[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2684-E2685]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

THE NEED FOR THE GREAT LAKES RESTORATION INITIATIVE

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HON. DAVID R. OBEY

of wisconsin

in the house of representatives

Monday, November 2, 2009

Mr. OBEY. Madam Speaker, I commend to my colleagues the enclosed
article from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about the threat to the
Great lakes from invasive species and the need for the Great Lakes
Restoration Initiative passed by the house last week.

[From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Nov. 2, 2009]

15,000 Reasons To Worry About State's Lakes

(By Dan Egan)

Crandon.--A day at the beach in Wisconsin's North Woods
didn't used to go like this.
Candy Dailey spent a Fourth of July holiday splashing with
grandkids on the sandy shore of Lake Metonga when she felt a
nasty sting on her foot.
She didn't need to look down to know the culprit was a
zebra mussel--cuts from the razor-sharp shells have become as
unremarkable as bee stings since the mussels invaded Dailey's
lake eight years ago.
The natives of the Caspian Sea region first turned up in
North America in the summer of 1988, thanks to overseas
freighters' longstanding--and ongoing--practice of dumping
their contaminated ballast water in the Great Lakes, which
are now home to more than 185 non-native species.
None has wreaked more damage than the mussels, which feast
on Great Lakes plankton and have cost the region billions of
dollars in starved fish populations, beach-trashing algae
blooms and plugged industrial and municipal water intake
pipes.
Now, this ecological mess is spreading inland.
``The Great Lakes are just a beachhead for invasions that
are going to play out in lakes across the country in the next
century,'' says University of Wisconsin ecologist Jake Vander
Zanden. ``It's just the start.''
Dailey is painfully aware of this.
``I'm a nurse, so I knew to make it bleed and wash it
out,'' she says of the cut suffered from the molar-sized
mussels. ``I dried it off and taped it.''
Trouble came in the middle of the night when she woke with
a throbbing, swollen foot. By morning a tell-tale red streak
was creeping up her leg. By sunset she was taking a broad-
spectrum antibiotic.
Dailey recovered from the bacterial infection, but her
holiday was over.
It's not the kind of story that makes a headline. It's just
one infection from one cut. It's just one person swimming in
one inland lake.
The problem is Wisconsin has more than 15,000 inland lakes.

Real trouble for real estate

Politicians have tried for years to force overseas
freighters to treat their ballast water--used to steady the
ships--before discharging it at a Great Lakes port in
exchange for cargo.
The shipping industry acknowledges the trouble it has
pumped into the world's largest freshwater system, and its
leaders profess a desire to do something about it.
Yet at the same time they have consistently fought
regulations proposed by Great Lakes states to require
freighters to install onboard ballast treatment systems,
claiming they are impossibly stringent, expensive or
inconsistent from state to state.
Members of Congress, meanwhile, have repeatedly vowed--and
repeatedly failed--to craft an overarching national ballast
law that is palatable to both the shipping industry and
environmentalists.
The result is the door remains open to invasions, the most
recent being the ``bloody red shrimp'' discovered in Lake
Michigan in late 2006. There could well be others that have
arrived since then; it can take years for populations to grow
big enough to be noticed.
Biologists say the damage being done to the world's largest
freshwater system cannot be overstated, but the problem has
become bigger than the Great Lakes themselves. It's now clear
the failure to slam the door on new Great Lakes invasions has
consequences for everyday folks with cottages on inland
lakes, places working-class people across the state like to
claim as their favorite on earth.
``Where is the fun in playing on the shoreline anymore if
our lakes are wall-to-wall zebra mussels?'' asks Dailey.
``Look at the money that we all pay in property taxes to live
on a lake that is now not the lake that it used to be.''
The potential economic impacts of this second-wave invasion
could prove staggering.
Property on Forest County's Lake Metonga sells for an
average of about $1,200 a shoreline foot, and the lake has
roughly 7 miles worth of it. That means a crude estimate of
just this lake's shorefront value--not including any of the
homes built on it--lands somewhere above $44 million.
At the same time, one estimate of the annual savings
associated with using overseas ships to haul cargo into the
Great Lakes instead of transporting it via truck, train or
barge is only $55 million.
That's basically the real estate value of just one inland
lake.

