Category: Ten Threats to the Great Lakes

In an effort to rank, in the order of importance, the ten major environmental issues facing the Great Lakes, the staff at the GLRC asked 28 stakeholders in the Great Lakes basin to rank the major issues affecting the Great Lakes. The Environment Report then sent out a team of reporters throughout the region to explore these issues in-depth. The result of their efforts will be broadcast on public radio stations beginning on October 10th, 2005. This series is made possible in part by the Joyce Foundation and the Healing Our Waters Campaign .

Air Pollution Deposition

Air pollution deposition comes from various sources, including smokestacks, fires, pesticides, and automobile emissions. Chemicals and compounds that are sent into the air from these sources fall back down to earth directly or via precipitation.

Cargo Ship Channels

The Great Lakes are linked to the world's ports through a system of channels, locks and dams stretching from Duluth, MN to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, a 2,340 mile journey. The system is a big source of environmental damage in the Lakes.

Disappearing Native Species

Species that are indigenous to the region are disappearing due to habitat loss and competition from invasive species, causing biodiversity to decline. When biodiversity declines, the entire ecosystem can be thrown off balance causing disruptions that have yet to be fully understood.

Invasive Species

Invasive species are organisms that are found in ecosystems from which they did not originate. Many of them often out-compete, eat, or otherwise harm other native organisms (see disappearing native species).

Nonpoint Source Pollution

Nonpoint source pollution is created when water from rain or melting snow carries pollutants as runoff into waterways and groundwater. The pollution is usually a mix of chemicals, including those coming from agricultural and urban sources.

Point Source Pollution

Point source pollution comes directly from an identifiable source, like a wastewater discharge pipe from a factory. Much of the time, there are regulations on discharge that goes directly into lakes and rivers, but sometimes, harmful chemicals can still accumulate or are accidentally spilled.

Polluted Beaches

Going to the beach is a popular pastime for many, but polluted beaches can affect both human and ecosystem health. Oftentimes, the pollution comes from wastewater drains when heavy rains overwhelm sewer systems and wastewater treatment plants.

Pollution Hot Spots

In this day and age, just about everything has been touched by pollution. However, there are certain areas that have extraordinarily high concentrations of things like PCBs, and heavy metals. Such high concentrations of pollutants can cause problems for generations to come.

Shoreline Development/Wetlands

Wetlands are often called the kidneys of the earth because they filter and extract pollutants from the water that passes through them. They also alleviate flooding and control erosion. Development of wetlands disrupts this whole system, and replacement wetlands don't work as well.

Water Withdrawals

The demand for fresh water is high, and the Great Lakes are a tempting and ready source. Many people and organizations outside the Great Lakes basin are seeking to make withdrawals from the Lakes, but some worry the ecosystem can't handle it.

Ten Threats: Concrete Shores

Hardened shorelines protect buildings, roads, and homes, but many developers say a more natural method should be used. (Photo by Lester Graham)

Along many Great Lakes cities, long concrete or stone seawalls protect property against
wind and wave erosion. It’s a hardening of the shoreline that some people say is
necessary to protect expensive real estate. But some scientists and environmentalists say
it’s part of one of the ‘Ten Threats to the Great Lakes. They’re worried those concrete
seawalls are not only hurting the environment… in the long run, they’re hurting the
economy. Lynette Kalsnes has this report:

Transcript

In our series ‘Ten Threats to the Great Lakes,’ we’ve been looking at how humans make
changes that affect the health of the lakes. Lester Graham is our guide through the series.
He says the next report shows how far we’ll go to try to manage nature:

(waves lapping against concrete wall)

In the middle of a miles-long concrete shoreline, there’s a tiny beach. Steve Forman points
toward a small bluff at the base of a tree. The professor of earth and environmental sciences at
the University of Illinois at Chicago says the sand, grass and dunes help soften the impact of
waves and rain.

“This kind of relief is what you’d see in many natural coastlines, a coastline like this can
accommodate change better than one that’s been concreted up.”

Just feet away, the concrete picks back up, like a stark white runway that bisects the land and the
lake. Concrete revetments like these in Chicago are a familiar sight in urban areas across the
Great Lakes.

Roy Deda is with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps manages much of the
construction on public shorelines. Deda says hardening the shore is one way of protecting against
erosion.

“Where hardening of the shoreline is important and used, is where you have an existing
community in an urban area like Chicago. You have a lot of development in place already, and
basically you’re protecting what’s been built over a long history.”

Deda says it protects property. But scientist Steve Forman says using concrete walls comes at a
cost: the destruction of natural systems that are often helpful.

Forman says wetlands and stream valleys normally act like a sponge to absorb high lake levels.
They also release some of the water back when lake levels are low. Forman says concrete can’t
buffer those fluctuations.

“It makes the extremes potentially even more extreme in terms of lake level variations.”

So, when there’s a rainstorm, Forman says the water runs off the concrete quickly… instead of
being absorbed across sand or wetlands slowly.

He says the same thing is true for the water flowing into the lakes from rivers.

Discharge into rivers can go up by 50 times the amount it would if natural areas buffered the
rivers.

“Any time we change the landscape from its natural components, we also change the plumbing of
the Great Lakes. We change the way water is routed in and around and through the Great Lakes
as well.”

It’s not only rushing rivers and lake levels that cause problems.

When the shoreline is hardened… the wildlife and organisms that once lived there disappear.

Cameron Davis is with the Alliance for the Great Lakes. He says many rare species live in that
narrow ribbon where the land meets the water.

“When we harden the shorelines, we basically sterilize them in a lot of ways, because we’ve not
providing the kinds of habitat and cover that we need for many of them.”

And beyond the effect on wildlife… hardening the shoreline can also be a bad economic decision.

Steve Forman says permanent structures built near the shores are not as stable as they might seem
when lake levels are high and winter storms cause big waves that erode the land underneath them.

