Creepy Carp Story Gets Ever Creepier

Rat has been keeping you apprised a fellow vermin’s progress (hmm, “Vermin’s Progress” – possible book title) up the Mississippi, up the Illinois River -- and now just one great leap over an electric fence and through a few easy-to-pass-through navigation locks, to clean new territory -- Lake Michigan.

Not to be alarmist or anything, but get ready, Cheeseheads: these finned monsters could be headed your way via your favorite river if they get to Lake Michigan: West Bend, Appleton, Mequon, Packwaukee, Portage.

First, the biology of this vermin’s progress, and then some “human geology,” and then the politics. They have found DNA evidence of Asian carp well past the electric fence (barrier) on the Illinois River. First they found some in a shipping channel well away from Lake Michigan. Now it is reported that more Asian carp DNA is found north of the city of Chicago. That’s one long haul from the Illinois River, and that’s creepy.

Here’s the human geology part, if you can call it that. Chicago did not want to dump its shit into its drinking water, so it re-engineered the Chicago River to flow away from Lake Michigan and to the Illinois River. Because that route has now been developed, the Asian carp has an entry ramp to Lake Michigan, and of course to every river that feeds it.

Now for the politics. A bunch of Great Lakes states wants to crack open a century-old agreement that lets Chicago do what I described above – send trillions of gallons of water a year out of Lake Michigan and down the Mississippi.

Them’s HUGE fightin’ words for Illinois – including the state’s current favorite son, Barack Obama, whose solicitor general got the administration behind Illinois’ pathetically weak case to not revisit that water agreement because the state thinks the Asian carp is no big deal.

People are starting to ask whether the Obama regime’s big investment in funding for the Great Lakes might be money down a sewage canal if the Asian carp gets established in Lake Michigan (and presumably in other Great Lakes). Scientists seem to disagree just how much they’ll take over.

But check any video on YouTube these days and watch these critters. You decide if you think they might do just fine if they found their way up, say, the Root River at Racine.

Last word: Rat’s not nostalgic about the golden age of the newspaper, but I do lament the loss of good hard-headed reporting and journalism. It seems alive and well, at least for this topic, with superb reporting about if by Dan Egan of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Here’s that paper’s latest coverage of where they found carp DNA. http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/81177687.html

PCB-ilities

PCB Dredges in Little Lake Butte des Morts (Lower Fox River)

When it comes to poisons, Rat fears warfarin like Superman fears kryptonite. For you humans in Wisconsin, warfarin is a rat poison developed at the UW-Madison decades ago. It's a blood-thinner that makes rodents bleed to death. Now some of you take it for your heart problems -- in limited doses, of course.

I digress, but only so far, as I talkin' human health today -- I'm talkin' PCBs. Of all the toxic nasties dumped into rivers, PCBs were the baddest: insidious, highly toxic, very persistent, and very mobile once they end up in river sediments or groundwater.

More Wisconsin history for you: paper helped build this state. We had trees for raw material, cheap and willing immigrant labor, and there were the rivers to dam up to supply water and power for the paper mills. In the 1950s and '60s, the paper industry used PCBs for a process that's now obsolete, but the damage they wrought still haunts: there are PCBs in the Fox River, from Appleton downstream to well into Green Bay.

Here's the good news: they are getting cleaned up, slowly but surely, and that clean-up got a boost recently when a federal judge ruled that companies only very distantly responsible for dumping PCBs in the Fox River are NOT repsonsible for paying to clean them up. The two companies that WERE largely responsible -- Appleton Papers Inc. and NCR Corp. -- continue to dodge their responsibility, and may appeal the judge's decision. http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/79435147.html'

There are a lot of people unhappy with the progress on the PCB clean-up on the Fox, as well they should; it has been long, expensive, contentious and arduous. But as my rat mother used to say when something bad happened to me, "It could be worse." As for PCBs in rivers, there is a "worse," and it is in New York and Connecticut.

The cover story of the December 2009 edition of Harper's magazine explains, in toxic detail, how General Electric, having dumped untold tons of PCBs in the river and in the ground surrounding their plants on the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers, have cozily colluded with state and federal regulators to pretend they're cleaning up the PCBs with a little dredging here and some monitoring over there. But those rivers, and the people using them and leaving near those plants, will have the spectre of PCBs over them for decades. GE is NOT bringing that good thing to life.

Going Thirsty in the Central Sands

Rat's muskratty relatives have been corresponding lately from the central sands area of Wisconsin, where they've noticed that there's no water in some places where it used to be -- and there's no drought going on.

In the central sands, the water table is as close to the surface as a layer of paint on drywall, and hundreds of millions of gallons of water get sprinkled on sweet corn and snap peas that end up in the canned and frozen vegetable section of grocery stores. My city cousins tell me that in the village of Plover, they can't seem to build enough industrial parks and outlet malls, and they wonder what that all will do to the water supply.

Rat hears that the River Alliance and other groups are working on legislation that would keep better track of where groundwater is coming from, and where it's going. Good idea -- problem is, there's no house-burning-down crisis that justifies action by legislators. This is thinking about the future -- something that doesn't happen much under the Dome.

There's a good review of the issue in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Props for POPS

I was dawdling up around Stevens Point on Saturday November 14, hoping to absorb a little knowledge from the hallowed halls of the local university in those parts, when I stumbled on an event that was right up a river rat's alley. The Politics of Phosphorus Citizens' Summit, hosted by the hard-working River Alliance of Wisconsin.

