Army Corps

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Breaking Up Is Hard To Do!

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

There is new legislation in Congress to push the Army Corps to engineer a permanent physical separation of the Mississippi River drainage and the Great Lakes at Chicago, reversing over 100 years of diversion of Lake Michigan water out of the Great Lakes watershed and closing the door on invasive species, like the Asian carp, trying to enter the Lakes. I’ve written on this several times, and a good general description of the problem is Carp Wars.

In an e-mail today Senator Debbie Stabenow writes:

Dear Brian,

I am writing to give you an update on my work to protect the Great Lakes from Asian carp. The recent discovery of an Asian carp in Lake Calumet, very close to Lake Michigan, should serve as a wake-up call to government agencies about the urgency of this situation.

Today, I introduced legislation to permanently prevent Asian carp and other invasive species from entering the Great Lakes. Congressman Dave Camp (R-Michigan) has introduced our bipartisan legislation in the House of Representatives as well. The Permanent Prevention of Asian Carp Act requires the Army Corps of Engineers to follow the recommendations of top experts in the field and expedite their study detailing the engineering options to permanently separate the Mississippi River from the Great Lakes.

In the Senate, my bill is co-sponsored by Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan), and other Great Lakes Senators. A permanent separation of the waterways would allow cargo to pass through the Chicago locks, but would prevent the water itself, and any invasive species living in it, from entering Lake Michigan.

I also recently spoke about this issue on the floor of the Senate, so my colleagues would know how urgent this issue is for us in Michigan. You can watch the speech on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QY-Sy12t3qg.

The Great Lakes are Michigan’s most precious natural resource, and they are a part of our way of life. I will never stop fighting to protect them.

Sincerely,

Debbie Stabenow

United States Senator

Now where this goes, or how much support we can expect from the Chicago-friendly White House, is anybody’s guess. But its a great effort, and I would encourage everyone to contact their Congress-person or Senator and encourage them to support this bill. An e-mail or phone call to the White House wouldn’t hurt either.

Does it strike anyone else as wrong that we continuously have to fight Washington to step-up and do what is right for public health and the welfare of our shared environment? Shouldn’t that be the default response?

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Posted in Air & Water Pollution, Invasive Species | No Responses »
Tags: Army Corps, Asian Carp, biological pollution, Chicago, congressman dave camp, ecology, Great Lakes, invasive alien species, mississippi river, senator carl levin, senator debbie stabenow, senator dick durbin, water diversion

Mr. Carp goes to Washington

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

Rep. James Oberstar (D – MN8) did a nice job of chairing a hearing of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure on the Asian Carp problem the Great Lakes faces. It was the first time I have watched a webcast of a Congressional hearing, and I have to say I liked it a lot better than I thought I would. I’ve worked in state, local and county government, and lobbied state legislatures, so this had a pretty familiar feel.

There were the elected officials being sufficiently non-committal (regardless of what they really thought) to encourage the panel of speakers. The administration’s man, Cameron Davis, (late of the Alliance for the Great Lakes, now the EPA Great Lakes Czar) was holding up the framework from the Carp Summit the day before and politely pointing out that he had been trying to get action on the Carp issue for 5 years or so, but assuring everyone that the administration had the bit in their teeth and were now on the right track. The guy from the Army Corps in full dress uniform assuring all assembled that they are studying the hell out of the situation, just like they were directed to do, and that their existing projects were really important and everyone should back off and let them engineer stuff. Everyone else was predictable as well. I want to congratulate Michigan DNRE Director Humphries for being very cordial, well spoken & sticking to her guns, insisting that the lakes must be physically separated from the Mississippi drainage permanently. Period. Another stand-out was Professor Lodge from Notre Dame, the guy who has been developing the eDNA techniques that let us know where fish have been even if we can’t find the fish (which, as any fisherman will tell you, happens more than we care to admit). He appeared to be a careful academic, and chose his words carefully in answering questions, even though you could tell that he wanted to say something like, “Just fill the damn canal in, will ya?”

Rep. Oberstar runs a good hearing. He was even-handed and was respectful to everyone there, even thanking them several times for braving the east coast blizzard and the likely-hood of being stranded in town for a while.

