Great Lakes advocates are renewing calls for the Trump administration to lift a stop work order on a barrier designed to stop invasive carp after several hundred juvenile fish were discovered just 80 miles from Lake Michigan.
“Invasive carp are a clear and present danger to the Great Lakes environment and economy. These invasive fish have already wreaked havoc up the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, upending the ecosystem and harming local economies. The Army Corps must restart construction on Brandon Road to address this national problem before invasive carp take hold in the Great Lakes, too,” Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition Director Laura Rubin said in a release.
Asian carp were first introduced to the U.S. in the 1970s to help control algae, but they quickly escaped into wild waterways, where they’ve spread rapidly. With a voracious appetite, carp outcompete native fish for food, and scientists warn that they could have a devastating impact on the Great Lakes ecosystem if they find their way into the lakes.
Great Lakes states have teamed up with the federal government on a solution to stop the fish from advancing into the lakes: The Brandon Road Interbasin Project (BRIP). The project will feature several deterrents to stop carp at a natural choke point near Joliet, Illinois, U.S.A. before they reach the lakes. Construction on BRIP began in May; however, progress was halted in July by a stop work order issued by the Trump administration, and state officials and conservation groups say they don’t know why. The project had already been delayed by a multi-month stop work order earlier this year.
Work on the project remains paused, and the recent discovery of carp closer to the lakes has renewed calls for work on BRIP to continue.
On 14 August, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources announced a sampling crew had caught 700 juvenile silver carp in Marseilles Pool, a body of water just 80 miles from Lake Michigan.
“The fish ranged in size from about 4 to 6 inches long, and the discovery marks the first time invasive carp of this size have been found this far upriver since the monitoring program began in 2010,” Illinois DNR said in a release. “The location indicates a spawning event may have occurred further upriver or in one of the tributaries that feed into the Illinois River.”
On 26 August, several Great Lakes groups called on the federal government to allow work to continue.
“The combination of juvenile invasive carp being found this far upriver and the stop work order have set off alarm bells across the Great Lakes region. We have a decade of bipartisan Congressional and state support behind this project, and construction crews are ready to go. The White House and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers need to let them get to work to protect our vital USD 5.1 billion (EUR 4.4 billion) fishing and USD 16 billion (EUR 13.8 billion) recreational boating industries – and the lakes we all love,” Alliance for the Great Lakes President and CEO Joel Brammeier said in a release.