“When the lake levels go up, the erosion rates are just phenomenal…what you see are hanging
stairs everywhere, instead of stairs that take you down to the beach, they’re hanging over the lake,
basically.”

That’s why scientists and planners are taking action. The Alliance for the Great Lakes’ Cameron
Davis is calling on planners to balance protecting the shoreline … with preserving ecology.

“Frankly I don’t think shoreline planning across the region is that great. There really is no single
unifying policy we’re all using to guide what our shorelines ought to look like.”

He’s hoping that some cities will experiment with restoring natural areas along their shorelines…
He says we need to see if in the long run, nature can do a better job of protecting the shores.

For the GLRC, I’m Lynette Kalsnes.

Ten Threats: Wetlands – Where Life Begins

Great Lakes coastal wetlands filter water, give lots of wildlife a place to live and help prevent erosion. These wetlands are also greatly responsible for feeding the fish of the Great Lakes. (Photo by Lester Graham)

The Ten Threats to the Great Lakes were identified for us by experts from all over the region.
Again and again they stressed that the shores and wetlands along the lakes were critical to the
well-being of the lakes and the life in them. Great Lakes coastal wetlands filter water, give lots of
wildlife a place to live and help prevent erosion. But the coastal wetlands are also greatly
responsible for feeding the fish of the Great Lakes. Biologists are finding that when people try to
get rid of the wetlands between them and their view of the lake, it hurts the fish populations.
Reporter Chris McCarus takes us to where life begins in the lakes:

Transcript

We’ve been bringing you the series, Ten Threats to the Great Lakes. One of the
keys to the health of the lakes is the connection between the lakes and the land.
The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham is our guide through the series:

(sound of walking in water)

About a dozen researchers have come to Saginaw Bay off of Lake Huron. They walk from the
front yard of a cottage into some tall grass and black mud out back. The coastal wetland is wide
here.

Don Uzarski is a professor from Grand Valley State University. He wants to see just how many
different kinds of microorganisms live in this wetland. He asks a colleague to dip a fine mesh net
into the muck.

“Why don’t you give us your best scoop there…”

The net’s contents are poured into a tray. The water and muck is pushed aside and tiny animals
are revealed. None of them is any bigger than an inch.

“There are a lot organisms right there. That’s a lot of fish food. Lot of water boatmen. We have
scuds swimming through here. We have snails. Probably a bloodworm. I don’t see it. But the
red thing.”

Uzarski says this is a healthy patch of wetland. It’s where Great Lakes life begins.

“The whole community starts here. And we’re talking about everything from the birds and fish
and all the things that people tend to care about more. But without this stuff we don’t have
anything.”

These microorganisms are at the bottom of the food chain. Lake trout, walleye and salmon are at
the top. But this natural order has been disturbed by humans. Only parts of the wetland are able
to work as nature intended. The bugs, snails and worms are supposed to be everywhere here. But
Uzarski says they’re not.

“Look at if we take 20 steps over there we’re not going to find the same thing. It’s gonna be
gone. And where’s that coming from? It’s coming from these disturbed edges. Which were
disturbed by? It was the spoils from dredging out that ditch right there.”

The dredging material is piled along the edge… a bit like a dike. Uzarski says that’s one of the
three main threats to coastal wetlands.

The dikes stop the natural flow of water. Farm and lawn fertilizers, sediment and chemical
pollution are not filtered out when they run off the land. Dikes also stop the water from carrying
food for fish out into the lake… and in the other direction, water can’t bring oxygen from the lake
into the wetlands. They’re at risk of becoming stagnant pools.

A second threat to the wetlands is alien invasive plants. Ornamental plants intended for gardens
have escaped. Phragmites, purple loosestrife, and European water milfoil among others all choke
out the native plants that help make the wetland systems work.

But… the greatest threat to the coastal wetlands is construction. We’ve been building homes,
buildings and parking lots right over the top of some of the Great Lakes’ most critical wetlands.

Sam Washington is Executive Director of the Michigan United Conservation Clubs, the state’s
largest hunting and fishing advocacy group. He says we need healthy wetlands if we want to
keep fishing the Great Lakes.

“If we didn’t have wetlands, if we didn’t have the ability to regenerate the bottom foods in the
food cycle of these animals, we wouldn’t have the big fish that people go out in the Great Lakes
to catch everyday. They just wouldn’t be there.”

Washington says the way to fix the problem is easy… but it will require us to do something that
comes really hard…

“The best thing human beings can do for wetlands, even though we really believe we know how
to fix everything, is just to leave ’em alone.”

Sam Washington gets support from the biologists who tromp out into the wetlands. They say
we’ve got to protect the whole food chain… so we should leave wetlands alone and just let nature
do its job.

For the GLRC, I’m Chris McCarus.

Ten Threats: Saving Wetland Remnants

Winous Point Marsh Conservancy and Duck Hunting Club's Roy Kroll collects millet. (Photo by Julie Grant)
This side of a wetland in Winous Point is protected by a man-made dike. (Photo by Julie Grant)
The unprotected side has little remaining vegetation. (Photo by Julie Grant)

Among the Ten Threats to the Great Lakes is the loss of thousands of square miles of wetlands along the lakes. From Superior to Ontario and on up the St. Lawrence Seaway, we’ve lost some of the most important wildlife habitat along the edges of the lakes. For example, 200 years ago, much of the southern shore of Lake Erie was a huge swamp. Most of those wetlands have been drained and filled since European settlement. Julie Grant reports on efforts to maintain the little bit that remains:

Transcript

In our next report in the series, Ten Threats to the Great Lakes, we’re going to hear about changes to a large area that drains into the lakes. Our guide through the series is the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham:

Researchers from the Cleveland area park district have been driving hours to get here to this bit of swamp nearly every day since last spring. Biologist Rick Spence and his partner wade through two feet of boot-sucking mud. They’re looking for turtles. Blanding’s turtles, to be exact. With a distinctive bright yellow chin and throat, it’s designated as a ‘species of special concern’ in Ohio…

“The Blanding’s originally were found in this area in the southern portion of Lake Erie, along this basin area. And so there’s a lot of the Blanding’s in here. It doesn’t get any better than this. We have nothing like this really around the Cleveland area that I know of.”

