 800-245-5082.

[Return to Newsletter Index]