WBEZ | great lakes

Heavy rain overwhelms combined sewer system

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 16:17:00 -0500

Inundated by nearly 5 inches of rain in less than 36 hours, Chicago water officials have had to "re-reverse" the flow of the Chicago River, opening the large gates that separate Lake Michigan from the river to relieve pressure on a sewer system swollen with runoff and waste.

As Chicago Magazine’s Whet Moser reported, the deluge has easily outpaced recent upgrades to the city's water and sewage infrastructure. Michael Hawthorne of the Chicago Tribune reported in 2011 that Lake Michigan had been hit with more sewage in recent years than the previous two decades combined.

The Metropolitan Wastewater Reclamation District said Thursday that its 109-mile network of tunnels and reservoirs was 100 percent full. The Mainstream Tunnel was full by 12:31 a.m., while the Des Plaines Tunnel filled up at 3:30 a.m. Built to contain 2.3 billion gallons, the system hit capacity and poured enough stormwater and sewage into Chicago-area waterways to help raise their levels higher than Lake Michigan. Following protocol, MWRD tried to relieve some of that pressure by dumping the tainted water into the lake.

Contaminants can spread kilometers away from shore. MWRD has asked residents to minimize their water use to help ease the strain on the heavily burdened system. Not that it's a great day for a swim, anyway, but you might not want to hit the beach, either.

Chicago’s sewer problems may be stark, but they are not unique. A 2004 EPA report to Congress found Chicago’s overflows plagued mainly by bacteria, while the city of Toledo, Ohio suffered pollution from copper, lead, silver and zinc. Water samples taken near Toledo's sewer outfalls showed effects of chronic toxicity. A 2010 study by the National Wildlife Federation found cities around the Great Lakes discharged 41 billion gallons of untreated sewage and stormwater into the lakes in 2009, with Chicago and Detroit leading the way.

There has been some progress. Detroit has decreased sewer overflows by 80 percent below 1995 levels by adding capacity, but had to back off its own deep tunnel project in 2009 due to lack of funding.

Chicago’s waterways have cleared up, too, but face a murky future. The total number of fish species found in the Chicago and Calumet river system increased six-fold between 1974, around the time that MWRD upgraded their facilities, and 2001. But the Deep Tunnel project originally meant to help the system avoid overflows won’t be complete until 2029, and may still be inadequate in the face of floods pumped up by climate change.

Asian carp might have entered lakes, but so what?

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 05:00:00 -0500

New evidence suggesting Asian carp may already be in the Great Lakes basin has renewed fears that the invasive species could pose an existential threat to the area’s lucrative fishing industry.

“The fact that fish may already be in the lake does not mean it’s game over,” said Lindsay Chadderton, aquatic invasive species director for The Nature Conservancy. “The real risk is that if we continue to debate and don’t act, we may lose that opportunity.”

But the charismatic fish, infamous for their tendency to leap out of the water (though they're unlikely to do so in the deep waters of Lake Michigan), are no shoe-in when it comes to colonizing the Great Lakes.

“In my view, the Mississippi River basin is the least of Lake Michigan's worries, because the habitat is so warm, rich and shallow that its denizens would be completely unfit in cold, dilute, deep Lake Michigan,” said Russell Cuhel, a senior scientist with the Great Lakes WATER Institute. To reproduce, carp need access to rivers where there is an amply flowing water column to help disperse their eggs. That isn’t common in most of the Great Lakes, but some places, including Lake Erie and the Detroit River, could provide the right conditions.

The sea lamprey, another invasive species that decimated the Lake Trout population, shares an Achilles heel with Asian carp. Like the carp, lamprey head upstream to breed. To control their spread, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission applies specialized poisons that kill young lampreys in streambeds before they reach open water and mature. It’s possible that if carp do establish themselves in the Great Lakes, a similar strategy could control their population. But it’s no sure bet.

“Invasive species never do what we expect them to do,” Chadderton said. “They’re opportunistic. That’s why they’re good invaders.”