Global trouble knocks

People flock to places like the forested shores of Lake
Metonga to get away from the rest of world.
It is an illusion.
Standing in front of about 400 shorefront property owners
at the annual Wisconsin Lakes Convention in downtown Green
Bay, University of Notre Dame professor David Lodge dimmed
the lights and gave a pointed presentation last spring about
the biological perils for a globe that has been stitched so
tightly together by increasingly efficient transportation
networks.
Lodge pulled up a slide showing the Great Lakes are
directly connected to 12% of the world's ports. That means a
mussel, fish or even virus picked up at a bustling global
port in a place like Antwerp, Belgium, can arrive in a matter
of days at the Green Bay docks just outside the doors of the
conference center at which Lodge spoke.
Then Lodge showed a slide that revealed 99% of the world's
ports are just two stops or fewer away from the Port of Green
Bay, or any other commercial dock in the Great Lakes. This is
not a theoretical problem; freighters are blamed for the
arrival of nearly 60 new species since the St. Lawrence
Seaway opened the Great Lakes to oceangoing vessels 50 years
ago.
And spreading that misery inland like so many viruses are
the fishing boats, Jet Skis and other pleasure craft rolling
on trailers down the state highways that provide a 65 mph
link between the Great Lakes and inland waters.
Wisconsin now has 120 inland waterways confirmed as
infested with zebra mussels, though there is not a
comprehensive annual survey of each lake so the actual number
could be much higher.
Beyond slicing swimmers' feet, zebra mussels have been
linked to inland lake outbreaks of blue-green algae that
produce toxins that can kill an animal and can cause liver
damage in humans.
This algae was a problem in state waters during the 1960s
and '70s, but it faded with a ban on laundry detergents that
contained the phosphorous that fed its blooms.
Now blue-green algae outbreaks are making a comeback, and
scientists are pointing to zebra mussel infestations as a big
reason.
The mussels encourage the blooms because they eat virtually
every type of algae except for the blue-green algae. That
gives the toxic algae a competitive advantage over its
nutrient-rich cousins that have historically nourished the
base of a lake's food chain.
Zebra mussels may also further promote these toxic blooms
because their excrement fertilizes them.
Still, not every lake in Wisconsin is destined to become
home to zebra mussels. Many, for example, don't contain
enough mussel shell-building calcium. Biologist Vander
Zanden's lab analyzed 923 lakes in northern Wisconsin's Vilas
County and found 91 of them to be suitable habitat for zebra
mussels. It's a completely different story in southeastern
Wisconsin, where all but one of 334 analyzed can likely
sustain zebra mussels.
But property owners on inland lakes have to worry about a
lot more than just zebra mussels.
``If you want to know what's coming next, look at the
species that are already in the Great Lakes,'' Lodge says.
And the problem doesn't stop at the state line; boat ramps
around the country are launching more than just boats. Zebra
mussels are widespread in the Mississippi River basin, and
quagga mussels are now plugging pipes all the way out in
California.

Invaders on the way

The list of Great Lakes invaders that threaten inland
waterways includes VHS, a viral disease spreading through the
Great Lakes that can be lethal to dozens of fish species.

[[Page E2685]]

