[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 19]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 26457-26459]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




          THE NEED FOR THE GREAT LAKES RESTORATION INITIATIVE

                                 ______
                                 

                           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-

[[Page 26458]]

     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.
       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

[[Page 26459]]

     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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