By Dan Egan of the Journal Sentinel
Posted: Dec. 2, 2009 3:54 p.m.
Even as hundreds of fishery workers begin to poison the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal in a desperate attempt to keep Asian carp from invading the Great Lakes, Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm hopes to open a new front in the fight.
She wants the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to take emergency action to shut the navigational locks in the Chicago area that are now believed to be the only thing standing between the invading fish and Lake Michigan, and she's asking Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox to take the case into court -the U.S. Supreme Court.
The reason the fish are poised to colonize the Great Lakes, Granholm argues, can be traced back to Chicago's construction of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal over a century ago. The canal, built to carry Chicago sewage away from Lake Michigan, created an artificial connection between the Great Lakes basin and the Mississippi River basin.
Cox late Wednesday said he was contacting officials with the Army Corps and state of Illinois to demand a full explanation of their immediate plans to stop the carp, and a news release issued from his office said he is "prepared to take whatever legal action is necessary to protect the Great Lakes."
Other Great Lakes states, including Wisconsin, didn't appreciate Chicago's decision to divert billions of gallons of Lake Michigan water each day into the Mississippi basin, and they sued last century in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
The court decreed in 1967 the Chicago diversion could continue, provided it was capped at certain level. Today that level is 2.1 billion gallons per day. But the lawsuit isn't closed; the justices ruled that the states that sued can bring the case back into court if they believe the Chicago diversion is causing damage to the shared Great Lakes.
Granholm thinks the looming threat of Asian carp swimming up the canal and into Lake Michigan fits that definition, and beyond closing the navigational locks - only a temporary solution to the problem - she wants to use the lawsuit to explore forcing Illinois to permanently sever the artificial link between the two grand drainage basins.
"Ultimately, the responsibility for the Asian carp threat attaches to the diversion of Great Lakes waters that has been sought by the state of Illinois and allowed to proceed by the U.S. Supreme Court," Granholm wrote to Attorney General Cox Wednesday. "While the diversion has been allowed by the court, it has acknowledged that damage due to the diversion relates to fishing, among other things."
A permanent separation of the two basins would have dramatic impacts on the barge industry that relies on the canal to move goods in the Chicago area, as well as between the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. It would also force significant changes in the way Chicago manages its sewage.
Conservationists, however, have argued that the costs of keeping the drainages connected will also be staggering because the canal has become a revolving door for invasive species to move back and forth between two of the continent's most important watersheds. Those species include the round goby, quagga and zebra mussels, and now possibly the super-sized carp.
The Army Corps has already begun exploring the possibility of such a separation.
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