LANSING – The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was supposed to come up with recommendations for addressing the threat of invasive species crossing between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River system, not merely a set of options, Attorney General Bill Schuette said in his formal comments on the Great Lakes Mississippi River Interbasin Study.
The Army Corps, in its report released at the beginning offered eight options for addressing not only Asian carp moving into the Great Lakes, but several other invasives moving south into the Mississippi River Basin. It also provided expected times and costs to complete each option.
It did not, however, rank any of the options as most effective.
“While the Corps takes years to study the problem, and now proposes still more studies, the threat that Asian carp will invade the Great Lakes through the Chicago Area Waterway System continues to mount,” Schuette said in his comments.
Schuette said Congress had charged the Army Corps with developing and implementing a plan. And he said the corps overestimated both the time and cost of physically separating the two water systems.
Lake Michigan was connected to the Mississippi through the Chicago Sanitary and Shipping Canal in 1900 to wash Chicago sewage away from the city, rather than into Lake Michigan, from which the city drew drinking water./P>
Schuette said the Army Corps should begin now implementing its proposal for a “mid-system hydrologic separation”, which would essentially restore the original division between the waterways, and ask Congress for the funds to complete it. The report estimates it would cost $15.5 billion and, assuming construction starts in 2017, not be completed until 2042.
The plan will actually take less than half that time and cost less than half that amount, Schuette said in his comments.
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