At any rate the jury is still out on whether carp could flourish in the unfamiliar Great Lakes ecosystem. Unlike carp, the wildly successful quagga and zebra mussels, which first arrived as stowaways in ship ballast tanks, breed where they live and are capable of producing 1 million eggs per year. In many areas of the Great Lakes they now blanket the lake floor, and have become by far the most dominant species by biomass in Lake Michigan.

Those mussels have devoured much of the available phytoplankton — the same food source carp depend on — posing another challenge for the new invader. Research suggests that carp might be able to survive on other food sources, however, including mussel feces. And even minor competition from the voracious carp, which can eat up to one fifth of their body weight in plankton each day, could place further pressure on young walleye and other sport fish that also eat plankton in their larval stage.

While the lamprey and the equally disruptive alewife entered the Lakes on their own volition, they are the exception to the rule. Recent research published by Cuhel and Carmen Aguilar in the Annual Review of Marine Science found few of the many invaders since 1936 established themselves by swimming into the Lakes. Most were unintentionally transported or released.

“It only takes one idiot to infect a location with an exotic [species],” Cuhel said. “One fisherman with a bait bucket can be worse than river flow.”

Cuhel won’t weigh in on policy or engineering proposals to physically separate the Great Lakes and Mississippi basins, or treat locks with chemicals that could clear out carp and other invasive species before they enter Lake Michigan. But others have called expensive efforts to keep out invaders a foolhardy investment.

There are dozens of species in the Great Lakes basin that don’t currently exist in the Mississippi, and nearly a dozen more vice versa. Aquatic invasive species protections could defend those populations from cross-contamination. What’s more, environmental agencies already spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year managing algal blooms, sea lamprey and mussels. That makes an economic argument for prevention measures, Chadderton said, even if the carp don’t turn out to be good colonizers of most Great Lakes waters.

“The trouble with any invasion is that there will always be evidence on both sides. So do you let the experiment run?” Chadderton said. “The most prudent management option is to prevent establishment.”

New study finds Asian carp DNA in Chicago waterways

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 16:00:00 -0500

The advance of the so-called Asian carp (the term can refer to many species of carp, but in Illinois it typically refers to bighead carp and silver carp) has long prompted worries that the fish will wreck the Great Lakes ecosystem, including its $7 billion fishery. Its impending arrival has even energized debate over whether to spend billions physically separating Chicago waterways from Lake Michigan.

The carp’s march up the Mississippi River basin even surmounted electric barriers set up by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep them out of the Great Lakes area. A new study in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences affirms that if the fish haven’t reached the Great Lakes yet, they’re very close.

In 2010 fisherman hauled a 20-pound bighead carp out of Lake Calumet, and before that carp were found in the western basin of Lake Erie — the same locations where the researchers found carp environmental DNA, or eDNA. Fish shed tiny bits of tissue as they swim, which become diffuse genetic evidence of their presence. The eDNA can’t say how many fish are in the area, or when they were there.

Scientists had already found carp eDNA in Lake Michigan, but chalked it up to contact with contaminated fishing gear or bird feces. The new report has raised eyebrows because, as the authors put it, “we remain convinced that the most likely source of Asian carp DNA is live fish.”

eDNA monitoring of invasive species is a relatively new technology. It can produce murky results, as in Minnesota where it may have misidentified carp DNA in the St. Croix river.

The new study was authored by researchers at the University of Notre Dame, the Nature Conservancy and Central Michigan University, and calls for a larger surveillance program across the Great Lakes basin.

Carp are abundant below the electric barriers near Chicago, can eat up to 20 percent of their body weight per day in plankton — a food source already under considerable pressure from invasive quagga and zebra mussels — and are known for leaping out of the water when agitated. But the carp remain elusive where their eDNA has been found, despite all the scrutiny from anxious fishermen and ecologists. Still, the latest findings are likely to reignite debate about whether the current defenses are enough.

The Army Corps of Engineers is studying the issue, and will release a report later this year.

Chris Bentley writes about the environment. Follow him on Twitter at @Cementley.

Grand Calumet River delivers toxic load to Lake Michigan

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 10:06:00 -0600

The Grand Calumet River system winds for 13 miles through a Northwest Indiana industrial landscape that could almost be described as post-apocalyptic.

