An Aversion to Diversion

While campaigning for president in October 2007, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson took a stance favoring diversion of the Great Lakes water to the thirsty West. “States like Wisconsin are awash in water,” he told the Las Vegas Sun newspaper.

That remark left Richardson awash in criticism. It cost him support in Wisconsin and other Great Lakes states, including Democratic strongholds such as Chicago, IL; Cleveland, OH; Detroit, MI; Gary, IN; and Milwaukee, WI—and it energized the legislative efforts then underway to pass a new regional compact severely limiting diversion.

Ultimately, the legislatures of all eight states in the Great Lakes basin (New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota) ratified the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact, the US Congress consented to it, and on October 6 President George W. Bush signed it into law.

Although the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec aren’t parties to the formal interstate compact, they are participants in a non-binding, good faith companion accord, the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin Sustainable Water Resources Agreement. When the basin’s governors endorsed the compact in December 2005, they and the provincial premiers also signed the agreement.

The Compact’s Provisions The key provision in both the compact and the agreement is “a general ban on diversions, with limited and strictly regulated exceptions for communities on or near the basin divide,” says David Naftzger, executive director of the Chicago-based Council of Great Lakes Governors, which facilitated the negotiations at the governors’ and premiers’ request. “Long distance diversions will be prohibited.”

Other provisions of both documents include commitments to:

• Implement water conservation and efficiency programs
• Manage water use inside the Great Lakes basin using a common decision-making standard
• Improve collection of water use information and data and create a centralized database available to the public
• Strengthen the scientific basis for making sound water management decisions

Under the compact, Naftzger explains, “proposed uses of water within the Great Lakes basin will be decided on by the individual states where the use takes place. Potential disputes over in-basin water uses will be resolved under state administrative procedures or state courts.”

The compact creates a council consisting of the state governors who will be responsible for administrative oversight. They will have limited decision-making authority and will establish rules for “alternative dispute resolution.” In Canada, the provinces have agreed through domestic laws and regulations to comply with the agreement’s terms.

The compact “also provides guidelines for state and provincial regulation of shipping within the Great Lakes,” says Dr. William Blomquist, a political science professor and liberal arts dean at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). “Shipping is a critical element of the economies of the Great Lakes states and provinces, but also poses threats to water quality and aquatic species, so the states and provinces felt the need for a framework to govern their regulations.”

“No More Chicagos” Together, the Great Lakes comprise the single largest collective body of available fresh surface water on the surface of the earth, a vast inland sea that contains about 20% of the world’s supply and 90% of the US supply. More than 34 million people—about 10% of the US population, and a quarter of Canada’s—dwell in the Great Lakes basin. The lakes’ seemingly inexhaustible supply of fresh water is a source of pride, pleasure, and economic benefit to basin residents, and a source of envy to many outsiders.

Since the early nineteenth century, entrepreneurs and politicians have concocted one scheme after another to divert Great Lakes water for use elsewhere—to provide drinking water to communities outside the basin, float barges on rivers and canals, replenish depleted aquifers, generate electricity, transport coal in a slurry pipeline, and dispose of municipal and industrial wastes. Some of these proposals were relatively local and small scale; others were grandiose plans to replumb much of the North American continent. A few have even succeeded.

By far, the largest diversion of Great Lakes water outside the basin occurs in Chicago, which originally discharged its sewage into Lake Michigan via the Chicago River. Chicago built a sewer system in the 1850s, and almost simultaneously began pumping polluted river water into the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which crossed the subcontinental divide into the Des Plaines River watershed. When this proved insufficient to keep pollution out of the lake, engineers deepened the canal and installed additional pumps to pull Lake Michigan water into the river and canal and over the divide. This arrangement, completed in 1871, proved insufficient as the city grew.