My favorite part of the whole affair was when Chairman Oberstar drew a parallel between the environmental and human suffering that was inflicted on New Orleans by the MRGO canal, which also only sees very light and easily re-routed shipping traffic, to the CSSC, and asked the USACE officer if he couldn’t see closing the Chicago canals as being as beneficial as the closing of MRGO . The USACE officer completely avoided answering the question but talked instead of the complexity of the engineering issues involved in Chicago and ways that they might regulate the locks differently, but not necessarily better. I got the impression that it hurt the Corps feelings to be told to shut down MRGO, and they don’t want to close another cool, old, canal just because it has some problems that they can engineer more solutions for, if we give them more money. Unfortunately, the most recent plan to put $78 million into band-aids won’t fix the problem, and there is still no permanent solution to the trans-basin migration of invasive alien species.

The Army Corps reminds me of a gear-head neighbor I used to have. He didn’t have lots of money, but he loved tinkering on old cars just to prove that he could make them run again, if only for a short time. This wasn’t Jay Leno pouring all the money needed into a project car to restore it to better-than-new condition. He would fix one thing only to find another problem. But he kept at it, because that’s what he liked to do. At one point his wife told me that his hobby was, “Buying old, junk cars and working on them until he had to pay someone to haul them away.” It was dirty, smelly, and loud work carried on in and around his garage. The projects would sit around for months with no discernible progress being made. The neighbors all grumbled. But at least it was his place and his money.

The Corps, on the other hand, isn’t playing with their own land & money, but ours. It’s time they were told that their canal and diversion projects at the south end of Lake Michigan need to go because they’re an eyesore, are creating a public nuisance, and are a health hazard. As Chicago’s neighbors on the lake, we need to put our foot down and not let the tiny bit of out-dated commerce created by these dinosaurs ruin our property values. And Chicago needs to clean-up their sewage like the rest of us and put the water back where they found it in no worse shape than when they borrowed it. This won’t just benefit the Great Lakes, but the waterways and communities downstream from Chicago all the way to and including the Gulf of Mexico who are now getting, literally, shit upon. You’d think that not having 2 billion gallons of water a day flowing down the river might help with downstream flooding a little as well, wouldn’t you?

What is complicated about getting a big suction dredge to the south end of the lake and filling the places where Lake Michigan leaks out with sand? There are only about 6 of them from Burns Harbor, IN to north of Chicago. They could do it in a couple months, tops. Then we would have a permanent physical separation of the Mississippi and Great Lakes drainages with no easy way for invasive alien species to cross from one to the other.

Just like it was before 19th Century Chicagoans “improved” it by building the canal in the first place.

Posted in Air & Water Pollution, Environment, Invasive Species | No Responses »
Tags: Army Corps, Asian Carp, Chicago, Environmental, Great Lakes, gulf of mexico, HBO, invasive alien species

Senator Stabenow & Representative Camp introduce the Carp Act. Finally!

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

This morning I found an email from Senator Debbie Stabenow’s office in my in-basket announcing that she and Dave Camp (R – Michigan), have introduced legislation to take immediate action against the Asian carp threat to the Great Lakes.

Here is an excerpt.

I have been working to ensure that federal and state experts have all the tools they need to protect the Great Lakes from the Asian carp, and so far, the efforts have been very successful. (?!?) However, the recent announcements by scientists are a troubling development that requires an urgent response. Therefore, the bills that Congressman Camp and I introduced call for immediate action to:

Immediately close the barriers and locks into the Great Lakes

Expedite the installation of interim barriers in rivers where no barriers currently exist

Enhance existing barriers and monitoring systems to prevent fish from crossing into the Great Lakes

Grant full authority to the Army Corps of Engineers to eradicate the Asian carp and prevent them from entering the Great Lakes.

As your Senator, I will continue to work to protect our Great Lakes, which are critical to our state’s livelihood. As always, please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of assistance to you or your family.

Sincerely,

Debbie Stabenow

United States Senator

I would also like to see actions to permanently separate the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal from Lake Michigan and stop the out of basin diversion of 2.1 billion gallons of our water daily; and for authority to eliminate the Asian Carp to go to the US Fish & Wildlife Service, but this is a good first step.

