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.