A day long powwow about the negative effects of phosphorus pollution on our rivers and streams...music to my ears. Toxic blue green algae has become a scourge of Wisconsin's waters over the years (not to mention the fur of one river rat), and it's a problem that can seem insurmountable to the average citizen. So it was a great idea for River Alliance to give those citizens...paddlers, anglers, business owners...a chance to get together and share a bit about their experiences with this noxious by-product of phosphorus runoff. And to maybe get working on a few solutions.

A lot was said during the 6 hours of the summit, and I won't try and recreate it all. But you can find out what went on by clicking here. The busy rats at River Alliance HQ have posted a nice set of notes, summaries and summations from the summit, including some pretty flash and dash Powerpoint presentations. Enjoy.

And Happy Thanksgiving to all you river lovers out there. Safe travels and safe returns.

A Lot to Carp About...

We're welcoming a guest post today, from River Alliance aquatic invasive species chief Laura MacFarland, alerting all you readers to a very scary threat to the Great Lakes--Asian Carp. These huge, hungry invaders are something right out of a river horror movie, and action is needed to get the authorities that be to do what needs to be done (isn't it always?...) to stop the Carp's spread. Read on, river rats, read on...

"The Army Corps and Notre Dame University has detected DNA evidence of Asian Carp ABOVE the electric barriers in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, the Cal-Sag Channel and the Calumet River. That means the fish could be within 6 miles of Lake Michigan with only navigational locks (insufficient barriers) standing in their way.

The River Alliance of Wisconsin is writing the Council of Great Lakes Governors to encourage them to ask the Federal Government to declare a state of emergency, which will allow Federal agencies to enact emergency measures to prevent the invasion of Asian carp from the Chicago Shipping and Sanitary Canal into Lake Michigan and the Great Lakes.

The federal government must declare a state of emergency, so that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Coast Guard have the authority to do what is necessary to stop the Asian carp from entering the Great Lakes. This is the opportune time for such measures because of the planned shut down of the electric barrier on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal for maintenance, and due to recently revealed hydrological connections between the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal (CSSC) with the Des Plaines River and the Illinois & Michigan Canal (I & M Canal) during high flows and possibly low flows as well.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/70573047.html

Call your member of Congress AND the Director of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and urge them to:

- Tell the Corps to immediately close all controlling locks in Chicago waterways that lead to Lake Michigan.

- Tell the Corps to take any and all monitoring and control efforts to keep the Asian carp at bay and the Great Lakes safe.

- The risk is too great to delay taking action, we must act today to save the Great Lakes from this devastating invasive species.

To reach your member of US Congress, you may call the Capitol Switchboard at: 202-224-3121

To reach IL DNR Director Marc Miller, you may call 217-785-0075"

Check out the video clip below to see just how dangerous these interlopers are:

Sacrificing rivers? And why not a lake or six, too?

Rat has been reading with great interest the most recent issue of The Flow, the River Alliance's newsletter. This issue is all about the connection between food, farming and rivers. Lot's of intriguing stuff in there...not the least of all the comment made by a "high level" state official, who thinks, “We may have to sacrifice a few rivers to grow the food we need to grow.” Well, at least now we know where some of our "leaders" stand, I suppose.

I was a little suspect when I read in there that, "Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't" -- "it" being a lot of groundwater pumping for agriculture drying up lakes and rivers in sandy central Wisconsin. For the Rat, it's obvious -- you pump a bunch of water through big wells, you're bound to dry up the nearby lakes and rivers that depend on that very same groundwater.

Wisconsin Public Television's latest entry in water issues takes on the delusion, expressed in their piece by a potato farmer, that we have plenty of water and don't worry, be happy. In central Wisconsin, we have a case of good science undermining the myth and, implicitly asking, "Whose water is it, anyway?" Watch and learn: http://wpt2.org/npa/IW808.CFM

Great Great Lakes Reporting

Zebra mussels getting cozy (too cozy) in Lake Keesus in Waukesha County
(photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Of all the laments about the demise of the daily newspaper, one of the most salient is the loss of good, factual, analytical reporting. For all their ubiquity (and their iniquities), Rat fully understands that blogs – even this one – are not journalism.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Dan Egan served up some fine reporting lately, however – reporting with a bit of an edge. In the October 27 edition, Egan asked the question that’s gotta be asked: what will $475 million of federal money for saving the Great Lakes really get us? Probably not what’s needed most – enforcement of existing laws. Read the sobering conclusion from his reporting here.

He keeps up the drumbeat in a follow-up story zeroing on invasive critters that hitchhike from foreign ports and get dumped into the Great Lakes, the most infamous of which is the zebra mussel.

To Egan’s point again: the zebra mussel is out of the barn door (can you say that?), and the new federal largess won’t touch this problem. In this case, it’s not the lack of enforcement, but a lack of good laws in the first place to keep nasty bilge water from being dumped in the Great Lakes.

Rat can’t imagine why a relatively tiny industry like Great Lakes shippers have such a grip on the tillers of Congress and state legislatures. (It’s not like they’re running casinos.)

Yet, lawmakers continue to refuse to regulate these ships. Their cargo could get moved around the Great Lakes by train or truck cheaper anyway. What gives? Maybe they're swept up in the romance of the high seas. Maybe they're in the hip pocket of the zebra mussel lobby. Or maybe they've listened to The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald one too many times and have lost all perspective. We might never know why they're so reticent to regulate this industry and the many menaces it's responsible for dumping in the Great Lakes. But we do know one thing...

....better start getting used to zebra mussels...and little else... in Wisconsin's inland waters...