Please join us in contacting your elected help in DC and urging their support of this legislation and it’s immediate passage.

As always, I’d love to hear your take.

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Posted in Environment, Invasive Species | No Responses »
Tags: Army Corps, Asian Carp, Chicago, invasive alien species, water diversion

Army Corps failed to provide DNA evidence of Asian carp to high court

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

The US Army Corps of Engineers failed to inform the Solicitor General or the US Supreme Court that they had DNA evidence that the fish had entered Lake Michigan. This was data that they had been sitting on for four days! This makes it seem likely that they knew in time for the Supreme Court’s deliberations for a scheduled decision on Friday, January 15th, and didn’t pass it along then in an attempt to hide it from the Court.

For more details read this from the Detroit News.

Oh, the Army Corps! Those scamps are always getting into trouble, aren’t they? They need a firm hand to guide them back to the straight and narrow, because we know that left to their own devices they are bound for Hell in a basket. Which is bad enough, but they are charged with looking after vast parts of our nation’s wetlands and waters, and their engineered solutions have not been generally good solutions (You can always tell an engineer. But you can’t tell him very much!) for natural processes and biota. We can’t let the Corps take our wetlands and waters down with them!

The Corps needs to be under the oversight of Fish & Wildlife for all projects containing fish and wildlife. When they are allowed to lead we get stuff like this, and the screwed-up plumbing nightmare that surrounds New Orleans. They are good at engineering and building stuff, but they can’t be allowed to determine what they will build. Unfortunately, they are often used by congress to send pork home to the district, when congress decides which projects get funding. Either way, they fail to weigh the long-term ecological consequences almost every time.

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Posted in Environment, Invasive Species | No Responses »
Tags: Army Corps, Asian Carp, Chicago, US Supreme Court

Carp Wars

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

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.

Posted in Invasive Species | No Responses »
Tags: Army Corps, Asian Carp, Chicago

Aliens are living among us!!

Saturday, December 12th, 2009

The following is a letter I received in response to a letter I sent to Senator Carl Levin (D – MI) some time back. In fact, I wrote before eDNA evidence from the Asian carp was found above the electric barrier.

Thank you for contacting me regarding the electric dispersal barriers in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. I appreciate hearing your thoughts on this matter.

The Great Lakes are one of our nation’s greatest natural resources. Ensuring the protection and clean-up of this treasure and Michigan’s others waterways has long been one of my top priorities. As co-chair of the Senate Great Lakes Task Force, I have worked with other senators and representatives from the region to promote legislation and policies that protect the Great Lakes from various threats.

I have long been concerned about the threat posed to the Great Lakes by invasive species, such as Asian carp. These species are introduced from other ecosystems and often encounter few, if any, natural enemies in their new environments and wreak havoc on native species.

In an effort to address this issue, I cosponsored the National Invasive Species Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-332). This law authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to build a temporary dispersal barrier (Barrier I) in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to stop invasive species from entering Lake Michigan. Along with the other members of the Great Lakes Task Force, I have made repeated efforts to fund and to authorize the Army Corps to complete and enhance the dispersal barriers in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.

Asian carp have been found in the Des Plaines River, which runs extremely close to the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal (CSSC), north of the dispersal barriers. When flooding occurs, Asian carp could be carried over by floodwaters into the CSSC. The Army Corps of Engineers has identified six areas where flooding from the Des Plaines River is most likely to flow into the CSSC, which would allow the carp to bypass the barrier. Additionally, the Illinois and Michigan Canal (IMC) can provide a bypass for the Asian carp. The Army Corps of Engineers speculates that they can fill the IMC with dirt to mitigate this bypass of the dispersal barrier.

On October 21, 2009, the Fiscal Year 2010 Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Act was signed into law. This law includes language, which I supported, to authorize the Army Corps of Engineers to draft an Interim Report and to implement its findings on how to address this bypass threat. The Interim Report is part of a broader Efficacy Study that will examine larger, longer term improvements to the barrier project. The final Efficacy Study will include recommendations for optimal operations of the dispersal barriers and permanent efforts to prevent the passage of such invasive species through the CSSC.

Invasive species in the Great Lakes are an ecological, economical and health threat. I will continue to work to ensure that the threat of invasive species is reduced. Thank you again for writing.

