http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/78425727.htmlLockport, Ill. - Fish are floating in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal in one of the nation's largest ever river poisoning operations - and at least one of those fish is a confirmed Asian carp.
"We got a bighead carp toward the end of the day," John Rogner of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources said late Thursday afternoon.
Thousands of gallons of fish poison, called rotenone, was dumped in the canal around 8 p.m. Wednesday in a drastic attempt to destroy every fish in a six-mile stretch of waterway so an electric fish barrier on the canal can be turned off for maintenance.
That barrier is considered the last chance to protect the Great Lakes from the oversize, jumping carp that biologists say could ravage the lakes' $7 billion fishery.
Leaders of the operation now expected to cost about $3 million were predicting about 200,000 pounds worth of several species of fish, including at least some Asian carp, to surface by Sunday, and they said early Thursday morning everything was going according to plan.
They said they know the poison is working because they have placed live common carp in traps along the canal to serve as sentinels.
"We're seeing kills in all of those, so we're confident we have a complete mixing" of poison, Rogner said.
Rogner said large numbers of fish didn't begin to surface until after 7 a.m. Thursday. The theory is the poison is driving fish down the canal in search of safe water, but eventually the fish run out of places to swim. The biggest kill is expected once the slug of poisoned river reaches the Lockport Lock and Dam, about six miles downstream from the electric barrier. There the fish will have nowhere to go but backward, into the poison.
"We expect very large numbers down there," Rogner said, standing on the edge of the brown water flowing down a canal that opened in 1900 to carry Chicago's sewage away from its drinking water intakes in Lake Michigan.
Behind him fishery crews wearing respirators and lime green safety vests dumped buckets of poison in a side channel to ensure all stretches of the canal are thick with rotenone.
A different chemical will be dumped in the canal at the Lockport dam to neutralize the poison.
Nobody wanted this to happen, but biologists say they've been backed into a corner. Water samples taken from the canal last summer revealed the presence of Asian carp DNA just below the barrier, though no actual Asian carp have been found above the Lockport dam.
Now the $9 million, fish-shocking barrier needs to be turned off for a checkup and regular maintenance.
The barrier, which was turned on in April, will need to be shut down about every six months for two or three days of maintenance, something officials with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which operates the barrier, said they didn't realize until the barrier builders informed them just prior to it being turned on.
So the only choice they have is to clear the river of all fish so there is no risk of any sneaking above the barrier while it's shut down.
The poisoning had been planned for the past month, but things got even stickier two weeks ago when new water samples revealed the presence of Asian carp above the barrier, only about six miles from the shore of Lake Michigan.
Officials are still pondering how to address that threat; they could do more poisoning, or shocking, or they could order navigational locks shut in an attempt to seal off the lakes from the fish. They could do a combination of all three.
But in the meantime they say they need to shut down the barrier because that is the only thing that will prevent large numbers of fish from moving up the canal and into the lakes. Biologists say it won't be "game over" for the Great Lakes if a small population reaches Lake Michigan. They say the fish need to arrive in the lake in big numbers to establish a self-sustaining population.
Severing river/lake link
Politicians, meanwhile, have grown exasperated by the situation. On Wednesday, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm called on the Michigan attorney general to re-open a court case governing the operation of the canal, which created an artificial link between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basin.
She wants him to explore the possibility of permanently severing that link, which would result in severe disruption to the barge industry that relies on the canal, as well as force dramatic - and likely expensive - changes in the way Chicago handles its sewage.
Army Corps officials say no option is off the table in the fight to protect the Great Lakes, and they have already begun to explore the costs and benefits of re-establishing the natural separation between the Great Lakes and Mississippi basin.
Army Corps officials have declined to speculate how the fish might have made it past the barrier. The one plausible explanation is they were not operating it at a level strong enough to repel all sizes of Asian carp until August, when the newly developed DNA tests first detected the fish within several miles of the barrier.
Previous fish-shocking surveys had showed the carp stalled for several years about 20 miles below the barrier.
The new DNA tests are being supervised by David Lodge at the University of Notre Dame, who in October declined to talk to the Journal Sentinel about what they entail and why they are appropriate to be used for fishery management decisions.
Lodge has, however, gone into detail about the science behind his findings with state and federal officials responsible for dealing with the carp problem. They have characterized it as quality work.
As the day wore on before the first dead bighead carp was confirmed, fishery officials stressed the results of the DNA tests did not necessarily drive their decision to poison the river. They said they likely would have made the decision anyway, since fish have been found about seven miles from the barrier.
"It's better to be safe than sorry," said Charles Wooley, deputy regional director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
But some Thursday were already sorry for how far things have gotten in what can only be described as a slow-motion ecological disaster.
Two species of Asian carp, silver and bighead, were first imported by an Arkansas fish farmer decades ago. A 2006 Journal Sentinel investigation revealed he promptly handed the unwanted fish over to Arkansas fishery officials. They, in turn, used those fish in sewage treatment experiments that were partially funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Those fish were among the first known to have escaped into the wild.
Everybody knew the day would come when the northward-migrating carp would eventually be busting down the door of the Great Lakes. Now that day is here - and on Thursday there were about 300 state, federal and Canadian fishery workers doing everything to keep that door shut.
"This is what happens when you don't pay the slightest attention to prevention," Marc Gaden, spokesman for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, said while standing on the canal wall.
Below him flopped about dozen white-bellied little fish.