Alongside the several branches of the slow-moving waterway, a steel mill, gypsum plant and other heavy industry spew plumes of steam into the air while vines and shrubs grow inside vacant crumbling brick buildings. A fragment of the partially demolished Cline Avenue bridge still stands, twisted rebar and chunks of concrete hanging from each end. A rusty abandoned motorboat bobs half-sunken next to a soiled brown floating absorbent boom.

The Grand Calumet has long been known as one of the nation’s most polluted rivers. It is one of 43 federal Areas of Concern targeted for remediation in the Great Lakes region. For many decades before the 1972 Clean Water Act, countless industries dumped contaminated waste into the river with abandon. Gary, East Chicago and Hammond discharge untreated sewage and storm water into it.

The Grand Calumet consists of two forks that join and empty into Lake Michigan via the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal and Indiana Harbor, in East Chicago. Though the land right around the river mouth is not open to the public, local residents fish, swim, boat and wade at nearby beaches, harbors and weedy access points.

The Grand Calumet’s impact on this near shore area is hard to quantify given the way contaminants disperse quickly in Lake Michigan. But experts with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management say the river surely harms near shore lake water quality and habitat as it empties one billion gallons of water into Lake Michigan each day.

That flow includes material from overflowing sewers during heavy rains, contaminated sediment pulled from the river bottom, industrial run-off and contaminated groundwater.

Daunting as this toxic brew may sound, the Grand Calumet is getting cleaned up. Hence the near shore area of Lake Michigan should reap significant environmental and ecological benefits as well.

State and federal environmental officials are about halfway through a massive project to remove contaminated sediment and restore wetlands. And the state environmental agency is working with municipalities to reduce sewage overflow during rains.

A legacy of contamination

The Grand Calumet was “originally mostly a slowly meandering wetland complex,” said Jim Smith, an Indiana state natural resource damage coordinator. But with widespread dredging, channelizing, damming and the building of the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal which makes up the final stretch into the lake, “the flow regime of the river has changed.”

Today, in fact, municipal and industrial effluent makes up 90 percent of the river’s flow.

“There were industries from meatpacking to lumber to brickmaking and metal shops on the west branch to the big steel mills and the petroleum industry,” Smith noted. “Pipelines and everything came through this area. Also the municipalities developed their sewers going directly into the river. There was domestic contamination from human origin to organic stuff from the petroleum industry and steelmaking.

“The river was the disposal point for years.”

The river’s sediment contains harmful metals and carcinogenic compounds including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and heavy metals like mercury, cadmium, chromium and lead from the decades of industrial dumping. A 2000 study prepared for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found serious concerns and impacts from contaminated sediment in the Grand Calumet.

The river is also contaminated by leaching and run-off from nearby waste disposal sites and contaminated groundwater, according to the Areas of Concern website. It is even harmed by atmospheric deposition of contaminants from fossil fuel burning and waste incineration.

There are more than 460 underground storage tanks containing chemical and petroleum waste products in the area, the website says, and at least 150 leaking tank reports have been filed with the county.

“The contaminants we’re talking about affect organisms and can directly or indirectly affect the food chain,” said Scott Ireland, U.S. EPA special assistant for the senior adviser to the administrator on the Great Lakes. “They could wipe out the benthic community, so fish are not able to eat, or fish eat (benthic organisms) and are contaminated; then the contamination will enter the food chain. If humans eat the fish, they are taking up those contaminants as well.”

Great Lakes Echo is a project of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University.

The Grand Calumet River’s road to recovery

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 09:52:00 -0600

The sediment on the bottom of the Grand Calumet River in Northwest Indiana provides a toxic record of the region’s history going back more than a century.

It is full of chemicals, heavy metals and other contaminants from steel-making, oil refining, waste incineration, smelting and other heavy industry that laid the economic and social foundation of the area.

But federal and state officials are now in the midst of a multi-million dollar project to clean up the sediment and the river as a whole.

Since the 1972 Clean Water Act drastically reduced industrial discharges into waterways, once the legacy sediment is removed there will be relatively little industrial pollution in the future, said Scott Ireland, special assistant for the senior adviser to the administrator on the Great Lake for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Dredging started in 2009. About 750,000 cubic yards of sediment two to three feet deep have been removed along a 2.5 mile stretch of river. The dredged area was then covered with a reactive barrier, composed of either organoclay mixed with sand or an activated carbon mat. These specialized materials help filter and contain toxic substances from the underlying sediments.

