CHICAGO — It might be back to the drawing board for the Army Corps of Engineers’ sweeping proposal to spend billions of dollars and 25 years to block an Asian-carp invasion of the Great Lakes.
Buried within the corps’ 10,000-page study are controversial — if not inaccu rate — interpretations of federal and state water laws that are driving much of the project’s astronomical costs and epic timeline.
The bulk of the corps’ $15 billion-plus estimate to restore the natural separation between the Lake Michigan and Mississippi River watersheds is yoked to projects that critics say have little to do with directly stopping invasive species.
They include $12 billion to build things such as reservoirs, sewer tunnels and water-treatment plants, as well as remove contaminated river sediment.
“The media has fixated on the $15 (billion) to $18 billion figure, and a number of politicians equate that with the price tag for (watershed) separation,” said Tim Eder, executive director of the Great Lakes Commission, a body appointed by the region’s governors and legislatures.
“We don’t accept that. We think that’s based on flawed assumptions.”
Chicago dug its canals more than a century ago to reverse the flow of its namesake river — and all the sewage discharged into it — away from Lake Michigan and into the Mississippi River basin.
Governors and regional political leaders have grown increasingly concerned about these canals as global trade has made the waterways a man-made conduit for things such as the jumbo carp from China and a fish-killing virus from the Atlantic to migrate between two of America’s grandest watersheds.
This is how zebra and quagga mussels made their way out of the Great Lakes and into the Mississippi basin, which sprawls across 40 percent of the continental United States, from Montana to New York to Texas.
This is why 17 attorneys general — from such far-flung states as Arizona — demanded in 2011 that the Army Corps expedite the study on how to re-separate the watersheds.
And this is the reason all 16 U.S. senators from Great Lakes states wrote the Army Corps in November urging it to move quickly to close the “invasive-species superhighway.”
The Army Corps originally planned to complete the $25 million study in 2015, but with Asian carp knocking on the door to the lakes, Congress demanded it be finished by the end of 2013.
The study contains eight scenarios to block the rapacious Asian carp species that threaten the lakes’ ecology and multibillion-dollar fishery.
The two options that have drawn the most attention call for restoring the natural divide between the two watersheds — because this would be the most-effective way to halt the transfer of unwanted species and because those options call for so much money and time.
“The assumptions used in the report create the impression that the corps thinks this situation is not urgent. Well it is,” Eder said. “We need action and we don’t have 25 years to wait.”
Why? In Ohio, Asian carp are deemed a dire threat to Lake Erie’s $11.5 billion annual tourism industry because they out-compete native fish for food. The same can be said for each of the Great Lakes.
Problems with the plan start with the Army Corps’ definition of pollution.
First, the agency assumes that if Chicago’s sanitary canals are dammed so that some portion of their flows enters Lake Michigan, the water leaving Chicago’s sewage plants in that direction must be clean enough, essentially, to drink.
“The anti-degradation regulations under the Clean Water Act restrict the addition of significant pollutant loads” to Lake Michigan, said Army Corps study leader Dave Wethington.
Then, because it would be wildly expensive — if not impossible — to use a sterilization process such as reverse osmosis to clean those sewer-plant discharges to virtual drinking-water quality, the agency is proposing a labyrinth of tunnels to continue sending the discharges into the Mississippi basin.
Other tunnels would carry away from the lake the city’s sewer overflows that currently go straight into the Mississippi-bound canals.
But if Chicago were allowed to discharge a portion of its highly treated effluent into the lake — as do Milwaukee, Toronto, Detroit, Cleveland and every other major Great Lakes city — the project’s cost would plummet.
Critics say what the Army Corps has ignored is that Asian carp also are an added pollution load, one that could be far worse than highly treated effluent. The Army Corps didn’t factor the carp into any future pollution load equation because the carp cannot be considered a type of pollution, Wethington said.
“The definition of pollutant under the Clean Water Act does not include living organisms,” he said.