This area is the 150 year-old Winous Point Marsh Conservancy and Duck Hunting Club. It’s the largest privately owned coastal wetland in Ohio. It’s a thin strip of marsh that runs eight and a half miles along the shore.

Roy Kroll has been Executive Director of the Duck Hunting Club for more than twenty years. He keeps busy balancing the needs of researchers, biology classes, and reporters.

Kroll takes me onto the marsh in a wooden boat. He uses an old-fashioned pole to push us through water that’s only a couple of inches deep. It’s slow and quiet. He stops and uses the pole to slap the water for a call and response with migratory birds. (slap) He can hear who’s hiding in the cattails, arrowhead, and other emergent wetland plants…

(Kroll slaps water twice, birds respond)

“Well, looks like the teal have left and the rail are here.”

Kroll says the 4,500 acre marsh harbors over 100,000 waterfowl, mostly ducks, during November’s peak migration. There aren’t many places like this left on the Lake Erie coastline. More than 90 percent of the region’s wetlands have been drained. Most of that was done in the mid-1800s.

The area was once known as the Great Black Swamp. It stretched from Lake Erie all the way to Indiana. Much of it was under a dense canopy of hardwood trees. Kroll says it was a great system to filter river waters entering the lake. But European settlers and land speculators cut down most of the trees, dug ditches and straightened stream channels to move water quickly off the land. They built roads and transformed the swamp into rich, productive farm fields.

“You have to put yourself in the time period. Rightfully so, that was considered progress. And now we have to look back and say, well, yeah, it was progress and now it looks like it’s not progress. And if we’re not going to eliminate all these wetlands, we’re going to have to take some proactive measures to do it.”

Even at Winous Point, some of the wetlands are in poor condition. Standing on a man-made dike we look one way and see all kinds of plants: cattails, duckweed, and lily pads. But look to the side that’s not protected by the dike, and there’s no vegetation. Hand-drawn maps from the 1800s show a diversity of plants here, but now it looks like an open bay…

“What we’re looking at now is an open water wetland. And again, with no plants, we don’t have the structure for fish, invertebrates, and even plankton and algae to colonize on plant stems. It’s nowhere near as productive.”

Kroll says it’s not nearly as productive as the protected area. He says high lake levels, invasive carp, and pollution running off the land and into the rivers that drain into the lake have all made it tough for marsh vegetation to survive. Without plants, Kroll says the wetland can’t clean water running off the land…into the lake. He says it’s unrealistic to expect a short band of remnant wetlands to do the job of a hundreds of square miles of swamp forest.

“The key is to start at the upstream far upstream head of the watershed and begin restoring wetlands from there down to here.”

There are some efforts to re-store small parts of the Great Black Swamp. But Kroll says it’s also important to protect the little bit of the original coastal wetlands that are still left.

For the GLRC, I’m Julie Grant.

Ten Threats: Farmland to Wetlands

Installing vast networks of underground drains, known as tiles, is a common practice on farms throughout the country. Farmers can get their machines onto the fields sooner, and crops grow better when their roots aren't wet. This field, near Sherwood, OH, was once part of the Old Black Swamp. (Photo by Mark Brush)
The basic design of this trench digging machine has remained unchanged for more than 100 years. Instead of black plastic pipe, workers used to install short sections of clay tile pipe. These underground pipes are known as "farm tiles." (Photo by Mark Brush)
Lynn Davis now runs his family's farm tiling business. His grandfather started it close to a hundred years ago, and Lynn still does work for many of the same families his grandfather worked for. (Photo by Mark Brush)

One of the Ten Threats is the loss of wetlands. A lot of the wetlands of the Great Lakes were
turned into cropland – farmland. But before farmers could work the fields in the nation’s bread
basket, they first had to drain them. So thousands of miles of ditches and trenches were dug to
move water off the land. Losing millions of acres of wetlands meant losing nature’s water filter
for the lakes. Reporter Mark Brush reports… these days some farmers are restoring those wet
places:

Transcript

We’ve been bringing you stories about Ten Threats to the Great Lakes. On today’s report, the
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham introduces us to a story about how farmers are
getting involved in restoring some of the natural landscape:

We’re standing in the middle of a newly-harvested corn field in northwest Ohio. This area used
to be wet. It was part of the old Black Swamp – one of the biggest wetland areas in the country.
The Swamp stretched 120 miles across northwest Ohio and into Indiana. It filtered a lot of water
that eventually made its way into Lake Erie. And it provided habitat for all kinds of wildlife.

Today, the Black Swamp is gone… It was drained and turned into farmland.

“Is it o.k. to go?”

“Yeah, go.”

(sound of trenching machine starting up)

Lynn Davis and his crew are cutting a trench into the earth. The trench is about a half a mile
long and five feet deep. Workers trail behind the machine feeding black, plastic pipe into the
trench.

The underground pipe will drain excess water to a nearby ditch.

Davis says these drains help the farmer grow more crops. It’s a common practice that’s been
going on for more than a hundred years. Farmers can get their machines onto the field sooner,
which makes for a longer growing season. And crops grow better when their roots aren’t wet.

Years ago, wetlands were considered a bad thing – places that stood in the way of farmland
development – and places where diseases spread.

The federal government actually paid people to drain them. And by the end of the 20th century
more than 170,000 square miles of wetlands were drained.

