CAN'T CALL FOR HELP. CAN'T WAVE TO ATTRACT ATTENTION.

 We just learned a whole lot about the realities of drowning, and we're convinced that EVERY person who goes near the water needs to know and understand what takes place during the process known as the "instinctive drowning response."

Female Sturgeon can live 150 years, and make excellent indicators of eco-system health. They are also an endangered native species whose habitat was dramatically altered by human activities, pollution, the construction of dams and other factors.

No data as to the extent of Sturgeon spawning activity on the sites prior to the construction of the new beds was made available. Each of the NYPA-designed spawning beds consists of ten thousand square feet (100 x 100) of pea gravel, with boulders positioned as current breaks at the downstream ends. The beds are positioned both above and below the Iroquois Dam near Waddington, NY.

Iroquois Dam is principally used to control water levels, and the ability to raise or lower its 32 gates is one of the principal reasons Lake Ontario is the only great lake where the water level can be controlled by man.

NYPA used a Canadian firm to conduct the study.   

Upstream, in Lake Ontario and throughout the Great Lakes, Sturgeon numbers are reportedly increasing without the aid of new spawning areas. The recovery is credited, in part, to the proliferation of zebra and quagga mussels, which appear to be benefiting many benthic (bottom-feeding) species including Sturgeon.

Update: A full report on the project, including the pre-existing conditions on the two sites, was published today (07/08/2010) by Waterpower Magazine.

Environmental groups and Great Lakes advocates are hailing the letter as a major step toward isolating the Great Lakes from other US watersheds. Here's what Great Lakes on the Ground had to say.

It's a no-brainer.

“While we’re all talking,” said Notre Dame biologist David Lodge, “the fish are swimming.”

Indeed they are. When Lodge’s biologists reported late last year that water samples taken a few miles inland of the lakeshore contained carp DNA, and other tests indicated the presence of the DNA in Lake Michigan itself, it became clear that the electric barrier on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal would not be enough to stop the migration.

Federal officials had the scientific evidence on which to base immediate action, yet other than some fiddling with poison and nets, nothing is being done. Procrastination might be a time-honored tradition among bureaucrats, but why does the inability to make a decision always seem to pop up at the exact moment when any delay at all geometrically increases the chances of something bad happening? One is forcefully reminded of the Emperor Nero, who also liked to fiddle around.

Has no one in the Army Corps heard the adage, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire?”

Of course, everyone has, and when the physical evidence becomes irrefutable, there will be so many spears and arrows flying around Washington, we'll be mistaking our legislators for porcupines.

Meanwhile, while we fiddle, Lodge’s words may be prophetic. The carp are poised to swim in Lake Michigan and all indicators say they’ll like it just as much as the 200 other foreign invaders already there waiting to welcome them.

Yesterday’s Milwaulkee Journal Sentinel reported that Attorneys General from five of the seven Great Lakes states (excluding New York and Illinois) say the Federal government isn’t doing enough to stop the migration of Asian carp into Lake Michigan.  In a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers, the AGs claim the government’s “response is not commensurate with the urgency and magnitude of the threat.”

WHERE IS CUOMO?

As the Chicago Locks are in Illinois, the absence of its signature on the complaint to the Corps of Engineers is understandable. But where is New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo? Too busy readying things for next week’s announcement of his run for governor? So it seems. If the fish enter Lake Michigan, political opponents will certainly be interested in Cuomo’s silence on a subject that could drastically affect New York’s interests on Lake Ontario, which is downstream of the other lakes and sure to see the arrival of the invaders soon after they populate Lake Michigan.   

Thirty-three years after the finalization of the US Clean Water Act in 1977*, most American cities have completed changes and are in compliance. But for Oswego, New York, at the east end of Lake Ontario, and for other waterfront cities on rivers adjoining the Great Lakes, the process has been more difficult.

There has been progress. Oswego completed the major components of its east side separation project in 2003, and then, on July 25, 2006 , after 28 years of remedial actions, the Oswego River Basin became the first of 43 Great Lakes sites to be delisted as an Area of Concern by the EPA. Now, another four years later, the city itself, which straddles the mouth of the Oswego River where it empties into Lake Ontario, will be coming into compliance too. Under the terms of an agreement announced May 13 by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, Oswego will commit an additional $87 million to complete the separation of its West side sewage and storm water systems.

The Oswego River, second only to the Niagara in volume of flow into Lake Ontario, divides Oswego into east and west components connected by two bridges. This division necessitated two completely seperate and independent projects - and a cost roughly twice that faced by other communities.

Add to that the age of its infrastructure - Oswego was first settled in 1780 and is located on the sloping east and west banks of a river gorge, and compliance became of necessity a long term process. 

In the early years, as the old city grew, the river made a convenient dumping point for sewage, and sewage flowed down the slopes to end there. Add the fact that on the west side the sewers, most of them circa 1850, were in worse condition than expected, and the formula for cost overruns was complete.

