Few American rivers have been left untouched by the drive for shipping channels and sewage canals. To move along a storied river like the Mississippi is to navigate a path cut for commodities with pumps, locks and straightened bends. This is certainly the case at the lock where the reversed Chicago slurps from Lake Michigan, at the pumping stations that push sewage south and at ship elevators connected to the canal system.
Fusion of watersheds as grand as the Great Lakes and Mississippi River allows for all kinds of natural and cultural mixtures. Part of the mix comes from living travelers on ships from far-flung ports that disembark and find success in a new place. If the species in question outcompetes its predecessors, then it becomes classified as an invasive species.
The most formidable invasive species are four kinds of carp. Their movement has brought Great Lake states as close as they have ever come to plugging the Sanitary and Ship Canal. Unlike other new arrivals, the carp reached the United States through the mail rather than on barges, ordered from Malaysia to clear pond scum in Arkansas. This attractive asset ultimately proved their greatest liability.
Two of the four carp –Bighead and Silver–take a vacuum cleaner approach to nutrition, inhaling all of the plankton that they can. Plankton rests at the base of the aquatic food chain. In its absence, smaller species go hungry and starve out bigger ones like fish beloved by humans. It wasn’t their ravenousness that seized public attention but their ability to leap from the water when frightened by motorboats, sometimes whacking boaters on the head.
As a result, the invader term really stuck and wanted signs targeting carp established total opposition. Dubbing them Asian Carp infused the standoff with long-held Rust Belt resentments about Japanese cars and Chinese manufacture blamed for erasing blue collar jobs. With an enemy framed in America’s crosshairs, it wasn’t long before the military stepped up.
As a wing of the armed forces, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) thinks in terms of elimination and deterrence. It has experimented with mass carp poisoning but ultimately prefers walls in water aimed at keeping them out of the Great Lakes. USACE’s solution costs hundreds of millions of public dollars, contains inevitable design flaws and keeps us lodged in a faltering 19th century system. USACE intends to expand a deterrence complex in the Mississippi-bound Des Plaines River that resembles a checkpoint for carp. Just as military checkpoints look to keep certain people out but let others through, so the carp checkpoint aims to repel fish and propel barges. Just as military checkpoints have increased surveillance and detention technologies, so USACE looks to do for carp.
In 2002, USACE debuted a demonstration electric barrier in the Sanitary and Ship Canal, which was upgraded in 2008. Barriers IIA and IIB came online in 2009 and 2011. They work by emitting a field of electrodes across the breadth and depth of the canal that carp cannot pass. It is said that, due to their potent charge, crew on any passing barges must enter the cabin to avoid any negative effects on humans.
The basin-bridging fish inspired bipartisan action among Great Lakes members of Congress who demanded federal funding for an elaborate carp deterrent complex at a Des Plaines River junction known as Brandon Road. For a total cost of around $858 million, the carp checkpoint will increase the redundancy of current barriers by adding another along with an acoustic fish deterrent blasting sounds intolerable to carp and a bubble curtain that “removes small and stunned fish entrained in spaces between barges.”
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act Law extends $226 million for the completion of Pre-Construction Engineering and Design and the initiation of construction for the Brandon Road Lock and Dam Aquatic Nuisance Species Barrier Project on the Des Plaines River. Additional federal funding from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and millions from the States of Michigan and Illinois back up the impressive starting sum. Some, if not all, of the carp checkpoint will be established on the Des Plaines River.
