NNY senator weighs in on carp
WASHINGTON — The steady advance of the Asian carp toward the Great Lakes is generating new discussion around an old idea: maybe connecting the Mississippi River to Lake Michigan was not such a good idea after all, and they should be separated again.
Sen. Kirsten E. Gillibrand raised the subject in a letter to three federal agencies that have a role in managing the waterways that lead into Lake Michigan around Chicago. She is following in a line of officials and interest groups that over the years have expressed concern about the environmental effect of linking the two waterways.
Mrs. Gillibrand, D-N.Y., stopped short of saying the waters should be separated forever. But she did advocate for a temporary closure of the Chicago and O'Brien locks, two key points in the carp's route to Lake Michigan, as well as poisoning and other preventive methods already under way.
The Army Corps of Engineers could decide within days whether to temporarily close the waterways. Evidence of carp has appeared within about seven miles of Lake Michigan, indicating the 3-foot fish have found a way past an electronic barrier.
"The Asian Carp pose a traumatic and long-term threat to the Great Lakes and the enormous economic benefit the lakes provide to New York and the nation," Mrs. Gillibrand said in a press release. "The lakes help drive our economy, draw tourism, offer endless recreation and provide drinking water for millions of families. The Asian carp could potentially destroy all of that, disrupting the food chain and disturbing the natural ecosystem permanently."
She added, "I believe that temporarily sealing this waterway as we analyze the situation at hand and decide on a long term management strategy is a reasonable course of action."
A study for the Great Lakes Commission in 2008 concluded only a physical barrier between the waterways could ensure keeping Asian carp, as well as other species, from migrating into the Great Lakes. And even some physical barriers, such as locks designed to keep saltwater out of neighboring freshwater bodies, carry the risk of letting some organisms through, the commission's study cautioned.
"Short of physical separation, no single technology is likely to provide a true ecological separation at the Chicago Waterway System," the authors wrote.
The most effective approach, a concrete wall blocking the flow of all water, carries the biggest price to commercial navigation, recreational boating and other uses of the canal, the commission reported in the study, which was conducted by the Alliance for the Great Lakes.
Environmental groups support separation. Taking the Mississippi and its tributaries out of the Great Lakes system would not only keep out the carp but eliminate a major source of water diversion from the lakes, said Jennifer J. Caddick, executive director of Save the River, the Clayton environmental group.
"Lake Michigan and the Chicago Sanitary Canal may be a long distance from the river, but those carp are still too close for comfort," Ms. Caddick said in an e-mail message Friday. She said the Chicago diversion, for political reasons, has escaped much of the discussion about restricting water removals and diversions.
The Chicago diversion lowers water levels in all of the Great Lakes, including taking about 3 centimeters off the level of Lake Ontario, according to the U.S.-Canadian International Joint Commission, which advises the countries on boundary water policies. The IJC reported bigger drops on the other Great Lakes.
The history of the Chicago diversion is longer than the St. Lawrence Seaway's and illustrates why permanently separating the waterways could be no easy task politically.
The diversion dates to 1848 with the completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal and has several purposes: water supply, sanitation, navigation and power generation. Over time the system was designed, among other reasons, to give Chicago a cleaner supply of drinking water; water could be taken from Lake Michigan, then dumped as treated sewage into the Illinois River.
In addition, water flows out of Lake Michigan into the canal to create a shipping route for barges and other vessels bound from or to the Mississippi River. Thousands of barges pass through the system's locks each year.
Owners of barges and shipping companies have complained that shutting off the waterway will hurt business; the poisoning operation to stop the carp already has disrupted traffic.
The Great Lakes Commission study found that about 25 million tons of commodities move on the Chicago Waterway System annually, including coal, sand and gravel, iron ore and steel. The system has maintained that level roughly since the early 1990s, the study reported.
Whether the Seaway would pick up much traffic from a permanent closure is unclear. A spokeswoman for the St. Law-rence Seaway Development Corp. did not return a message Friday to address that question.
In addition, as many as 65,000 recreational vehicles passed through the Chicago Waterway System's locks annually during the past decade, the study found.
All of those interests are at play as policymakers consider their next moves.
To add a bureaucratic wrinkle, the amount of water diverted from Lake Michigan is not up to the IJC but to the U.S. Supreme Court, which resolved a decadeslong fight between the United States and Canada over water diversions in 1980. The battle dated to 1913, when the British government, on behalf of Canada, objected to the Chicago Sanitary District's withdrawal of more water than the federal government had authorized.
By Supreme Court decree, water withdrawals are to be no more than an average of 3,200 cubic feet per second.
The last major congressional effort on Chicago withdrawals was in 1976, when lawmakers authorized a study and demonstration program on increasing water flows to provide cleaner water to Chicago and reduce shoreline erosion in Lake Michigan. The study concluded such an increase was not economically justified. The demonstration project was never funded.
