Salties deliver thick, rotting green gunk on Great Lakes shorelines; $55M savings a drop in the bucket compared to staggering costs
July 01, 08 by TheFleetIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
by Dan Egan | Source: Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
The scope of the ecological damage of the biological pollution linked to overseas shipping is matched by its staggering economic toll.
- The cost comes in lost tourism on beaches unsuitable for swimming and in the empty recreational fishing boats that are the backbone of a Great Lakes fishery valued at over $7 billion a year. Recreational fishing from Michigan’s 10 busiest fishing ports on Lake Huron, for example, has plummeted from around 1.2 million hours in 2003 to about 300,000 last year - because of a crash in salmon. And there are early but ominous signs Lake Michigan’s sport fishery could be headed in the same direction.
- The cost comes in power and water bills as part of never-ending programs to keep water intake pipes free of mussel and algae buildup. We Energies alone spent well over $3 million on structures to keep cladophora out of intake pipes at just two power plants, in Port Washington and Oak Creek. It is spending an additional $2.6 million on special mussel-proof screens as part of its expansion at Oak Creek, and its overall operating costs for controlling mussels - which cluster and clog industrial intake pipes like plaque in a carotid artery - is estimated at $500,000 a year. That’s just one company. The most comprehensive survey to date indicates the pipe-clogging costs to industry and government since 1988 approach $1.5 billion.
- The cost comes in tax bills - $358 million has been spent by the U.S. and Canadian government since 1958 killing just sea lampreys, an almost-forgotten bloodsucking parasite that swam into the lakes through the shipping canals and still must be controlled with annual doses of poison or it will devastate what’s left of the lakes’ prized predator fish.
- The cost comes in shrinking property values and our ability to enjoy the lakes. Just one county in Wisconsin gives a glimpse of the fortune at stake. Property records show shoreline properties in Door County, where Nell lives, have an assessed value of $2.6 billion.
Scientists say the only way to stanch the shipborne onslaught is to somehow sterilize the freighter-steadying ballast water sloshing in the bellies of the 700-foot-long behemoths that lumber up the Seaway.
But there is another simple, radical and potentially cheap way to address this problem - shut oceangoing ships out of the lakes until they can prove they won’t pollute them.
The shipping industry claims a ban could deal a brutal economic blow to the Midwest. But the relatively tiny amount of overseas cargo that flows on the Seaway likely could be absorbed at a relatively small cost by a handful of daily trains, or transferred before the ships reach the Seaway door to a Great Lakes-based freighter fleet.
The shipping industry bristles at the notion. But the industry also balked at the mandate for double-hulled oil tankers; now it boasts about its safety record.
Preliminary results from a federally funded study under way at the University of Notre Dame estimate that the economic loss tied directly to 57 exotic species scientists believe were delivered to the lakes by overseas vessels is costing us about $300 million a year - more than a million dollars a day for every day the Seaway is open (it closes each winter because of ice). That number does not include any losses in property values.
And the economic benefit of allowing the polluting ocean ships into the Great Lakes?
Only about $55 million a year, in terms of transportation savings over truck, rail and barge alternatives, according to a 2005 Joyce Foundation-funded analysis of cargo flows on the Great Lakes. The study has been ferociously criticized by shipping interests as an overly simplistic look at a complex transportation system, but it was successfully defended before an independent panel of transportation experts.
The promise of the Seaway, when it opened in 1959, was that it would turn Midwest cities such as Milwaukee into world-class ports. But it was built too small to accommodate many of the world’s freighters. Today ocean vessel traffic on the Great Lakes is a boutique business, done by an antique-sized fleet that accounts for less than 7% of the cargo moved along the Seaway and among the five big lakes, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. The ships primarily haul foreign steel into the region and depart with grain.
The vast majority of Great Lakes shipping is done by the freshwater “laker” fleet that hauls bulk commodities such as iron ore, salt and cement from one Great Lakes port to another.
Much, much more analysis, coverage; photos, video and diagrams at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel >>