In 1889, voters approved the Sanitary District of Chicago (now the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago) to dig a new and larger channel, the 28-mile Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. Work began in 1892, and was spurred on by an 1895 cholera epidemic that killed more than 10% of the population—over 90,000 people. Completed in 1900, this canal transferred 673 square miles of the original Lake Michigan watershed into the Mississippi River basin.

A lock at the mouth of the Chicago River enables navigation while keeping river water out of the lake. Instead, it flows into the canal, which leads southwest from the south branch of the Chicago River to the Des Plaines River. Downstream, the Des Plaines and Kankakee rivers join to form the Illinois River, which empties into the Mississippi River north of St. Louis, MO.

The Chicago diversion has varied over time. In the 1920s, it was as high as 10,000 cubic feet per second (6.463 billion gallons per day). Over the 40-year period from 1927 to 1967, it averaged 3,200 cubic feet per second (2.068 billion gallons per day).

For years, the other Great Lakes states complained that Chicago’s diversion was lowering the level of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River, disrupting navigation and hydroelectric facilities. In 1958, all except Indiana filed suit against Illinois.

Albert B. Maris, a retired federal appeals court judge from Philadelphia, PA, heard the case as a master-in-chancery for the US Supreme Court. He wrote a 574-page report recommending that Chicago not be allowed to increase its diversion rate beyond the 40-year average, and not be compelled to return its sewage to the lake. The states accepted his recommendations, and in 1967 the Supreme Court issued a decree finalizing this settlement.

“The reversal of the Chicago River is not going to be undone by this new compact,” says Blomquist. “Illinois will divert no more water out of the lakes than it has been. In addition to being practically and economically difficult, undoing the Supreme Court decree would have been a political deal-breaker with respect to ratification by the Illinois legislature. Chicago explicitly gets grandfathered in, but there will be no more Chicagos.”

Water As a Product Like a buffalo herd defending its calves from a pack of circling wolves, the Great Lakes states and provinces committed themselves in the 1985 Great Lakes Charter to consult on water diversion proposals. Giving their commitment some teeth, the 1986 US Water Resources Development Act included a provision requiring unanimous consent of the Great Lakes governors to any new or increased diversion.

That framework provided a practically impermeable barrier to diversion until 1998, when the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources issued a permit to a private company, the Nova Group, to ship up to 50 tanker-loads of Lake Superior water to Asia. Provincial officials couldn’t justify saying no, because their regulations, written for canals and pipelines, didn’t contemplate the use of tankers. After a public and media outcry on both sides of the border, the Nova Group relinquished its permit. Then the governors and premiers began discussions that led to the 2001 Great Lakes Charter Annex and, in turn, to the explicit ban on long-distance diversions written into the new compact and agreement.

Both documents prohibit any long-distance “bulk-water transfer” in a container greater than 5.7 gallons (21.57 liters). Each state and province has the discretion to extend this ban to smaller containers. The compact also exempts from the ban any “product”—defined as “something produced… by human or mechanical effort” and “intended for intermediate or end use consumers.” That definition exempts beer, which for over a century has been brewed using Great Lakes’ water. It also exempts bottled water. Thus, ironically, the Nova Group’s stymied plan to sell tanker-loads of Lake Superior water as a product may have opened the floodgates to sales of smaller containers of water from all parts of the Great Lakes basin as a product.

Critics of the compact characterized this potential productification of Great Lakes water as a serious loophole. They wanted Congress to plug this leak in the basin’s integrity before consenting to the compact, but Congress didn’t. “The compact wasn’t too controversial,” says Blomquist of IUPUI. “If the states reached agreement, the federal government’s job was to let it happen and not get in the way.”