Nonsense, says Noah Hall, a Great Lakes water-law expert and Wayne State University law professor.
“The corps’ statement is flat-out wrong. The Clean Water Act definitely includes biological pollutants, and courts have consistently interpreted living and dead biota as pollutants,” Hall said.
The idea of invasive species as a pollutant was, in fact, the essence of a landmark lawsuit brought against the shipping industry more than a decade ago. A federal judge ruled in 2005 that ship owners must treat their invasive-species-contaminated ballast-water discharges like other pollutants under the Clean Water Act.
Critics say that in choosing not to view Asian carp as a pollutant, the Army Corps backed itself into a corner when considering canal-problem solutions.
“The assumption of ‘no return flow’ to the Great Lakes — no matter how clean and well-treated — and the assumption that invasive species are not serious pollutants — no matter how dangerous — skews the analysis and limits the solutions to impractical and exorbitantly expensive proposals,” said Henry Henderson, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council who has served as Chicago’s commissioner of environment.
“It’s a deeply ironic — if not cynical — use of environmental principles to block an environmental solution.”
David Ullrich is a former deputy regional director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who now leads a group representing Great Lakes mayors. His group worked with the Great Lakes Commission in 2012 to fund their own study exploring how to repair the divide between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi basin.
That study concluded the project could be done for as little as $4.25 billion and that canal dams could be in place in a matter of years, not decades.
Every other Great Lakes city cleans its sewage in a multistage process that screens and settles out the solids, unleashes microbes to digest the leftover waste and then disinfects the water.
What comes out the end of those sewage-treatment-plant pipes is, under normal operating conditions, water clean enough to not harm Great Lakes beachgoers. It’s also clean enough, with dilution, for the lakes to remain a drinking-water source for cities from Toronto to Milwaukee to Duluth, Minn.
Chicago’s canals have long allowed the city to not disinfect its sewage.
It removes the big stuff but sends bacteria-laden discharges back into the canals to let nature bake it out on its way toward New Orleans.
Jim Ridgway is an environmental engineer and board chairman for the Alliance for the Great Lakes who worked on Ullrich’s earlier study.
He said the Army Corps’ plan to stop the carp not only would subsidize an upgrade of Chicago’s wastewater system to catch up with the rest of America, it would build a wastewater conveyance, storage and treatment system like no other.
Just as frustrating to study critics is the proposal to capture sewer overflows in reservoirs and then pump that water back to treatment plants once the storm subsides. This is not driven by the need to protect the city’s Lake Michigan drinking-water supply.
This means the plan calls for spending decades to build a reservoir system that would help protect water quality in the Mississippi-bound canals. The same canals where right now, every day, Chicago flushes fecal-laced sewage discharges.
Another controversial assumption is the plan’s approximately $2 billion cleanup of contaminated sediments in canal and river segments that lie east of the proposed dams, where water flows would be reversed toward Lake Michigan. The Army Corps maintains this is needed to meet water laws protecting Lake Michigan.
Critics say contaminated sediments in Chicago waterways are an environmental problem whichever way the water flows. Their removal, like that of PCB-laden mud in the Fox River near Green Bay, Wis., is a separate issue from stopping the carp.
Yet another factor driving the project’s astronomical cost is that Chicago would not be able to send sewer overflows into Lake Michigan.
All Great Lakes cities — even Chicago — use their lake as a safety valve to alleviate street flooding and basement backups by discharging untreated sewage straight into the lakes after big storms.
When exceptionally heavy rains hit Chicago, canal navigation locks along the lakeshore are opened to allow storm water and sewer overflows to spill into Lake Michigan, instead of city streets and basements. But even with this practice, flooding remains a chronic problem in the Chicago area.
Joel Brammeier, president of the Alliance for the Great Lakes, said it would be great to eliminate sewer overflows, flooding and contaminated river sediments in Chicago.
But, he said, these things are not about stopping Asian carp.