Lynn Davis’s family has been in this business for close to a hundred years. Davis admits that his
family helped drain the Black Swamp. But he says much of what’s been done can be reversed:

“You know, there is no question that this was of course one of the largest natural wetlands in the
country. And what we’re doing here was responsible for eliminating that wetland. Now what
we’ve done is relatively simple to reverse. If for some reason it was decided that we don’t want to
farm and live in this area any more, why we can put it back to a swamp real quick.”

And some of that is happening today.

Instead of paying people to drain wetlands, the federal government pays people to restore them.

(crickets)

We’ve driven about fifty miles north to where Bill Daub lives. He was hired by the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife service to find suitable land for restoration. And he’s restored well over 500 wetland
areas in the fifteen years he’s been doing it.

Daub says nature bounces back. He says every time he’s broken an old drainage pipe, dormant
seeds of wetland plants stored in the soil popped open:

“What’s amazing with the wetlands is that you see all these cattails, and wetland plants growing
in here – that stuff was in a seed bank, even though they were growing corn here, there was a seed
bank of wetlands species, waiting for water.”

The federal government will pay a farmer to take marginal cropland out of production under the
Wetlands Reserve Program. And Daub says it’s worth the money:

“Every one of these wetlands is a purification system. The water that finally leaves this wetland
has been purified through the living organisms in the wetland.”

(natural sound)

Janet Kaufman lives just down the road from Bill Daub, and eight years ago, she had a crew dig
up an old drainage pipe on her farm. These days, on the back end of her property there’s a pond
with a tall willow tree draping over the water:

“So this wasn’t here before?”

“Not at all, not at all! I mean it’s just shocking. And when the backhoe hit that it was like a
geyser, the water just poured out it just flew up in the air. They had to crunch it shut. I mean the
quantity of water that flows underground is unbelievable unless by chance you see it like that.”

Kaufman says a lot of her neighbors have been signing up to restore wetlands on their property.
The wetter areas aren’t that good for crops… and with the government offering money to let
nature take its course… it makes financial sense for the farmers.

But because a lot of the old Black Swamp area is good for farming, it’s not likely that we’ll see
huge swaths returned to wetlands.

But even the restoration of a fraction of the wetlands will help improve the health of the Great
Lakes.

For the GLRC, I’m Mark Brush.

Ten Threats: Green Lawns, Dead Lakes

A blue-green algae bloom. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

The experts who identified the Ten Threats to the Great Lakes for us
say nonpoint source pollution is one of the worst threats. That’s
pollution that doesn’t come out of a pipe but instead is washed from
streets and farm fields… and lawns. Americans use at least three million of tons
of fertilizer on their lawns every year. But the same compounds that make for a lush,
green lawn can make a stinky, slimy mess when they get washed into lakes and rivers.
Sarah Hulett looks at efforts to limit the amount of lawn chemicals that make their way
into the waterways:

Transcript

In our series, Ten Threats to the Great Lakes, we’ve been looking
at environmental problems affecting the health of the lakes. The Great
Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham is guiding us through the
issues one-by-one:

When newspaper headlines decried the death of Lake Erie in the 1970’s, Americans got
familiar with a new enemy of the environment. Scientists named phosphorus the major
culprit in the lake’s decline. And the reaction went a long way toward cleaning up the
lake: billions of dollars went into upgrades for wastewater treatment plants to reduce
phosphorus from sewage. And phosphate detergents have been mostly phased out of use.

But now that regulators have gotten a handle on the phosphorus coming from the most
obvious sources, they’re left with a much more difficult task: reducing phosphorus from
countless smaller sources that together add up to a lot of pollution.

One of those sources is lawn fertilizer. And Glenn Short says it’s easy to see what
happens when that fertilizer gets washed into the lake where he lives.

(sound of ducks quacking and waves)

“You have this, like, green slime floating all over the top of the lake water. Just pops up
everywhere and it can fill the entire lake surface – especially in the calmer bays. It can be
just miserable for swimming and things like that.”

Short sits on the board of the Lake Sherwood Association, in southeast Michigan. His
neighbors asked him to lobby the township to pass a ban on phosphorus fertilizer to
reduce the algae that takes over the lake in the summers. But he says at first, he was
reluctant to do it.

“I’m like any other homeowner. I don’t want government telling me what to do with my
own property. If I want a really nice lawn, I felt that I should be able to have one.”

But he started doing some research. And he found that enough phosphorus will
eventually kill a lake.

“Over a period of time, you get more and more organic material growing, you kill it off,
you just start filling up your lake. And eventually you have no lake anymore. You just
have a wetland. Well, I like my lake. I mean, I live on a lake. I like to use my lake.”

So Short drafted an ordinance to ban fertilizers containing phosphorus, and his township
board passed it. Several other local governments in the region have also enacted limits or
outright bans. And the state of Minnesota has statewide limits on phosphorus fertilizers.

It’s an approach the landscape industry calls unnecessary.

Gary Eichen is with Mike’s Tree Surgeons in southeast Michigan. It’s a company that’s
signed onto an initiative aimed at environmentally responsible lawn care.

(sound of spreader)

The company uses zero-phosphorus fertilizer on almost all the lawns it treats. Back at the
office, Eichen says the problem isn’t the chemicals – it’s that most homeowners don’t
know how to use them.

“They purchase from a source that is not educated in what the products are. He goes
home and starts going through this giant label on the back, and most of it might as well
be Egyptian hieroglyphics. He has no idea. So he ends up over-applying or incorrectly
applying.”

Eichen says there would be far fewer problems with runoff if homeowners left fertilizing
to the professionals. And he says it’s tough for the experts to stay in business when
there’s a patchwork of local ordinances to regulate chemicals like phosphorus.

But that’s exactly what the Environmental Protection Agency is asking communities to
do. Brad Garmon of the Michigan Environmental Council says that kind of bottom-up
regulation presents some challenges.

