Great Lakes could be region of troubled waters, writer warns

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has an interview with author Peter Annin about his timely book about the coming Great Lakes water wars:

The title is trying to convince people to read a book that they otherwise might not read, and the water diversion issue in the Great Lakes basin is the spotted owl issue of this region - very polarizing, very bitter, and for the people who have their opinions about this issue, they are very strongly held.

Q. Do you see Wisconsin as a future battleground?

A. There is no doubt southeast Wisconsin is the front lines in the Great Lakes water wars because so many communities there are sitting on either contaminated or declining - or both - groundwater resources. This is where the next forays into this water war are going to take place. We've seen it with Waukesha. We've seen it with New Berlin, and we saw it in 1989 with Pleasant Prairie.

Q. Are the Great Lakes seriously jeopardized by thirsty communities outside their basin?

A. For those who say the Great Lakes are too big to be damaged, do what I did: travel to the Aral Sea (in central Asia). Once the fourth-largest inland body of water in the world, in my lifetime, four decades, it has been decimated and has now lost 75% of its surface area and 90% of its volume. It shows, indeed, large lakes can be drained by man. They aren't invincible.

Q. What's it like standing on the bottom of a great lake?

A. Trying to describe what the Aral Sea is like is one of the most frustrating exercises of my journalism career. When you drive for five hours on the old seabed in a Russian jeep from the old shoreline to the new shoreline, how do you quantify that to somebody who has never been there? How do you describe the magnitude of the problem when you stop and get out and look around in all directions of the compass and you can't see water anywhere and you know it was once 45 to 50 feet deep over your head?

Nuclear dump triggers protest

The Port Huron Times-Herald carries this article about a proposed nuclear waste dump situated in Ontario less than a mile from Lake Huron:

Activists, politicians, and citizens groups from the United States and Canada voiced their opposition Oct. 23 to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission regarding a proposal to create a nuclear-waste storage site under Kincardine, Ontario.

Kincardine is on Lake Huron, about three hours northeast of Port Huron. Local officials fear the repository could contaminate the lake and other local waterways.

Ontario Power Generation has applied for regulatory approval to build a storage facility deep underground for low- and intermediate-level radioactive wastes generated at the Bruce nuclear plant site in Tiverton, Ontario. The facility also would take wastes from other nuclear facilities in Ontario.

Before the project moves forward, it must pass an environmental-impact study. The nuclear-safety commission is expected to outline requirements of the study within the next six weeks.

The environmental assessment, usually done by environmental experts hired by the nuclear industry, could take until 2011. If satisfied with the assessment results, the commission would grant a construction license.

John Earl, spokesman for Ontario Power Generation, said the storage facility could be operational in 2017.

Bruce nuclear plant officials acknowledged in 2002 that ground water near homes in Kincardine, Ont., tested positive for radioactive waste.

A Wave of Woes for the Great Lakes

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel covers the three day conference on the health of the Great Lakes:

More than 300 Great Lakes experts are gathered in Milwaukee this week for what is essentially a two-year checkup on the health of the world's largest freshwater ecosystem. The conference kicked off with an overview of some of the major issues facing the Great Lakes basin, which holds about 20% of the world's surface freshwater and is a source of drinking water for about 40 million people.

From the rise of invasive species to the prospect of falling water levels to the paving of coastal habitats and the apparent - and perplexing - meltdown of the bottom of the food chain in Lake Huron, most all the news was grim.

Among the most alarming of the problems detailed Wednesday is the disappearance in many areas of Lake Huron of tiny species that are a critical source of nutrition that most every fish in the lake directly or indirectly depends on. The drop is likely tied to the arrival of invasive mussels, though the direct link has yet to be established. The result, however, is a dramatic loss in biomass from the bottom of the food web. Lake Huron is, according to a presentation by Carri Lohse-Hanson of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, beginning to resemble the much less productive waters of Lake Superior, the biggest and coldest of the Great Lakes.

The news isn't all bad for the lakes. The latest studies show that concentrations of some of the nastiest chemical pollutants have dropped substantially since the 1970s. And, thanks largely to water treatment facilities, the lakes remain a healthy source of drinking water. Projects to remove toxic sediments are also under way.

Caught, but not released

The Detroit Free Press has this article on invasive species and bans on regional shipping:

When a new disease called viral hemorrhagic septicemia apparently was brought into the Great Lakes from the oceans and killed a couple of thousand muskellunge in Lake St. Clair last spring, fisheries biologists hoped it was a transitory event that would blow over.

Now, VHS has infected up to 27 freshwater fish species from St. Clair to the St. Lawrence River and presents such a threat that the federal government has banned the movement of most live game and baitfish from eight Great Lakes states and two Canadian provinces.

That represents a major problem for state fisheries agencies, which regularly ship each other millions of baby walleyes, muskellunge, steelhead, Pacific salmon and other game species for stocking, and for fishing tackle shops that get most of their live baitfish from Wisconsin and Minnesota.

James Rogers, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, said, "We knew that there had been some fish die-offs (because of VHS). But only a couple of species were affected. Then some new research came out that said that some species that we thought not to be affected by VHS were affected.

"That caused us to issue the emergency order to stop the movement of fish from (Ontario and Quebec) and the states where the disease has been found," including Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York. And after VHS was found in Conesus Lake, which is near Lake Ontario but has no direct connection to it, New York State banned the movement of the affected species within its borders.

The APHIS emergency order forbids moving live fish from any of the infected species out of the eight states and bans their importation from the Canadian provinces.