Just before Christmas Michigan filed suit against the Army Corps of Engineers and the State of Illinois to stop the advance of Asian carp into Lake Michigan and to re-open a supreme court decree from the 1920′s allowing Chicago to divert billions of gallons from Lake Michigan Daily, the only major, permitted withdrawal of water from the Great Lakes watershed. The water Chicago uses then flows down the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal (CSSC) to the Illinois River, the Mississippi, and finally the Gulf of Mexico. The diversion of this amount of water lowers the Lake Michigan / Lake Huron systems level by 3″. But with a combined surface area of 117,400 square kilometers that equals over nine cubic kilometers, or about 2,403,965,676,459 gallons. Now there’s a number even a congressman can see as significant.
The ultimate goal of the lawsuit, and of several regional and national environmental groups, is the closing of the CSSC and re-vamping of Chicago’s water treatment system to return the treated water into the Lake Michigan watershed, thus ending the diversion. Sending their sewage down the Missippi made sense for Chicago and Lake Michigan in the 1900′s because the city generated an amazing amount of sewage that until the 1970′s was poorly treated at best. (Probably not so good for the route to the gulf, though.)
The story of the threat of the carp to the Lakes has run in papers from the LA Times to the Wall Street Journal and on all the news networks. The only people downplaying the risk are the Corps and some elected officials from Illinois who don’t want to change the status quo. In the Washington Post’s December 22, 2009 edition they reported the following.
“They’ve been saying they have this under control, but they really don’t, and they’re going back to the status quo,” said John Sellek, a spokesman for the Michigan attorney general. “Their primary interest is keeping the waterway open, keeping that barge traffic on the canals. But Michigan’s interest is far larger than that. The Great Lakes fishing industry is worth $7 billion all by itself, let alone the hundreds of thousands of jobs that are connected to the Great Lakes.”
The Corps of Engineers and other federal, state and local authorities would probably be involved in closing the canals or other ecological separation measures, which could also be mandated through legislation.
If the canals were closed, barges could not travel from the Mississippi River into the Great Lakes. Freight would probably have to be transferred to trucks or rail cars and carried over land to Great Lakes ports. That would be a costly undertaking.
The national industry group for barge operators, which opposes closing the locks, says about a quarter-million truck trailers’ worth of goods make the passage annually on barges. But national environmental groups say the potential economic impact of Asian carp and other invasive species in the Great Lakes make freight reconfiguration worth the cost.
A 2008 study by the Alliance for the Great Lakes found that ecological separation could be economically beneficial and improve efficiency of freight transport.
The Natural Resource Defense Council has proposed that an environmentally sustainable intermodal freight facility be built to replace barge traffic into the lake, creating “green jobs” and curbing the invasive species risk.
“This way of moving goods may have made sense in the 19th century or 50 years ago, but are we still dependent on those same decisions?” asked Henry Henderson, NRDC Midwest program director. “We built a system without understanding the full implications. Now we have to design and build an engineered solution to a human-created problem.”
It’s time to bury the CSSC once and for all. We can’t afford the ecological cost of the invasion of Asian carp or the loss of so much water. And as I wrote in a previous post, Chicago is going to need more water soon, and they have established a precedent for out-of-basin diversion. We must keep Great Lakes water in the Great Lakes, with no exceptions.