“It’s very difficult to see what’s working and what’s not, and to chart success. And I
know that a lot of the state programs are re-evaluating right now to see if the approach
they’ve been using over the last five or ten years has been working.”

It’ll take at least another five to ten years for Glenn Short to see the results of his
community’s phosphorus ban. The lake he lives on is part of a river system that
eventually dumps into Lake Erie. But he says just like that Great Lake, it’ll be worth the
wait and the effort to see his small lake bounce back to health.

For the GLRC, I’m Sarah Hulett.

Ten Threats: Rethinking Urban Runoff

Everybody's got a gutter... and they're part of the urban runoff problem. Rain picks up dirty soot and other chemicals from roofs and heads into the gutter. During storms, the dirty water rushes down the gutters and down streets into storm drains... and can pollute beaches, drinking water and wildlife habitat. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
The pervious pavement at the Chicago Center for Green Technology lets water seep into the ground instead of heading into the sewer drain. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
The rain swale near the parking lot at the Chicago Center for Green Technology is full of native plants that absorb water that would otherwise head into the storm water system. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

One of the ten threats to the Great Lakes identified by experts across the region is nonpoint
source runoff. It’s a catchall category for pollution that’s not being spewed from one identifiable
source. The federal government’s finding that rain washing off concrete and asphalt in cities and
suburbs poses as big a threat to the Great Lakes as waste coming out of a factory pipe. Shawn
Allee has a look at the government’s effort to cut water pollution by remaking the urban
landscape:

Transcript

We’re continuing our series on Ten Threats to the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Lester Graham is our guide through the series. Today a look at a broad problem
with no simple solution:

(rain running into a sewer)

Water from a rain gutter is pouring into a nearby storm sewer drain. That protects property from
water damage and flooding. But at the same time, they pose an environmental problem for the
Great Lakes.

Roofs, streets and parking lots are made of hard materials like concrete or asphalt. During
storms, rain rushes off these surfaces into storm drains.

The problem is this: the runoff isn’t pure.

Brian Bell’s a storm water expert with the Environmental Protection Agency. He says rain picks
up pollutants on all those roofs and streets, things such as:

“Antifreeze from cars, motor oil, brake fluid, copper from the brake pads, cigarette butts from
trash, household hazardous waste, pesticides that may be overapplied.”

And for most sewer systems, that’s not the worst of it.

“The problem with storm water is, once its mobilized and goes into a storm sewer system, that
system does not treat the waste, so all of those things go to the local waterway untreated.”

In this region, runoff flows into the Great Lakes, where it pollutes beaches, drinking water, and
wildlife habitat.

To fight this, the EPA’s trying something new. It wants to make hard, urban landscapes softer.
The idea’s to replace concrete and asphalt with more soil and plants. That way, water can sink
into the ground and stay out of storm drains.

But how do you do that?

Well, the EPA’s working with places like the Chicago Center for Green Technology to show people
how. The city hopes residents and developers will use what they see here in their own projects.

(city sounds in)

Grace Troccolo’s guiding a tour of the facility.

First stop?

“Our parking lot is slightly pitched, so all of our rainwater flows off into these vegetated bioswales,
which when I’m not with people in the business, I call ‘ditch with plants.'”

The plants aren’t typical bushes or flowers. They’re mostly tall, prairie grasses native to the
Midwest. Their roots help water seep deep into the ground. The Center has several bio-swales,
and they all keep runoff on site and in the ground.

Another stop on the tour is a 40-foot section of the building’s roof. It’s covered with a matt of
short, tangled creeping plants. Grace explains why they’re here.

“So here we are at our green roof. Again, getting back to our issue of storm water management,
the city would like to see more vegetated surfaces and of course, in the city like Chicago there are
a lot of roof surfaces and so this section of the roof is designed to hold all of the rainwater that
falls on it during a one-inch storm.”

Again, the roof’s vegetation retains water and keeps it out of storm drains. Because of these
technologies, the building is an urban runoff success story.

All told, the Center releases less than half as much water to storm drains as similar buildings do.

The EPA wants the average home or business owner to follow suit, but price might keep that from
happening. Green roofs, for example, are more expensive than conventional ones.

But some observers say the biggest obstacles in fighting urban runoff are political. Stephen
Bocking teaches environmental policy at Trent University. He says the public’s used to pointing
fingers at a handful of big, industrial polluters.

People just aren’t used to seeing every house and business as a source of pollution.

“It’s much more difficult to deal with the problem when you’re talking about millions of separate
sources. People can’t just say well, it’s the job of industry or the job of the government to deal with
it. It’s the job of everyone to deal with it in some way.”

In other words, we’re all to blame.

Every new building in a city, or home in a subdivision, creates more hard surfaces, such as new
driveways, new parking lots and new roofs.

“It’s pretty hard to deal with a form of development which is intrinsic to our way of life. It involves
thinking about how we live our lives and how design and build our cities.”

Bocking says the EPA’s plan might not be enough to make up for all the roads and other hard
surfaces we’re building. He says, to succeed, we’ll need to change how we develop land.

There’s not much political support to stop that kind of development right now, so for the time
being, hard surfaces will continue to win out.

For the GLRC, I’m Shawn Allee.

Ten Threats: Dead Zones in the Lakes

These fishermen at Port Clinton, Ohio, are a few miles away from the dead zone that develops in Lake Erie every summer... so far, most fish can swim away from the dead zone. But the dead zone is affecting the things that live at the bottom of the lake. (Photo by Lester Graham)

One of the Ten Threats to the Great Lakes is nonpoint source pollution. That’s pollution that
doesn’t come from the end of a pipe. It’s oil washed off parking lots by storms, or pesticides and
fertilizers washed from farm fields. Nonpoint source pollution might be part of the reason why
some shallow areas in the Great Lakes are afflicted by so-called dead zones every summer.

