October 2017 Discover

October 2017^ DISCOVER^61

JAY SMITH

and David Hand, chair of the Department of Civil and

Environmental Engineering at Michigan Technologi-

cal University. Hand had worked on water purification

systems for the International Space Station that can turn

sweat and urine into tap water.

“This,” Hand told the group of the ballast problem, “is

not rocket science.”

Two weeks later, Isle Royale’s passenger ship had a

crude ballast treatment system that used chlorine to fry

viruses and other life lurking in its 37,000-gallon ballast

tanks, and then vitamin C to neutralize the poison so the

water could be harmlessly discharged into the lake. Green

didn’t stop there. She leveraged her authority as protec-

tor of Isle Royale to block all freighter ballast discharges

within a 4.5-mile radius of the island, which happened to

cover shipping lanes used by freighters sailing to and from

the Canadian port of Thunder Bay.

The Park Service has since installed a permanent bal-

last treatment system on the Ranger III that uses filtration

and UV light, a first for the Great Lakes. Although the

Isle Royale boat is almost toy-sized compared with the

freighters that ply the Great Lakes, Green contends the

relatively simple chlorine treatment could be scaled up

to the biggest boats on the lakes as an emergency line

of defense that would be far stouter than the saltwater

flushing — the only protection for the lakes until ballast

treatment systems are required for all overseas ships,

which likely won’t be until 2021 at the earliest.

STOP THE SALTIES

The Great Lakes are wrapped by thousands of miles

of shoreline. But unlike on the Atlantic, Gulf or Pacific

coasts, there is, literally, a door through which every

foreign Seaway ship must pass. Stop the overseas ships

known regionally as “salties,” and you can stop their

ballast invasions.

“Offload the cargo in Nova Scotia and ship it down

through rail,” an exasperated former Chicago Mayor

Richard Daley once told me. “That will protect the Great

Lakes forever. That will protect local and state govern-

ments from spending hundreds of millions of dollars.”

He is not alone. Conservationists agree this low-tech

solution for the Great Lakes could prove far cheaper

than installing ballast treatment systems that could cost

well over a million dollars on each ship.

But what might it cost?

In 2005, two Michigan logistics experts took the first

crack at putting a price tag on bringing in the Seaway’s

overseas cargo into the region by other means. The figure

they came up with was $55 million annually. That’s what

it would cost to transfer the salties’ cargo from a coastal

port to trucks, rail or regional boats.

The overall toll just to municipalities and power com-

panies trying to keep their pipes mussel-free over the last

quarter century tops $1.5 billion. And in terms of damage

to fisheries and other recreational activities, the dollar toll

for the ecological unraveling of the lakes due to ballast

invasions was pegged in a 2008 University of Notre Dame

study at $200 million annually — a number the study

authors predicted would grow as new invasive species are

discovered.

The question now is: How will the public respond once

the next new invader turns up?

Cleveland’s industrially fouled Cuyahoga River burned

over and over throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

As late as the 1950s, the flames on the oily surface of the

water were still viewed as business as usual. But eventually

the public had enough, and when the river was set ablaze

in 1969, it turned a nation livid and led to passage of the

Clean Water Act.

Isle Royale’s Green predicts similar fury with the ship-

ping industry when the next ballast invader turns up.

“The industry has had this grace period to find solutions,”

she says. “The grace period they have been given will hit

the fan when they find the next one.”

She tells me this on a raw, rainy day in 2014 at her

park headquarters not far from the shoreline of Lake

Superior, and my notes are a smudgy mess. When I go

back to them later, I can’t tell from my scribble if she

said “if ” or “when” a new invasion happens. So I call her

back to get clarification. She chuckles ruefully.

“No,” she tells me. “I said ‘when.’ Definitely ‘when.’ ”^ D

Reprinted from THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT

LAKES by Dan Egan. Copyright © 2017 by Dan Egan.

With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton &

Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

1989 2002 2017

Zebra mussels (orange) quickly colonized the Great Lakes and other waterways after they were first found in 1988. Quagga mussels

(purple), which thrive in deeper waters, now cover vast regions of lake bed as well.