“Our capping and dredging will sequester or isolate contaminated sediments that have been there for almost 100 years, reducing the total amount of contaminants going into the Great Lakes,” said Jim Smith, a coordinator of the natural resources damages department for the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. “How much it will reduce it we really don’t know – there will be some interesting monitoring done over the next few years.”

Addressing combined sewer overflows

Overflowing sewers that pour into the river and then Lake Michigan contain E. coli bacteria and other germs as well as oil, grease and detritus picked up by storm water running off industrial and municipal areas. In 2011, Hammond, Gary and East Chicago released 1.2 billion gallons, 126 million gallons and 304 million gallons, respectively, of stormwater contaminated with sewage into the Grand Calumet waterway, according to Indiana officials.
But the state is working with those cities to curb these combined sewer overflows, including by separating the sewers that carry storm water from sanitary sewers (for human waste.)

East Chicago already is implementing an approved plan. Hammond and Gary are developing their plans – two of the last four municipalities in a statewide sewer improvement program involving 108 cities and towns and 10 separate consent decrees.

East Chicago’s $20.8 million plan promises that only rains heavier than a relatively rare “10-year, one-hour” storm will cause sewer overflows into the Grand Calumet.

There are different techniques cities use to address the problem.

“You might increase the size of wastewater treatment capacity, to accept and treat more of the flow,” said Paul Higginbotham, branch chief over Indiana’s office of water quality permits. “You can also take out bottlenecks within the collection system – so you can get flow to the treatment plant versus overflow into the outfall…

“Also, bigger communities can add wet weather treatment systems, like basins for the overflow where it’s treated before it’s discharged.”

Restoring wetlands

State and federal officials have restored about 37 acres of wetlands that had been seriously degraded by contaminated floodwaters from the river over the years and choked with invasive phragmites. They removed the sediment in the wetlands and replaced it with clean sand. And they replaced phragmites with native vegetation.

In all, about 100 acres of wetland will be restored. It provides habitat for migratory birds and fish, improving the overall ecological health of the surrounding area. The wetlands also help prevent nutrient pollution and other contaminated runoff into Lake Michigan, as storm water filters through the wetlands before seeping into the lake.

The sediment clean up and wetland restoration are funded by the Great Lakes Legacy Act, a law meant to deal with contaminated sediment from years past. The Grand Calumet project so far has cost $72 million, about 65 percent of it federal money under the Legacy Act, which is part of the larger Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.

Another $75 million is needed to complete the project. Securing the full funding in the near future could be difficult given the federal budget crisis which is likely to mean moderate or even severe cuts to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.

State officials will closely monitoring the project for the next 40 years, repairing the cap on the river bottom if needed and continuing to remove invasive species and plant native species as necessary.

Under a consent decree with U.S. Steel, Higginbotham said, starting next year there will also be monitoring done on five miles of the east branch of the Grand Calumet, including a site in the middle portion of the Indiana Harbor which is at the river’s mouth into Lake Michigan.

“We’ll be looking at fish populations, fish tissue contaminant concentrations, sediment contaminant concentrations, water quality, general parameters, chemical parameters, macro-benthic populations, sediment toxicity,” said Smith.

Once the sewer, sediment removal and wetland work is done, the officials said, the river should be safer and more attractive for boaters. The beaches of Lake Michigan will become healthier for people and wildlife.

The Areas of Concern website notes that the Grand Calumet once supported “highly diverse, globally unique fish and wildlife communities,” and despite all the abuse “remnants of this diversity” still remain.

Theoretically it could be revived. Then ideally a paddling trip down the Grand Calumet into Lake Michigan will provide a view of both the area’s proud industrial history and the way a battered ecosystem can be nursed back to health.

Great Lakes Echo is a project of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University.

New potentially toxic algae turns up on Great Lakes beach

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 15:42:00 -0600

A new species is apparently making its way onto Great Lakes beaches, and it is potentially toxic.