Transcript

In another report on the Ten Threats to the Great Lakes series, reporter Lester Graham looks at a
growing problem that has scientists baffled:

Dead zones are places where there’s little or no oxygen. A dead zone develops in Lake Erie
almost every summer. It was once thought that the problem was mostly solved. But, it’s become
worse in recent years.

(sound of moorings creaking)

The Environmental Protection Agency’s research ship, the Lake Guardian, is tied up at a dock at
the Port of Cleveland. Nathan Hawley and his crew are loading gear, getting ready for a five day
cruise to check some equipment that measures a dead zone along the central basin of Lake Erie.

“What I have out here is a series of bottom-resting moorings that are collecting time series data of
currents and water temperature and periodically we have to come out here and clean them off and
we take that opportunity to dump the data as well.”

Hawley is gathering the data for scientists at several universities and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab. The information helps
them measure the behavior of the dead zone that occurs nearly every year in Lake Erie…

“What we’re trying to do this year is get a more comprehensive picture of how big this low-oxygen zone is and how it changes with time over the year.”

One of the scientists who’ll be pouring over the data is Brian Eadie. He’s a senior scientist with
NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab. He says Lake Erie’s dead zone is a place
where most life can’t survive…

“We’re talking about near the bottom where all or most of the oxygen has been consumed so
there’s nothing for animals to breathe down there, fish or smaller animals.”

Lester Graham: “So, those things that can swim out of the way, do and those that can’t…”

Brian Eadie: “Die.”

The dead zone has been around since at least the 1930’s. It got really bad when there was a huge
increase in the amount of nutrients entering the lake. Some of the nutrients came from sewage,
some from farm fertilizers and some from detergents. The nutrients, chiefly phosphorous, fed an
explosion in algae growth. The algae died, dropped to the bottom of the lake and rotted. That
process robbed the bottom of oxygen. Meanwhile, as spring and summer warmed the surface of
Lake Erie, a thermal barrier was created that trapped the oxygen-depleted water on the bottom.

After clean water laws were passed, sewage treatment plants were built, phosphorous was banned
from most detergents, and better methods to remove phosphorous from industrial applications
were put in place.

Phosphorous was reduced to a third of what it had been. But Brian Eadie says since then
something has changed.

“The concentration of nutrients in the central basin the last few years has actually been going up.
We don’t understand why that’s happening.”

Eadie says there are some theories. Wastewater from sewage plants might be meeting pollution
restrictions, but as cities and suburbs grow, there’s just a lot more of it getting discharged. More
volume means more phosphorous.

It could be that tributaries that are watersheds for farmland are seeing increased phosphorous. Or
it could be that the invasive species, zebra mussel, has dramatically altered the ecology of the
lakes. More nutrients might be getting trapped at the bottom, feeding bacteria that use up oxygen
instead of the nutrients getting taken up into the food chain.

Whatever is happening, environmentalists are hopeful that the scientists figure it out soon.

Andy Buchsbaum heads up the Great Lakes office of the National Wildlife Federation. He says
the dead zone in the bottom of the lake affects the entire lake’s productivity.

“If you’re removing the oxygen there, for whatever reason, for any period of time, you’ve
completely thrown that whole system out of balance. It’s all out of whack. It could mean
irreversible and devastating change to the entire ecosystem.”

And Buchsbaum says the central basin of Lake Erie is not the only place where we’re seeing this
low-oxygen problem…

“What makes the dead zone in Lake Erie even more alarming is that we’re seeing similar dead
zones appearing in Saginaw Bay which is on Lake Huron and Green Bay in Lake Michigan.
There, too, scientists don’t know what’s causing the problem. But, they’re already seeing
potentially catastrophic effects on aquatic life there.”

State and federal agencies and several universities are looking at the Lake Erie dead zone to try to
figure out what’s going on there. Once they do… then the battle likely will be getting
government to do what’s necessary to fix the problem.

For the GLRC, this is Lester Graham.

Ten Threats: The Earliest Invader

A bridge for a river... this portion of the Erie Canal crossed the Genesee River via an aqueduct in Rochester, NY. This photo was taken around 1914. (From the collection of the Rochester Public Library Local History Division)
Man-made canals allowed non-native species to swim into the Great Lakes. Some of them wreaked havoc on fish and habitat in the lakes. (Photo by Lester Graham)
One of the earliest invaders of the Great Lakes, sea lampreys heavily damaged commercial fisheries upon their arrival. (Photo courtesy of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission)

The Ten Threats to the Great Lakes” is looking first at alien invasive species. There are more than 160 non-native species in the Great Lakes basin. If they do environmental or economic harm, they’re called invasive species. There are estimates that invasive species cost the region billions of dollars a year. Different species got here different ways. David Sommerstein tells us how some of the region’s earliest invaders got into the Lakes:

Transcript

We’re bringing you an extensive series on Ten Threats to the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham is guiding us through the reports:

“The Ten Threats to the Great Lakes” is looking first at alien invasive species. There are more than 160 non-native species in the Great Lakes basin. If they do environmental or economic harm, they’re called invasive species. There are estimates that invasive species cost the region billions of dollars a year. Different species got here different ways. David Sommerstein tells us how some of the region’s earliest invaders got into the Lakes:

If the history of invasive species were a movie, it would open like this:

(Sound of banjo)

It’s 1825. Politicians have just ridden the first ship across the newly dug Erie Canal from Buffalo to New York.

(Sound of “The Erie Canal”)

“I’ve got an old mule, and her name is Sal. Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal…”

Chuck O’Neill is an invasive species expert with New York Sea Grant.

“At the canal’s formal opening, Governor DeWitt Clinton dumped a cask of Lake Erie water; he dumped that water into New York Harbor.”

Meanwhile, in Buffalo, a cask of Hudson River water was triumphantly poured into Lake Erie.

