Safety of electrified water for barge operators questioned
It’s supposed to be the last chance to keep the Great Lakes from turning into the Great Carp Ponds, but the federal government’s new electric fish barrier in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal is not doing the job.
The $9 million contraption designed to repel the jumbo - and jumping - Asian carp was finished nearly 2 1/2 years ago. It was conceived in a desperate attempt to stop the fish that have already infested the middle of the continent from gobbling their way up a canal that is an artificial link between the Mississippi River basin and the Great Lakes.
The fish are within a two-day swim of Lake Michigan. But federal officials won't permanently activate the barrier until they are convinced the electrified water is safe for the barge operators who make their living pushing things such as coal, sand and gravel along the rail-straight oversized ditch built a century ago to carry away Chicago's toilet water.
They can't say when that will happen.
They can't even say for sure if that will happen.
What they can say is that they need to do more testing, but their work and decisions are being done far from the light of public scrutiny.
The carp, meanwhile, are thriving in the region's rivers by the tens of millions. They can be found about 45 miles downstream from Lake Michigan, squeezing aside native fish populations and ruining rivers for recreation because of their penchant for porpoising out of the water and battering boaters.
The fish have migrated to within 15 miles of the new barrier. The only defense for the Great Lakes for the past several years has been a smaller, weaker "experimental" barrier that has a history of failing and that biologists believe is not strong enough to repel juvenile carp, which, because of their size, are less affected by electrified water. more
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