Native to the southeastern United States, it is a blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, called Lyngbya wollei. It was first found in the Great Lakes region in the St. Lawrence Seaway in 2005. Then it was spotted in Lake Erie in 2006.

Now it has been identified at Lake St. Clair Metropark north of Detroit, according to Wayne State University ecologist Donna Kashian.

Her research paper on the finding is under review for publication in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Great Lakes Research.

Kashia first spotted the cyanobacteria in 2009 while documenting vegetation prior to an effort to remove an invasive shoreline weed from the park.

“Once we got there, it became obvious there was this other stuff all over the beach,” she said. She immediately recognized it as a type of Lyngbya. “It’s very distinctive. It washes up in balls, like pebbles. If you took coarse hair and rubbed it like Play-Doh between your hands into a ball and dyed it green, that’s exactly what it looks like.”

In 2010, she and several other researchers separately determined it was Lyngbya wollei, the same organism that has plagued waters in the southeastern United States for decades. It forms thick, nuisance blooms and releases toxins that can cause skin, oral and gastrointestinal inflammation.

Kashian suspects that the cyanobacteria entered the Great Lakes system by hitchhiking on the hulls of boats.

She has seen Lyngbya wollei at the park every year since her initialdiscovery. She noted an especially large amount in 2012, possibly due to the hot summer.

But it may have been around for some time.

For a decade or so, park staff have seen what is presumed to be the same cyanobacteria on the beach, although they never identified it, said Paul Muelle, chief of natural resources for the Huron Clinton Metroparks, which includes the Lake St. Clair park.

“We get some (every year), but since we clean the beach on a daily basis during the use season, it really hasn’t been a huge problem there,” he said. Because other weeds make up the bulk of the daily beach grooming, pinpointing the cost for removal of the cyanobacteria is difficult. Nonetheless, using information from Muelle, Kashian estimated that the park’s tab for removal of Lyngbya was about $10,000 in 2010.

“Where we are noticing it more is in the natural areas where we don’t do active management,” Muelle said. He described mats of Lyngbya wollei that extend “40-50 feet wide,” in the area of the park near Point Rosa Marsh.

“And it’s deep,” he said. “We had grass growing on the top of it. It looks like solid ground and I tried to walk out there, but you could go up to your waist in gook. It was pretty excessive.”

One concern is that Lyngbya will spread to other areas, particularly to shallow-water areas such as parts of Saginaw Bay and to inland lakes, Kashian said. The other concern is that it will produce toxins.

“It absolutely could become toxic here, but we don’t know enough about it,” Kashian said. She noted that even with the blooms of Microcystis, a different type of cyanobacteria that has been heavily studied, scientists still don’t know why only some blooms are toxic.

“They don’t know what triggers it to start producing toxins, and we know even less about Lyngbya than Microcystis,” she said.

While Lyngbya wollei typically carries a toxin in the southern United States, the Lake Erie sample was not toxic. Kashian’s funding didn’t cover toxicity research. Instead, she investigated if the cyanobacteria at the park harbor E. coli bacteria, a bacteria that often prompts beach closings.

“We found very high levels of bacteria in these mats,” she said. “That’s a problem because it’s all over the beach, and if you have a lot of bacteria and kids play on it, they can potentially get sick. In addition, if you have large deposits on the shore and there’s wave action, bacteria could actually be transported back into the lake and that could contribute to beach closures.”

The mats also disrupt water flow into and out of Point Rosa Marsh, Muelle said. Marsh-restoration is under way and the removal of the Lyngbya mats is part of that effort. At the swimming beach, “the question is how do we manage this,” Muelle said. “If there are problems, obviously we’re concerned about public contact.”

Kashian added, “It’s definitely an invasive, nuisance species worth watching, because it hasn’t been documented in the Great Lakes before the first sightings in the St. Lawrence.”

Great Lakes Echo is a project of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University.

Nuclear power: The ultimate near shore threat to the Great Lakes?

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 15:25:00 -0600

“I hope you rethink your really scary plan to bury radioactive waste located only half a mile from Lake Huron…”

That’s a concerned citizen responding to a Canadian nuclear power company’s proposal to store radioactive waste underground near Lake Huron for 100,000 years.