It also includes the quagga mussel, a slightly larger and
hardier cousin to the zebra mussel that has exploded across
the bottom of Lake Michigan in the past few years. Scientists
say they are swallowing the base of the food chain and that
jeopardizes everything above it, including the prized salmon
that drive much of the Great Lakes' billion-dollar
recreational fishery.
Overseas freighters also brought to the Great Lakes the
round goby, a bug-eyed fish that thrives on native species'
fish eggs. Lake Michigan has lost more than 90% of its prey
fish population since the arrival of invasive mussels, but
the round goby is thriving, now accounting for about a fifth
of the lake's prey fish.
Gobies were first found in the Great Lakes in 1990 and in
recent years began gobbling their way up Great Lakes
tributaries, in some cases as far as 30 miles inland. The
fish have been found in more than one-third of the Lake
Michigan tributaries sampled.
``They are marching inland, and there is a lot of habitat
for them,'' says Vander Zanden.
Ballast water has also brought to the Great Lakes the spiny
and fish hook water fleas, which are both hard for native
fish to eat because of their namesake tails, and a rival when
it comes to feasting on the microscopic critters at the
bottom of the food chain.
Wisconsin's Department of Natural Resources has distributed
more than $10 million to communities to fight aquatic
invasive species since 2003. Regardless, the list of new
invaders is likely to grow.
The only protection the Great Lakes has at the moment from
contaminated ballast water is a requirement that overseas
ships bound for the Great Lakes flush their ballast tanks
with mid-ocean saltwater to expel or kill any unwanted
hitchhikers. It is a practice scientists say goes a long
way--but not all the way--to reducing the risk of future
invasions.
In January, the Environmental Protection Agency released a
report that spotlighted 30 organisms that have yet to invade
the Great Lakes but are medium to high-risk candidates to do
so.
Twenty-five years ago, few in the Great Lakes region had
even heard of a zebra mussel. The question now: What next is
headed up the St. Lawrence Seaway?
``Until we control the ships, there will be lots of species
nobody has ever heard of arriving on their doorsteps,'' says
Anthony Ricciardi, an invasive species expert at Montreal's
McGill University.

Frustrations mount

In 2008, organizers of the Pewaukee Triathlon had to cancel
the swim portion of the event, which drew some 2,000 racers,
because of plumes of blue-green algae. Nutrients flushed into
the lake by heavy rains were a likely factor, but it didn't
help that Pewaukee has also been infested with zebra mussels.
On a busy Sunday over Labor Day weekend, Pewaukee Lake bait
shop owner John Laimon estimated there were about 200
trailered boats on the lake ``coming from who knows where.''
It's not lost on him that Lake Michigan boat ramps are just
a half-hour away. He is flabbergasted that two decades after
zebra mussels were discovered in Lake Michigan, the
government has failed to turn off the invasive species
spigot.
``We're the ones paying for the mistakes at the federal
level, and there is nothing in the wind that is going to stop
that,'' he says.
With little progress in Congress, the state of Wisconsin
earlier this year tried to take matters into its own hands.
It followed the leads of other Great Lakes states such as
Michigan, Minnesota and New York and proposed its own ballast
regulations that would require ships to install onboard
treatment systems.
Shipping industry advocates were not happy, particularly
because Wisconsin's proposed standards, which mirror New
York's, are much stricter than those of neighboring
Minnesota.
They urged the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to
back off or adopt weaker regulations more in harmony with
those of Minnesota, with which Wisconsin shares Duluth-
Superior harbor. What's the point in stringently protecting
just one side of a harbor, they asked.
Conservationists agreed. But they urged Minnesota to get as
tough as Wisconsin was considering.
The shipping industry turned out in force at a public
hearing on Wisconsin's proposal last spring, easily
outnumbering those in favor of greater protections.
``In a time of national recession and a record state budget
deficit, the last thing Wisconsin should do is impose a
(ballast) permit that will: A) destroy jobs, B) reduce tax
revenues and C) not result in any environmental benefits,''
said Andy Lisak, executive director of the Development
Association that promotes business interests in Douglas
County and the port city of Superior.
The DNR has been sitting on its proposal ever since.
And this has left bar-and-boat-launch owner Andy Cuppan
``terrified'' about what might be headed next down the
interstate off-ramp and into his mussel-infested lake.
He and his business partner recently bought the Boathouse
Bar and Grill on the shore of Upper Nemahbin Lake, which is
literally just feet from the rumbling westbound lanes of I-
94.
Cuppan mentions that earlier this summer he dared to take a
shoeless swim and suffered several stinging mussel cuts.
More painful for him is the idea that not enough is being
done to protect him from the big lake 30 miles to the east
and from what's stewing in the water at ports across the
globe.
``We can't do anything about what's here, but let's not let
anything else in,'' he said. ``Our livelihoods are at
stake.''
Of course this is just one guy, on one lake.
The problem is Wisconsin has more than 15,000 of them.

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