Echo

The Chicago water heist that just keeps on taking

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(WI) Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – There are a lot of fish tales going around. Here is a true one that is about more than just the recently famous Asian carp. Once upon a time, many years ago, Chicago was a cesspool. It was so polluted in the late 1800s, it has been written, that chickens could run across the scum that formed on top of the rivers. I don’t know if I believe this because it has also been written that, instead of fish, the rivers were full of the floating carcasses of dead cats and horses, and I am not sure a chicken would go anywhere near a dead horse.

Echo

A hole in the St. Clair River

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(MI) Detroit Free Press – The so-called hole in the St. Clair River, which carries water from Lake Huron down into Lake St. Clair, is definitely big enough to merit filling, although the fix would surely be more technologically sophisticated than that. Nonetheless, the recommendation of a study group — that their findings be incorporated into a much larger study of the lakes — is probably sound. The St.

Echo

Nuclear plant spills tritium into lake

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(ON) Toronto Star – Workers at the Darlington nuclear station filled the wrong tank with a cocktail of water and a radioactive isotope Monday, spilling more than 200,000 litres into Lake Ontario. Ontario Power Generation is investigating how the accident happened and officials say hourly tests of the lake water show that the level of tritium — the radioactive isotope of hydrogen — poses no harm to nearby residents. More

Wildlife

Coast Guard targets zebra mussels in Great Lakes

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(IL) Chicago Sun Times – Twenty years after the pervasive zebra mussel was first detected in the Great Lakes, the U.S. Coast Guard is preparing rules to prevent new invasive species from infiltrating the nation’s freshwater systems.

Ecologists, environmentalists and public officials have mixed feelings about the rules. While they are delighted over the prospect of the first national standard for treating ship ballast water, they’re disappointed by the timetable. “We’ve been dealing with this issue literally for decades,” said Matt Frank, secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. “And we don’t believe the Coast Guard rules are aggressive enough.” More

Echo

Wisconsin AG wants more info on Asian carp threat

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(WI) The Associated Press – Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen said Wednesday he wants to know more about the threat Asian carp pose to the Great Lakes. The carp have been migrating northward in the Mississippi and Illinois rivers for decades. Scientists say if they get into the Great Lakes, they could consume plankton, interrupt the food chain and devastate the $7 billion fishery. More

Echo

Dredging near Great Lakes OK for now: panel

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(ON) CBC – Navigational dredging along the St. Clair River in southwestern Ontario has contributed to a drop in water levels in the upper Great Lakes basin, but it’s not an ongoing problem and doesn’t require immediate action, a panel of U.S. and Canadian experts has found. Water levels between Lake Michigan and Lake Erie have dropped an average of 23 centimetres between 1963 and 2006, according to a report by the International Upper Great Lakes Study Board. More

Echo

Panel: St. Clair River not draining Great Lakes

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(MI) Detroit Free Press – In blunt terms, members of an international study panel said the idea that a widened St. Clair River is losing billions of gallons of water each day, causing the levels of Michigan and Huron lakes to drop, is bunk. A Canadian group put forth that idea five years ago after an expert it hired concluded that the river was acting like a bathtub drain that had been enlarged by dredging, allowing billions of gallons of water to escape too quickly into Lake Erie. More

Echo

Editorial: Act now before invader hits Great Lakes

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(WI) Green Bay Press Gazette – The latest invasive species to threaten the Great Lakes is a brute called the Asian carp. The Wisconsin Legislature should take an opportunity today to act swiftly against the threat. Capable of growing to 4 feet long and 100 pounds, the Asian carp has starved out native species by scooping up plankton as it slowly migrated north up the Mississippi River since the 1970s. The fish originally was imported from Asia to cleanse fish ponds and sewage lagoons in the deep South, but they escaped into the river. More

Echo

To guard Great Lakes, give fence a chance

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(VA) USA Today – It sounds like science fiction: an alien invasion of Lake Michigan by toddler-sized scum suckers. But around Chicago, the fear is so real that governments have already spent more than $11 million building electronic defenses to zap the invaders and trying to poison them. The alien is a fish, the Asian carp. The fear is that the voracious plant-eaters could migrate from the Mississippi River basin through a Chicago canal and into the Great Lakes, threatening the habitat of lake fish. The risk, however, is that a going-overboard solution (walling off the canal) will be adopted before the costly new defenses (electrical barriers) are given a chance to work.

Echo

EPA to spend $13 million to help stop Asian carp

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(WI) Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – Less than two weeks after fishery experts spent about $3 million to poison the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal in a desperate attempt to beat back an Asian carp invasion of Lake Michigan, the federal government has announced it will throw another $13 million at the problem. That money will come from the recently passed $475 million Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and much of it will go to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers so the agency can build emergency berms and plug various waterways in the Chicago area to keep the carp from riding floodwaters into the lake. More