“In a movie, that would be the flashback with the impending doom-type music in the background.”

(Sound of ominous music)

It was an engineering and economic milestone, but a danger lurked. For the first time since glaciers carved the landscape twelve thousand years ago, water from the Hudson and water from the Great Lakes mixed.

(Sound of “Dragnet” theme)

Enter the villain: the sea lamprey. It’s a slimy, snake-like parasite in the Atlantic Ocean. It sucks the blood of host fish.

Within a decade after the Erie Canal and its network of feeders opened, the sea lamprey uses the waterways to swim into Lake Ontario. By the 1920’s and 30’s, it squirms into the upper Lakes, bypassing Niagara Falls through the Welland Canal.

What happens next is among the most notorious examples of damage done by an invasive species in the Great Lakes. By the 1950’s, the sea lamprey devastates Lake trout populations in Lake Superior. Mark Gaden is with the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.

“They changed a way of life in the Great Lakes basin, the lampreys. They preyed directly on fish, they drove commercial fisheries out of business, the communities in the areas that were built around the fisheries were impacted severely.”

The sea lamprey wasn’t the only invader that used the canals. Canal barges carried stowaway plants and animals in their hulls and ballast. In the mid-1800’s, the European faucet snail clogged water intakes across the region. The European pea clam, purple loosestrife, marsh foxtail, flowering rush – all used the canal system to enter the Great Lakes.

Chuck O’Neill says the spread of invasive species also tells the tale of human transportation.

“If you look at a map, you can pretty much say there was some kind of a right-of-way – railroad, canal, stageline – that was in those areas just by the vegetation patterns.”

Almost one hundred invasive species came to the Great Lakes this way before 1960. O’Neill says every new arrival had a cascading effect.

“Each time you add in to an ecosystem another organism that can out-compete the native organisms that evolved there, you’re gradually making that ecosystem more and more artificial, less and less stable, much more likely to be invaded by the next invader that comes along.”

(Sound of “Dragnet” theme)

The next one in the Great Lakes just might be the Asian Carp. It’s swimming up the Illinois River, headed toward Lake Michigan. Cameron Davis directs the Alliance for the Great Lakes.

“If this thing gets in, it can cause catastrophic damage to the Great Lakes, ‘cause it eats thirty, forty percent of its body weight in plankton every day, and plankton are the base of the food chain in the Great Lakes.”

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has installed an electric barrier in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal that might stop the carp. But as long as the canals around the region remain open for shipping and recreation, it’s likely more invaders may hitch a ride or simply swim into the Great Lakes.

For the GLRC, I’m David Sommerstein.

Ten Threats: The Beloved Invader

Because alewives are the main source of food for some sport fish, some people forget that they're an invasive species. (Photo courtesy of NOAA Fishery Service)

As we look at the “Ten Threats to the Great Lakes,” we’re spending some time examining the effects of the alien invasive species that have changed the Lakes. One of the first invasive species to arrive in the Great Lakes was the alewife; it’s native to the Atlantic Ocean. It has become the most beloved of all the invasives. That’s because it’s food for the most popular sport fish in the Great Lakes. But in the beginning, the sport fish was introduced to get rid of the alewives. Peter Payette reports:

Transcript

Today we’re continuing our series on Ten Threats to the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham is our series guide:

When autumn arrives in Northern Michigan, salmon fishermen line the rivers. The fish, native to the Pacific Ocean, swim upstream to spawn and then die. That’s why Tim Gloshen says they’re not interested in his bait.

“But if you irritate ’em enough and keep putting it in front of them, they’ll snap at it sometimes and you got to be ready when they hit it and set your hook.”

Anglers caught eight million pounds of salmon in Lake Michigan last year. Most of the fish are caught out in the lake.

“I got buddies that are catching couple hundred a year out there. They’re out there twice a week at least, all summer long, you know.”

Tim and his buddies and everyone else who fishes for salmon in the Great Lakes are at the top of the food chain. The money they spend on food, lodging, tackle, and boats figures heavily into decisions about how to manage the Lakes.

But it wasn’t always so.

Pacific salmon were stocked here about forty years ago to control the invading alewives. The native lake trout had just about been wiped out by overfishing and the sea lamprey. With no big predators left, the alewife population exploded.

At one point, it was estimated that for every ten pounds of fish in Lake Michigan, eight were alewives. Occasional die-offs would cause large numbers of alewives to wash up on beaches all over the Great Lakes. Historian Michael Chiarappa says all this was happening as America was feeling the urge to get back in touch with nature.

“And that’s when you get this rise in greater interest in sport fishing, recreational fishing, hunting. Teddy Roosevelt sort of epitomized the spirit of the strenuous life; get back out there and engage nature. It’s good for the soul, it’s good for the body, it’s good for the mind.”

So the salmon was brought in to control the alewife population and transform the Great Lakes into a sport fishing paradise. And it worked. But alewives remained the best food source for the ravenous salmon.

So now a healthy alewife population is seen as a good thing by the states that benefit economically from the recreational fishing. Mark Holey, with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says this has caused people to forget alewives are an invasive species.

“If alewives were knocking on the door today, there may be a much different discussion about it. It may be more like the Asian carp.”

How the alewife would compare to Asian carp is unknown, because the Asian carp has been found in the Mississippi River, but not yet in the Great Lakes. What is known is that when alewives are abundant, native fish don’t do well. For example, Holey says biologists used to think PCBs caused many young lake trout to die. Now they know early mortality is mostly due to thiamin deficiency.
Thiamine is a vitamin lacking in lake trout that eat too many alewives.

“From the studies that we’ve been involved with, anywhere, right now, anywhere between thirty to fifty percent of the females that we take eggs from show some… their eggs show some signs of thiamine deficiency. Which means survival of those eggs are impaired.”