Sincerely,
Carl Levin

Last week a group of wildlife management agencies forming the Asian Carp Rapid Response Workgroup ( No, really! That’s what they are called!) poured rotenone into the CSSC while the electric barrier was down for maintenance and killed a bunch of fish, but only one Asian carp, a Bighead. For more background on the official efforts to control Asian Carp go to asiancarp.org .

According to The Great Lakes Commission, “Since the 1800s, more than 160 nonindigenous aquatic nuisance species (ANS) have invaded the ecosystem from around the world, causing severe economic and ecological impacts.”

This doesn’t include species that are alien but aren’t considered by most authorities to be invasive nuisances, like brown and rainbow trout, or Pacific and Atlantic salmon. (We should really ask the whitefish, Menomonee, Coaster Brook Trout, and Lake Trout about that one. I mean, biomass is biomass, right? And while we’re on this topic I will throw in the obligatory mea culpa reference to Europeans being the worst alien invasive species ever to hit the American continents. We displaced the native populations of humans and brought all manner of plants, animals and diseases with us from the old country to displace the Native American flora and fauna. We’re territorial, filthy, aggressive, arrogant, and breed like bunnies. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, we drug Africans and Asians over to help us screw things up faster than we could by working alone. We make rotten neighbors, by all accounts.)

I was a child during the 1960s not a “child of the ‘60s,” but I remember the energy of the decade and the belief that it was not only possible to change the world, but inevitable. Like Billy Joel said,

We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it.

Have we stopped even trying to fight this problem? When did we become so complacent, and why? Senator Levin points out what he has tried to do and what he has accomplished. As much as I appreciate the Senator’s hard work, it seems to me to be too little and too late. The Army Corp is going to prepare a study, when an ecological nuke is hundreds of yards from Lake Michigan? Seems to me it’s time to get righteously indignant, draw a line in the sand and shout, “ENOUGH!”

Apparently we don’t learn too good here in the heartland. The Asian carp, sea lamprey, zebra mussels, Viral Hemorrhagic Septicemia, the spiny water flea, Purple loosestrife and the other 150-some plagues to our Great Lakes were mostly preventable. They weren’t prevented because short-term financial gain trumps long-term ecological health. And it is going to continue to trump the health of our local, regional and global environment until we find a way to change the game by getting a vast majority of people to get really pissed and demand change from our elected officials and to refuse to take “no” or “later” for an answer. Until we are able to make the corporations and individuals responsible for these ecological catastrophes liable for their crimes and cause them to fear financial ruin and prison. Today not only is there no down-side to this biological pollution, it’s accepted as the price of progress in many circles. While there are some laws on the books enforcement is problematic at best, and the penalties are woefully inadequate.

This must change, and soon. History shows us that there will always be another Asian carp or Emerald Ash Borer. We are spending billions of dollars fighting preventable problems instead of on restoring our Great Lakes. I have to believe that if we piled all the financial gain of a few companies and individuals on one side and all of the costs of fighting this scourge on the other the costs to the many would dwarf the gain of the few.

Putting out a fire is never easy. It is even harder when new hot spots keep popping up all around you. But that doesn’t mean you quit trying.

Like my friend the Lorax said,

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

Posted in Environment, Invasive Species | No Responses »
Tags: Army Corps, Asian Carp, Chicago, Trout

A Drop In the Invasive Species Bucket

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

(*NOTE – I moved this over from the old blog to provide some background for the next entry.)

2009 October 21

by JP Savage

The AP reports that the Federal Government is putting up a whole $6 million to keep Asian Carp from destroying the great lakes.

Wow.

Considering the catastrophic damage this fish could potentially cause to the Lakes’ ecosystems and recreational and tourism interests worth well into the billions of dollars, wouldn’t you think that they could make sure that the Army Corps of Engineers fixed things so that the Chicago Sanitary & Ship Canal and Des Plains River couldn’t connect during flood events, rendering their electrical weir moot?
Maybe they could find some more change under the seat cushions in the capital?

See the ABC News Story here.

Posted in Environment | No Responses »
Tags: Army Corps, Asian Carp, Chicago, politics

The Round River

From the Great Lakes of the Northland