CHICAGO – Chicago’s seasonal ritual of boat parades may be scuttled as five states ask a judge to head off an invasion of Asian carp by blocking access to Lake Michigan.
Boats come out of winter storage along the Chicago and Calumet rivers each spring and motor through locks into the lake, where they harbor until fall. The city schedules lifts of movable bridges twice a week to accommodate tall masts.
Michigan and four other states will argue at a Tuesday hearing that one way to shut out the carp is to close the locks. Boaters in the nation’s third-largest city say that would strand them in dry dock or, for sailboats, cost thousands of dollars to have vessels transported overland.
“Closing off the locks just seems like cutting off a lifeblood for a lot of boaters in this town,” said Glennon Schaffner, 45, an architect and retail executive who keeps his 30-foot Chris-Craft powerboat, the Maru II, at the Goose Island Boatyard on the north branch of the Chicago River, about three miles from the lake.
Boatyard owners are concerned that customers will abandon their facilities close to the city for those far enough away that they wouldn’t be affected by carp-fighting measures.
“We are very nervous about the situation,” said Rick Haislip, general manager of the Goose Island Boatyard, which stores as many as 400 powerboats. “Boat owners are worried if they pull boats out this fall, they will not be able to get back into the lake next spring.”
Asian carp, which grow as big as 100 pounds, escaped into the Mississippi River after being imported to cleanse fish ponds and sewage lagoons. Their diet includes the plankton that native species need to survive, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio and Pennsylvania contend that the carp threaten the region’s $7 billion sport and commercial fishing industry.
U.S. District Judge Robert Dow in Chicago will hear evidence in the lawsuit filed in July by attorneys general for those states, charging that Illinois and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers haven’t done enough to keep the fish out of the lakes.
“We have here a carp highway,” Robert Reichel, an attorney for Michigan, said in an appearance before Dow last month.
Traces of carp DNA have been found in Calumet Harbor, a cove southeast of downtown that is part of the lake.
“Once in the lake, it would be very difficult to control” the fish, according to the states’ complaint.
While they recognize the threat that the invasive fish pose, Chicago boaters question the lawsuit’s reasoning.
“There is no way to prevent the carp from getting into Lake Michigan,” said Jeff Pierce, founder of Windy City Yacht Brokerage, who owns a 52-foot Jefferson Monticello powerboat, the Broke-R. “Even if they close the locks, spring flooding will allow them to get into the lake.”