The best-known near shore threats to the Great Lakes are raw sewage and algae blooms. Both receive considerable attention from government agencies and accounts about them are regularly reported in the popular media.

The threat posed by the nuclear power plants that dot the region could easily trump both. It may be the ultimate near shore threat.

There are 33 nuclear reactors in the Great Lakes region, many of them near the water’s edge such as Palisades in Michigan.

After a seeming dormant period of public concern about nuclear power risks, awareness increased this past year. The Fukushima Japan meltdown is likely the reason. That incident played out in the news over weeks and impacted not only nearby residents and workers but food and water supplies. Remnant amounts of radioactivity eventually hit this nation’s west coast.

Closer to home, there has been increasing activity in Canada. In addition to the 100,000-year underground waste storage proposal, Bruce Power has sought permits to transport contaminated equipment on the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River to Sweden for decontamination.

That’s an issue for activist John Jackson.

He’s concerned about transporting nuclear waste on lakes and rivers because “most accidents happen near harbors” which means near population centers. Jackson is executive director of Great Lakes United, a bi-national group that focuses on Great Lakes issues.

His group, and others want the U.S. and Canada to assess ”the risks, threats and unknowns“ of nuclear power plants.

They have asked the International Joint Commission to request the U.S. and Canada to reinstate a task force for the assessment. The commission, which advises the countries on trans-border water issues, has declined.

“Traditionally, such references (requests) either come with funding to conduct the examination or direction as to how such a study would be funded,” said John Nevin a spokesperson for the commission.

“Short of such action by the governments, the commission continues to monitor this important issue and remains acutely aware of the concerns raised by the public on both sides of border.”

Jackson disagrees and says the commission “sets up task forces all the time.”

Illinois Senator concerned

The Zion Nuclear Station is equally 50 miles north of Chicago and south of Milwaukee on the shores of Lake Michigan.

“The Zion facility holds roughly 1,100 tons of nuclear waste just yards away from Lake Michigan,” says Nicole Barrett, a spokesperson for Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk.

“It’s critical the nation protects its water resources from nuclear contamination,” Barrett said. “We must find a safe, permanent storage facility for the country’s nuclear waste.”

Kirk has a keen interest in near shore Great Lakes issues including the dumping of billions of gallons of sewage into the lakes.

He is in a position to spotlight near shore threats as he co-chairs the senate Great Lakes Task Force with Michigan Sen. Carl Levin. The task force prioritizes and emphasizes Great Lakes issues in Congress.

A precautionary tool

A new addition to the recent update to the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement between the U.S. and Canada requires caution: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”

This precautionary approach seems tailor-made for nuclear issues like underground storage of waste. Who can say with certainty that it’s safe to store waste for 1,000 years let alone 100,000?

The test as always with the agreement is will the U.S. and Canada comply with the document of their own creation?

Understanding the advantages, risks and threats of nuclear energy is daunting. That may be why we don’t hear much about it until there is a problem. Then all hell breaks loose as with the Fukushima disaster.

Those of a certain age may remember Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island near disaster. A huge concern then was that we didn’t know what we didn’t know. And it’s inherent in us to fear the unknown, with justification, when it comes to nuclear power because of the potential for a loss of drinking water, evacuations and long-term threat of disease.

The Great Lakes region has a long history of neglecting or ignoring its environmental problems.

Palisades Nuclear Power Plant on Lake Michigan. Image: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission

The many legacy toxic hotspots that dot our shores were ignored for decades and it will be decades more before they’re cleaned up. That assumes we have the will to keep funding the effort.

Every year we continue to dump billions of gallons of sewage into our rivers and lakes because we won’t invest in infrastructure. That shows no signs of changing and those problems aren’t insurmountable, if we want to tackle them.

However they pale compared to the consequences of neglecting the nuclear waste storage and transport issues. The least the U.S. and Canada can do is assess those threats and unknowns.

Senators Kirk and Levin could easily use the gravitas of their offices to spotlight this issue and they should if their concern for the Great Lakes is more than perfunctory.

To neglect the nuclear threats that are literally on our shores…… that’s “really scary.”

