Great Lakes on the Ground

The NWF Great Lakes Regional Center’s new reports on oil and gas drilling, and on sulfide mining could not have been timelier.

Just as we are issuing reports on government efforts to address oil and gas drilling and sulfide mining both industries are announcing major new initiatives in each area– an expansion of the Enbridge oil pipeline, and the approval of a permit for a huge new sulfide mine near Lake Superior.

Individually, the news is not good. Together, the actions begin to form a disturbing pattern of trading short term economic growth for ecological damage and eventual economic decline –that, if uncorrected, threaten the future of the Great Lakes and all of us who depend on them.

Pipeline Report Shows Lax Protections from Oil and Gas Spills

The pipeline report looks at federal and state programs that are supposed to protect people and wildlife from oil and gas spills and leaks. This region is a long way from recovering from the one-million-gallon Enbridge spill in Marshall, Michigan, so you’d suspect that there are some major gaps in protections. You’d be right.

The report documents that the federal government’s protections are weak and the states’ are incomplete, fragmented and ineffective:

• There is no federal review of the long-term risks associated with routing of new oil pipelines or consideration of impacts to entire watersheds such as the Great Lakes basin, and state review is at best inadequate, and in some cases non-existent;
• Many areas designated as “environmentally sensitive” are left unprotected by the federal Integrity Management program, the primary tool for assessing the condition of existing lines, installing leak detection systems, and repairing defects on a set timeline; and
• Within the Great Lakes region, only one state (Minnesota) is certified to regulate intrastate oil pipelines, and only three states (Minnesota, Michigan and Illinois) have any permit requirements for new oil pipeline construction – and in many cases even those requirements are minimal.

We don’t have much time to fix the ineffective state and federal regulations. Enbridge is proposing to expand two of their pipelines to carry more oil in a more corrosive form though pipes that are 50-60 years old. The federal agencies need to do their jobs when reviewing the Enbridge plan, and even more importantly, the states need to step up. Michigan needs to closely scrutinize the Enbridge expansion plan and, if necessary, order the company to change it to make it safer. And the feds need to take a new and much harder look at the entire project.

Great Lakes Region in Midst of Mineral Rush

Our sulfide mining report also paints a grim picture of short-term jobs and revenues being traded for long-term ecological harm like acid mine drainage that destroys not just lakes and streams but also the jobs that depend on them. The Great Lakes region is experiencing a mineral mining rush. Billions of dollars of gold, nickel, copper and other metals have been discovered in sulfide ore bodies in the upper Great Lakes states and mining companies are pursuing them at full speed.

The tradeoff posed by this mining rush is not simply jobs vs. the environment; it is jobs vs. jobs – mining jobs vs. tourism and recreation jobs, and mining jobs vs. the jobs in the knowledge economy that come to a region when its quality of life is high.

Federal protections against this type of sulfide mining are minimal and the state response is mixed. Some, like Wisconsin, are doing a decent job; others, like Michigan, are not. The report found, for example, that Michigan has a potentially effective law, but that its methods of implementing and enforcing it are weak.

And that’s bad news for Lake Superior. Michigan has already approved the massive Kennecott mine, which will be dug underneath the Salmon Trout River, a blue-ribbon trout stream that runs through pristine forest to Lake Superior, only a few miles away. Michigan’s approval came despite overwhelming evidence that acid mine drainage is likely to occur and that the mine itself could collapse, endangering workers and sucking in the entire Salmon Trout River.

Last week, Michigan issued an initial permit for a second operation, the Orvana Copperwood Mine, to be located in the far western tip of the Upper Peninsula only two miles from Lake Superior. Mining at Orvana would be permitted within 200 feet of the Lake Superior shoreline. 200 feet! That puts the risk of acid mine drainage  less than a football field away from the largest, cleanest lake in North America.

An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure

When we talk about the Great Lakes, we often think about “restoration” – helping the lakes recover from decades of historic contamination and other threats. We think of restoring the status quo. But that’s not right; for the Great Lakes the status quo isn’t static. It’s moving all the time, and in these areas, the status of the lakes is degrading.

We cannot restore the lakes with one hand while we’re making them worse with the other. It’s much easier to make them sick than it is to make them healthy. The adage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” strongly applies to the Great Lakes. It is far more costly to restore the damage than to prevent it in the first place.

The agencies charged with regulating pipelines and mines need to consider why we need a Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. In the past we allowed the kinds of pollution that they’re allowing now. That pollution damaged the lakes to the point where we need a $20 billion investment to bring them back to health. Let’s not make the same mistakes again.

The Great Lakes are the foundation of our economy, our recreation, our quality of life, our health. Let’s treat them that way.

Last post, I promised to do a multi-part update on Asian carp, moving from recent sampling to short term actions to long term actions to threats outside the Chicago Area Waterway System.

To sum up the recent sampling results, it’s pretty clear that there are isolated Asian carp in the Chicago waterway system past the electric fence, but the fish do not appear to be present in breeding populations. Which is good news; it means we have time to get a permanent fix for this crisis.

Today’s post takes on short term actions – particularly, last month’s report from the government’s Asian carp task force.

