Action against Asian carp

[Lee Borgersen]

   Federal lawmakers call for action against Asian carp


Great Lakes senators want more from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers than the $25 million battle plan the agency released in January to stop the advance of Asian carp into the Great Lakes.


  and the beat goes on
A March 14 letter signed by a bipartisan group of 11 U.S. senators — including Wisconsin's Ron Johnson and Tammy Baldwin — tells the agency to turn that plan into action.

"We want to impress upon you the need to implement short-term measures to stop Asian carp from getting into the Great Lakes, and to move aggressively toward a long-term solution," the senators wrote.

The Army Corps released a 10,000-page study on Jan. 6 that examines a range of options to stop the marauding exotic carp from invading the Great Lakes by swimming up the Chicago Sanitary and Ship canal, which provides a man-made link between Lake Michigan and the Asian carp-infested Mississippi River basin.

Asian carp are the species most people are worried about at the moment, but the goal of the project is to stop unwanted species from migrating in both directions; biologists have identified about a dozen species poised to ride the canal waters out of the Great Lakes and into the Mississippi River basin, including a fish-killing virus that could wreak havoc on the Southern fish farm industry.

Great Lakes advocates and most scientists agree the best way to solve the problem is to rebuild the natural divide between the two watersheds by erecting some sort of structure to physically plug the canal. It is a project the Army Corps' study claimed would take decades and cost as much as $18 billion because of the need to drastically change the way storm and wastewater flow through the nation's third largest city.