Great Lakes Echo is a project of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University.

Keeping an eye on the Great Lakes 'canary'

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 09:43:00 -0600

Back in the 1970′s, Lake Erie – often referred to as the Great Lakes’ “canary in the coal mine” – was closely monitored by government agencies. As lake health improved, that scrutiny was gradually withdrawn and funds diverted elsewhere. But with the advent of new problems, from dead zones and algae blooms to invasive species like Asian carp, there are again many eyes on the lake. And the samplers are coming up with some surprising discoveries.

Amy Jo Klei grew up on Lake Erie and has been bringing her daughters here for years. But these days, she’s worried about the changes she’s seeing in the lake.

” When my daughters were little, the water was clear, and I said, oh, isn’t this great,” Klei said. “And the last few summers I’ve been up here, my heart is aching and I’m like, I’ve gotta fix this,” she said.

Klei is the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency’s Lake Erie manager. It’s her job to oversee a new three-year monitoring program to update conditions in the lake, funded by the federal Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. She’s out on the Black River, a Lake Erie tributary to take part in the latest sampling.

“And the purpose of this was to collect the water quality data to assess the current conditions of the lake, to help us be able to detect trends and changes as they happen” Klei said.

One of those changes has been massive harmful algae blooms, last seen in Lake Erie in the 1970′s. Those blooms have hurt water quality and cost lake users – from water treatment plants to charter boat captains – tens of thousands of dollars a year. Klei says the algae issue, along with other emerging challenges to Lake Erie’s health, have re-focused bi-national cooperation on lake monitoring in a way that’s never been seen before. She cites a recent water quality agreement signed this fall between the US and Canada.

“One of those, under the near shore annex of the new agreement, is the requirement to develop a comprehensive monitoring framework for Lake Erie,” Klei said. “And I’m sure our work here and our monitoring will certainly be a key piece of that, along with our other state and Ontario partners. ”

Ohio EPA biologist Scott Winkler is checking on wildlife quality on the bottom of the Black River, a Lake Erie tributary.

Among those partners are the US EPA, the US Fish & Wildlife Service, state Departments of Natural Resources from Michigan, Indiana and Ohio, Ohio Sea Grant, and research institutions like Heidelberg University of Ohio, Ohio State University’s Stone Lab, and the Universityof Toledo. Canada is also a new partner. At the fall Great Lakes Week conference in Cleveland, Michael Goffin, regional director for Environment Canada in Ontario, said his government is now committed to new algae testing on Lake Erie.

”It’s in place this year and the funding continues for the next four years,” Goffin said. ” That’ll allow us to achieve the commitment within the amended Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement to have new targets in place within three years of entry into force of that agreement, ” he said.

But three or four years may not be long enough to chart the course of changes in Lake Erie, some of which are also occurring in other Great Lakes’ bays and near shore areas. Ohio EPA biologist Scott Winkler says one of the things he’s discovered from recent monitoring with new federally-funded equipment is that harmful algae blooms, previously thought to be primarily surface phenomena, may be far more complex, especially for the millions of people who get their drinking water from the lake.

"Quite often, at water intakes, where they’re drawing water from the lakes, the level where they’re drawing water intakes, even when we don’t see anything at the surface, we do see the toxin produced by this algae, microcystin, is in the water sample,” Winkler said. “Yet when you look at the water, it looks clear, it looks nice, everything looks fine. Through this sampling, we’re seeing that one of the potential reasons for this increase is that all of the algae is down there, at the level where this intake is drawing it in,” he said.

Scott Winkler is an Ohio EPA biologist who’s been monitoring the Black River, a Lake Erie tributary, for the last 3 years.

Winkler and Klei say that new state and federal water quality monitoring on Lake Erie will likely continue beyond current federal funding, set to expire next year. In the meantime, Klei says all eyes are on Lake Erie. She’s even got charter captains testing for signs of algae.

“These guys live on the lake, they’ve been on it their whole lives,” Klei said. “They know when change is happening, they know when something unusual is going on. It’s just been really helpful. ”

Great Lakes Echo is a project of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University.

How to build a better ditch. No, really.

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 06:00:00 -0500

Andy Ward remembers the day he drove through the Darby Creek watershed – the day that convinced him to build a better ditch.