In some cases, none of the eggs will survive. So a worse case estimate would be half of the wild lake trout in the Great Lakes can’t reproduce because of alewives. This is why advocates for native fish species have been happy to see the alewife populations decline in recent years. They almost disappeared from Lake Huron.

Mark Ebener is a fisheries biologist for the Chippewa Ottawa Resource Authority. He says the government agencies that stock salmon and lake trout should stock more than ever to keep pressure on the alewife. Ebener thinks with alewife numbers down, there’s an opportunity to reestablish the native herring as the main prey fish in the Lakes, especially in Lake Huron.

“Saginaw Bay used to have a huge population of lake herring that’s essentially gone. They used to have a tremendous commercial fishery for it, and people used to come from miles around to buy herring there, and everybody in the lower end of the state used to have herring come fall and the springtime when the fishers were fishing, but they’re gone.”

This opportunity to bring herring back might not last much longer. The warm weather this past summer will probably help alewives rebound next year.

For the GLRC, I’m Peter Payette.

Ten Threats: Closing a Door

Coast Guard Marine Science Technician Sheridan McClellan demonstrates some of the equipment used to check the ballast water of foreign ships. Environmentalists believe the Coast Guard should be given the equipment and authority to more thoroughly check the ships for invasive species in ballast water. (Photo by Lester Graham)
Even if ballast water is pumped out of ships, puddles and sediment usually remain at the bottom of the tank, both of which can contain non-native living organisms. (Photo courtesy of NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory)

In this “Ten Threats to the Great Lakes” series, we found experts across the region point to alien invasive species as the number one challenge facing the Lakes. The Great Lakes have changed dramatically because of non-indigenous species that compete for food and space with native fish and organisms. More than 160 foreign aquatic species have been introduced since the Lakes were opened to shipping from overseas. It’s believed that many of the invasive species hitched a ride in the ballast tanks of ocean-going cargo ships.

Transcript

Today we’ll hear more about Ten Threats to the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham has the next report in the series:

Foreign ships entering the Great Lakes are boarded and inspected in Montreal, long before the ships enter U.S. Waters. Sheridan McClellan is a marine science technician with the U.S. Coast Guard. He says inspectors take samples of the ballast water and test it onboard ship. He demonstrates the equipment at the Coast Guard lab in Massena, New York.

MCCLELLAN: “And when you look through this refractometer, if you look on the right hand side, you will see the salinity… If you’d like to look through it…”

GRAHAM: “Oh, yeah. I see.”

MCCLELLAN: “You see a line?”

GRAHAM: “Right.”

The inspectors want to see salt in the water. That means the ship exchanged ballast water from a freshwater port with ocean water that kills most freshwater organisms hiding out in the ballasts.

“Once we check all the ballast tanks and they’re all good to go, we tell the captain that he’s allowed to discharge his ballast in the Great Lakes if he so desires.”

And that’s it; if the ship’s ballast contains ocean water and the log shows the water came from deep ocean, it’s good to go. Lieutenant Commander James Bartlett commands the Massena station. He says that’s all the Coast Guard can do.

“We’ve been asked if we are actually checking for the organisms and doing, you know, a species count. Right now, that technology’s not available to us nor, really, do we have that capability in our regulations. It’s essentially, it’s a log check, an administrative, and then also a physical salinity check.”

But a ship can also be allowed into the Great Lakes if its ballast tanks are empty. Ships fill their ballasts tanks to keep the vessel stable in the water. When a ship is fully loaded with cargo, it sits deep enough in the water that it doesn’t need ballast water for stability. It’s declared as “No Ballast on Board,” or NOBOB.

But “No Ballast On Board” does not mean empty; there’s always a little residual water and sediment.

(Sound of footsteps thumping on metal)

Deep inside the S.S. William A Irvin, an out-of-service iron ore ship that’s permanently docked in Duluth, Minnesota, Captain Ray Skelton points out the rusty structure of the ballast tanks.

“You can see by all the webs, scantlings, cross members, frames, just the interior supports for the cargo hold itself, and the complexity of this configuration, that it wouldn’t be possible to completely pump all of the tank.”

And a recent study of NOBOB ships found there’s a lot more than just water and sediment sloshing around in the bottom of the tanks. David Reid headed up the study. He says there are live organisms in both the water and the sediment.

“If you multiply it out, you see that there are millions of organisms even though you have a very small amount of either water or sediment.”

And when ships load or unload they discharge or take on ballast water, that stirs up the water and sediment in the bottom of the ballast tanks along with the organisms they’re carrying from half way around the world, and they end up in the Great Lakes.

The shipping industry says for the past few years, the security regulations since 9/11 have been more important to the industry than dealing with ballast water. Helen Brohl is Executive Director of the U.S. Great Lakes Shipping Association. She says the shipping industry hasn’t forgotten; it is paying close attention to concerns about ballast water.

“From my perspective, in ten years, ballast water is not an issue, because in ten years there’ll be treatment technology on most ships. We’re moving right along. Ballast, in some respects, is kind of beating a dead horse.”

But environmentalists and others say ten years to get most of the ships fitted with ballast water treatment equipment is too long. New non-indigenous species are being introduced to the Lakes every few months.

The invasive species that are already in the Great Lakes are costing the economy and taxpayers about five billion dollars a year. The environmentalists insist Congress needs to implement new ballast regulations for the Coast Guard soon.

They also say the Environmental Protection Agency should start treating ballast water like pollution before more invasive species catch a ride in the ballast tanks of the foreign freighters and further damage the Lakes.

For the GLRC, this is Lester Graham.

Transcript

Related Links

Transcript

Related Links

Transcript

Related Links

Transcript

Related Links

Transcript

Related Links

Transcript

Related Links

Transcript

Related Links

Transcript

Related Links

Transcript

Related Links

Transcript

Related Links