Mike Schoonveld: There’s a better solution to keep invasive carp from the Great Lakes

When new heads of agencies controlled by the executive branch of the federal government were appointed earlier this year, they came with a mandate to control spending. Simultaneously, a new agency called DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) led by billionaire Elon Musk was formed to seek out waste, fraud, and inefficiency and was given the power to eliminate federal jobs.

But DOGE didn’t attack these problems with much finesse. In some instances, nine of every 10 employees or projects of some agencies were eliminated and with this came plenty of criticism from people and institutions who disagreed with the findings and actions of the newly minted efficiency experts.

No one knows how or where it will all play out but I personally hope the DOGE people show up at Joliet, Illinois, and put the blueprints for the Brandon Road Interbasin Project through the shredder. This is the billion dollar project that (if it works as well as the designers hope) has an 87% chance of keeping Asian carp in middle America’s major rivers from infiltrating into the Great Lakes.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says the Brandon Road Lock and Dam near Joliet has been identified as “the critical pinch point where layered technologies could be used to prevent movement of invasive carp populations into the Great Lakes.”

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want Asian carp to get into the Great Lakes. Asian carp are horrible things and have wreaked havoc in mid-America’s rivers for three decades.

It was stupid to allow them to be imported to North America in the first place. It was stupid to allow them to be stocked in places where they could escape into the wild. It was stupid to think that fish farmers wouldn’t accidentally or on purpose flush them into the wild.

Long before carp were imported, one could say it was stupid to dig channels and build a system of locks to connect middle America’s big rivers to the Great Lakes. History books are riddled with examples of unintended consequences along with governments that spent their way to oblivion by depleting their treasuries on boondoggle projects.

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Speaking of history, let me delve into a bit of history regarding the man-made connection between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi watersheds, creating the possibility of invasive species in one of the drainages infiltrating into the other. It’s one of those stories rife with both boondoggles and unintended consequences.

The word “Chicago” in Algonquian language meant “stinky place,” either from the wild onions that purportedly grew there or more likely, because of the thousands of acres of stinky marshlands that separated sand dunes along the southwest shores of Lake Michigan from the prairies farther inland.

Onions or not, as Chicago grew it became a stinky place; in part, because the city sewers emptied into the Chicago River which flowed into Lake Michigan. Cholera, dysentery and other waterborne diseases were common.

To combat this, the flow of the Chicago River was reversed by connecting it to the Illinois and Michigan Canal, away from Lake Michigan.

The city was no longer polluting Lake Michigan, and the sewage in the I&M canal was so concentrated, no fish, not even carp, could survive. It was still a stinky place.

Over time, sewage treatment facilities improved the water quality, additional canals had been constructed and these waterways became important ports for ships from overseas filled with valuable cargo – as well as not so valuable invasive species. The most notable of these invasives was the round goby.

A government project to electrify a portion of that canal to keep gobies from heading towards the Mississippi was drafted, funded, permitted, revised and delayed to the point that by the time the switch was flipped to zap any migrant gobies, thousands of them had already escaped; but by then, the swarms of Asian carp were heading for the Great Lakes and the goby barrier became the carp barrier. It wasn’t perfect, but it was hoped to be a deterrent until fledgling carp committees could come up with something better.

Years passed and studying, monitoring, planning, designing and lobbying to keep the Great Lakes carp-free became an industry, with millions spent each year. Those millions will still be spent until the “grand plan,” the billion-dollar-plus Brandon Road Project is completed a decade or more in the future, if ever.

Early on, anyone suggesting the one solution that would have solved the problem, simply and (relatively) inexpensively was quickly excused from meetings and even now there’s no support for a simple, permanent, economical fix.

What should have been done and could still be done is to plug the canal, then spend those millions of dollars (not billions) creating a mechanical means to move the cargo barges (or just the cargo) over or around the plug.

That’s still the solution that will work. That’s still the solution that can be completed quickly. That’s still the solution that will keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes.

You can read to your heart’s content about the Brandon Road Interbasin Project via the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers webpage devoted to the proposal here. Readers can contact the Corps’ Rock Island District at: (309) 794-4200 or email: cemvr-cc@usace.army.mil