It was the mid-‘90s, and the 560 square miles of Ohio land that feeds in the Big and Little Darby Creeks was one of the most diverse aquatic systems in the Midwest. Ward, a professor at Ohio State University’s College of Food, Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, wanted to know how he could best protect the creek and its tributaries from farm runoff and other pollution that threatened life in the waterways. In excess, chemicals like phosphorous can lead to a massive overgrowth of algae, choking off other plant and animal life in and around the Great Lakes and as far south as the Gulf of Mexico.

As Ward and a colleague drove past some of the local farms, they debated the merits of buffer strips – areas of soil and vegetation meant to separate farm fields from the surrounding landscape and absorb runoff. “Buffer strips were the new thing on the block at the time,” Ward explained, and farmers were being offered financial incentives to build them.

But what did that matter, Ward wondered, if most farmers also used a series of underground drains to draw excess water away from their crops? If the drains ran under the fields they would also run right underneath the buffer strips.

“How much value [were they] really going to provide,” Ward asked, “if a good portion of the flow went right underneath them?”

The farms’ underground drains would often empty into ditches – some as big as 15 or 16 feet wide – that ran around the fields and fed into the watershed. As Ward and his colleague rounded a corner, they saw a bulldozer clearing out one such ditch, ripping out giant clumps of grass and other vegetation and mounds of sediment that had built up over time, fed by nutrients and run-off water.

“I turned to the person I was with and asked, ‘Is that a common practice in the Midwest, to totally remove everything that was in the ditch?’ ‘Oh yeah that happens a lot. In fact, there are maintenance programs in which the county will come and do that.’"

Ward was shocked. “That’s crazy!” he recalled telling his colleague. “We’re providing incentives to grow grass at the top of the ditch, yet a lot of the flow is going underneath that grass. Then we’re paying people to rip out the grass where the water is actually ending up! It just made no sense to me,” Ward said.

Farmers needed ditches to catch excess water and move it away from crops. But was there a way to design a more environmentally-friendly ditch?

It wasn’t just a crazy dream. Ward and his colleagues came up with what they called a two-stage ditch. Whereas a conventional ditch is a narrow, muddy, waterslide of a tube, channeling water and all of its contents straight through to larger streams and rivers, the two-stage ditch looked like an overgrown series of large steps. Water would flow through the narrow bottom of the ditch, but a flat “bench” of soil above the water, planted with grass and other vegetation, would absorb water and act as a flood plain during times of heavy rain. Rather than fighting nature, Ward figured they could let nature help protect itself.

But what would the farmers and landowners think? According to the environmental advocacy group the Nature Conservancy, at $10-$12 per linear foot, two-stage ditches are vastly more expensive to build than conventional ditches, which cost only $1 to $1.50 per square foot. But two-stage ditches are expected to last a lot longer (around 30 years). The Conservancy argues that “one option is immediate” while “the other is permanent.”

In 2007 the Joyce Foundation (which also supports editorial initiatives at WBEZ) gave $5 million in grants to the Nature Conservancy and three other groups to, in part, help build two-stage ditches in Indiana, Michigan and Ohio around the Wabash River watershed. And Kevin Willibey, a farmer who owns land near Ohio’s Fish Creek, built two-stage ditches on his property after seeing a pitch from Ward and his colleagues.

Willibey’s testimonial is included in a short film produced by the Nature Conservancy. Hear him explain why he feels good about the switch in the audio below:

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Andy Ward spoke at an event presented by the Peggy Notebart Nature Museum earlier this month. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

Feds, 5 states to push for Great Lakes wind farms

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:37:00 -0500

The Obama administration and five states have agreed to speed up approval of offshore wind farms in the Great Lakes.

There are no wind turbines in the lakes at present. Proposals have met fierce opposition from people worried the structures would ruin views and harm the environment.

Under the deal, federal and state agencies will develop a plan to speed regulatory review of proposed offshore wind farms. Officials say the projects would have to meet safety and environmental standards.

States that signed the deal include Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania.

Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin declined.

Administration officials disclosed the agreement to The Associated Press before a scheduled announcement Friday.