Let’s be clear at the outset: we need to keep our eye on the ball, which is permanent separation of the Mississippi River system from Lake Michigan. And I’ll discuss that in the next post. But the recent government report, with the oh-so-interesting title of “Monitoring and Rapid Response Plan for Asian Carp on the Upper Illinois River and Chicago Area Waterway System,” (pdf) is not designed to address permanent separation; it addresses primarily the short-term actions that the agencies have been employing for several years.

Those short-term actions include:

• upgrading the electric fence that deters carp from moving up the canals toward the lake
• preventing carp-infested waters from flooding from the Des Plaines River into the canals
• reducing the population pressures of Asian carp from below the electric fence (so there are fewer fish available to travel upstream toward the lake)
• netting and commercial fishing operations
• poisoning stretches of the canals when the monster carp appear to be present
• testing out new methods of killing or repelling the carp
• continuing to conduct eDNA testing for Asian carp in Chicago’s canals

Although the report doesn’t feature any groundbreaking developments, it actually does show progress for short-term activities. It’s pretty much in line with what we asked them to do in the short term when I testified before the Senate a year ago–you can read my full testimony on Asian carp here (pdf).

Discussions of hydroguns and other fanciful technologies aside, the main thrust of the monitoring and rapid response report is that:

1. They have developed a trigger-response mechanism for making management decisions, just as we demanded that they do.
2. The triggers include eDNA evidence, sometimes in isolation.
3. While they don’t explicitly defend the validity of eDNA evidence as I’d like to see, they do defend it implicitly, as they are willing to take management actions based on DNA evidence alone.
4. The availability and transparency of the eDNA evidence has improved dramatically.
5. Their plan moving forward for sampling and rapid response looks pretty solid.

The fundamental problem with the report is the way it was marketed and covered. It is not designed to address long-term solutions; even the name of the report indicates how limited it is. The report is supposed to complement the long-term actions that the long-term plan, the Great Lakes Mississippi River Separation Study, is designed to develop, not substitute for them.

The coverage was confusing and misleading, probably not helped by news release put out by the agencies online, which implies that this report describes all the efforts of the agencies on CAWS; it never mentions long term separation.

Most importantly, the report reflects a change in attitude and action by the agencies. It shows they have are relying on the best evidence – including eDNA evidence – to make rational decisions on how to slow the continued march of Asian carp past existing barriers. If this action plan was accompanied by a timely and robust schedule for completing a permanent and effective barrier, I’d say it does the job it needs to do.

Unfortunately, the plans for the permanent barrier is woefully lacking…. And so the agencies seem to be relying on this short-term plan as a long-term solution. And that’s a recipe for disaster.

Stay tuned for next week’s post on what’s happening (or not) with the permanent barrier.

Earlier this week, an oil pipeline beneath Marshall, Michigan (about 70 miles west of Ann Arbor), burst and released between 800,000 and 1,000,000 gallons of oil into Talmadge Creek, a small tributary of the Kalamazoo River. The oil quickly flowed into the river and has travelled 35 miles downstream, where it is about 60 miles from Lake Michigan. The pipeline has been shut off so no more oil should be released into the river, but the pipeline is underground and the EPA has not confirmed whether the oil has indeed stopped entering the stream.

Visit www.nwf.org/MichiganOilSpill for more on the disaster.

Oil in the Kalamazoo River | National Wildlife Federation

Federal and state officials are working with the pipeline owner, Enbridge, to try to contain the spill, recover the oil, and protect and rehabilitate damaged wildlife. U.S. EPA is the incident commander for the spill. The U.S Fish and Wildlife Service, the Departments of Transportation and Homeland Security, the Coast Guard, and the Michigan DNRE also are part of the response team.
As of noon today (Thursday), federal and state officials believe that they have largely contained the spill in Morrow Lake, an impoundment of the Morrow Dam just east of Kalamazoo. They say that they have removed approximately 2,500 barrels of oil from the river, or about 10 percent of the spill. 

NWF staff on site this morning verified that the spill did not appear to have gotten to the dam. Officials are also making contingency plans for actions at Lake Allegan, another 30 miles downstream from Morrow Pond (near Allegan), if the spill is not contained earlier. Despite comments by Governor Granholm this morning indicating otherwise, officials appear to be confident that the spill will not reach Lake Michigan or the wetlands complexes near Saugatuck. However, the damage to the areas along the Kalamazoo River is severe. Toxic fumes have made evacuations necessary and residents along the river have been warned to boil their water before using it. Oiled birds and dead fish have been discovered, but there is little information about the extent of the wildlife damage; the pipeline company, Enbridge, appears to be concealing that.

Although this spill is very small compared to the Gulf spill, it has been called the largest oil spill in the Midwest. To provide a sense of perspective, the Kalamazoo River spill is about 10 percent of the size of the Exxon Valdez spill. Because it is in a medium-sized river, the spill is highly concentrated and will stay that way until it is removed or diffuses in Morrow Lake, Lake Allegan, and Lake Michigan itself.

National and regional media have been reporting on the spill, including the New York Times and the Detroit Free Press. NWF has issued a statement. Our office has a team of people on the ground in Marshall, Battle Creek and Kalamazoo tracking the spill and the wildlife recovery efforts.

As we learned from the Gulf disaster, this is all unfolding rapidly and we are still learning critical information. We have hopes that despite its size, this spill will be quickly contained and much of the oil slick removed. The impacts on the river and its wildlife are still unknown; I believe we’ll be dealing with those impacts for years.