As begun, the west side separation project consisted of the construction of a 4 MGD treatment facility a few feet above lake level and approximately one mile west of the river - discharging its treated water into the turning basin at the west end of the harbor breakwall - and a pumping station at the foot of the slope near the river mouth. Collection laterals parallel the river, one for storm runoff, the other picking up most of the existing sewer terminals and feeding the pumping station, which then pushes it up and over the slope to the treatment plant on the far side.

But the west side project, stressed by major cost overruns on the east side project, was never finished, finally petering out before the majority of the west side separation lines, roughly from route 104 and south, could be installed. 

© 2010 Lake Ontario Observer

At the same time, new west side loads were added - residential development on the southern fringes of the city, new high and middle schools, expansion at SUNY Oswego and sewage agreements with the town of Oswego – and it soon became evident that any good-sized precipitation event would overwhelm the system and result in uncontrolled discharges into Oswego Harbor, according to a 2008 article quoting a water department supervisor. There have even been instances where the sewer gratings on Water Street were "blown off" by the tremendous pressure of rainwater during stormy weather.

The new agreement will correct the situation by rerouting storm and snow melt runoffs. This will permit the existing facilities to function for the first time as originally designed.

*The CWA made it unlawful to discharge any pollutant from a point source into navigable waters, unless a permit was obtained. EPA's National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit program controls discharges. Point sources are discrete conveyances such as pipes or man-made ditches. Individual homes that are connected to a municipal system, use a septic system, or do not have a surface discharge do not need an NPDES permit; however, industrial, municipal, and other facilities must obtain permits if their discharges go directly to surface waters. 

Illinois which has approximately 100 miles of shoreline, will receive $110,000, or about $1100 a mile, while Indiana, with less than 75, will receive $3,348,000, or $66,860.

It's true that Illinois accounts for less than 1% of the 13,000 miles of Great Lakes shoreline, but it wouldn’t be smart to forget that Metropolitan Chicago and millions of people are packed in like sardines on most of it. Don't think for a second that just because they use Lake Michigan water to flush their sewage into the Mississippi and points south, that if Chicago wasn't there, Lake Michigan wouldn't be cleaner.

With the new USDA numbers, and the fact that Chicago is currently the epicenter of the most serious environmental crisis in memory, $1100 seems like an insult. We'd like to know how the feds arrived at the division of “spoils.”

Maybe it's because Illinois, and the Chicago Locks, are currently the topic of hot national debate over the issue of the Asian Carp. The carp are expected to enter Lake Michigan through the locks of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, as well as through the series of sewage channels the City of Chicago and State of Illinois have created over the years. One of these, the North Shore Channel, will be a focal point of the next detection effort planned by the ACRCC (Asian Carp Coordinating Committee) beginning today and extending through Friday May 14.

The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Channel started out as a measure to divert Lake Michigan water into the Chicago River, (pay close attention to the word sanitary - remember, this was done long before spin control was invented) and has long been a sore subject to the other Great Lakes states, who continue to labor under the conviction that the water Illinois takes belongs to them as much as to anyone. The project reversed the direction of the Chicago river, causing it to flow away from the lake. This made the city’s drinking water safe again - at the cost of several inches of water level in the other states.

Recently, after a motion to reopen the “Chicago Diversion” case by the othe Great Lakes states failed, the Obama administration applauded the Supreme Court’s decision.

Whether the ball leaving Obama’s left hand (GLRI) and headed toward "farmers", will be caught by his right (the one he's using to hold open the Chicago Locks) remains to be seen. Meanwhile,  mom and poppa carp, the door to the largest source of clean fresh water in the world is open, so come on in.

Cleveland Scene WeeklyThe answer to the above question is, of course, a very scary breed of fish, and for once people are up in arms about this the most monstrous of a long line of invasive species that've descended on the Great Lakes like a plague.

THE CITY OF CHICAGO; ILLINOIS DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES; METROPOLITAN WATER RECLAMATION DISTRICT OF GREATER CHICAGO; US ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS; US COAST GUARD; US ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY; US FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE; US GEOLOGICAL SURVEY; GREAT LAKES FISHERY COMMISSION; ILLINOIS DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION; and the INDIANA DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES, are all interested parties in the search for answers to what promises to become the most serious of crises.

On May 5, the above organizations, which joined to form a group calling itself, "The Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee," and which had conducted an initial study last winter, announced a second study, this one to last three months and include a further search for signs of the presence of the fish.

Tradional sampling methods, including gill netting and elecrofishing, did not result in the capture of any asian carp during the initial sampling period, which lasted five weeks. The new plan will use the same sampling methods, but will move the focus of the search to the North Shore Channel, where among other measures, a three day testing period will be carried out.

The north shore channel is an open sewage/drainage ditch that receives water from Lake Michigan, traverses the city of Chicago, and empties into the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.

There's an excellent article on Great Lakes diversion projects, including the Chicago Diversion, here. And for an analysis of the overall situation from a reporter who's been following the issue, check Andy Buchsbaum's blog "Great Lakes on the Ground."