Water Level Issues Although the compact and agreement represent a commitment by the Great Lakes basin’s political leaders to retain as much of the basin’s water as possible within its confines, no one is sure how much diversion the lakes could tolerate before their level would begin to drop significantly. The Chicago diversion has been estimated to reduce the level of Lakes Michigan and Huron (which share a common level) by just 2 centimeters (0.787 of an inch), a negligible amount compared to overall lake-level fluctuations of 4 to 6 feet due to variations in precipitation and evaporation. Fluctuations in Great LakesLevels

“Such fluctuations are a normal part of the hydrology of the Great Lakes, says Dr. Philip V. Scarpino, an environmental historian on the IUPUI faculty. “We organize around a mean lake level. When it goes up and down, it has an impact on people’s economic bottom line. If the level is up, you may have beach erosion or a smashed beach house and dock. If the level is low, you may have several feet of muck between the shore and the water and not be able to get a boat in to your dock.”

In 2007, Lake Superior’s water level dropped to an all-time record low, though it rebounded somewhat in 2008. Lakes Michigan and Huron were down by about 1.6 feet in 2008, while Lake Erie was near its long-term mean. This variability within the basin further complicates discussions of lake-level effects.

“Lake Superior is unusual in that its watershed is about the same size as the lake,” explains Jim Nicholas, director of the US Geological Survey’s Michigan Water Science Center in Lansing, MI. “So, what happens on the lake is more important than what happens on the watershed. If you get four inches of rain on the land surface, some of that trickles into groundwater, some evaporates, and some goes into tree leaves, leaving only some of that four inches of rain to flow from the watershed to Lake Superior and raise its water level maybe an inch or so. But, if you get four inches of rain directly on Lake Superior, the water level goes up four inches.

“Until 2008, the Lake Superior basin had been very dry since about 1998,” he adds. “During that same period, Lake Erie was in a relatively wet regime, but those wet weather systems didn’t get up to Lake Superior.

“Also, Jay Austin, a researcher at the University of Minnesota, has shown that water temperatures in Lake Superior have been increasing and ice cover decreasing, which leads to more evaporation in the winter when you have cold, dry air and relatively warmer lake water,” continues Nicholas. “Climate variability is a significant issue. How much is due to natural causes and how much to the effects of human-induced climate change is debatable.”

Surface Water and Groundwater Another determinant of lake levels is groundwater, which flows to the Great Lakes from the subsurface area within the groundwater divide. This area is analogous to the watershed area on the land surface that is bounded by the watershed divide. Although a groundwater divide rarely lies directly beneath a surface water divide, the compact and agreement use the surface water divide for management and regulatory purposes, with special exceptions for communities that straddle the surface water divide.

Although groundwater has only a very small direct effect on lake levels, it does influence the flow of rivers and streams entering the lakes. “All groundwater is moving to surface water,” says Nicholas. “The water goes into the ground on the land surface by recharge, moves through aquifers, and comes out naturally into surface water—into a stream, lake, or wetland. If you put a well in, you short-circuit the groundwater system.

“Whether that impact is significant, discernable, and something to worry about depends on the location of the groundwater withdrawal and the resource to be affected,” he adds. “If you reduce the quantity of water in the stream enough, it becomes a quality issue. If there’s not enough water in the stream, the trout start dying.”

In Michigan, a 2006 law prohibits groundwater withdrawals that cause an adverse impact on the fish community in nearby streams. “The biological system is the regulating mechanism,” says Paul Seelbach, a fisheries research specialist in the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Institute for Fisheries Research at the University of Michigan (U-M) in Ann Arbor.

Interdisciplinary Model To implement that law, DNR and U-M researchers melded ichthyology and hydrology into a complex computer model based on 20 years of fish-community surveys around the state, 15 years of stream-flow measurements from 150 gauges, and additional measurements at about 2,000 other locations. They established a relationship between a stream’s summer flow volume and temperature, and the abundance of every major species of river and stream fish in Michigan.

They classified some 10,000 relatively homogeneous stream segments into 11 fish-community types by species composition, and then applied the model to ask how each species in a fish community responds to the change in flow when a certain percentage of water is withdrawn.

Seelbach says Michigan’s approach is independent of, but similar to, The Nature Conservancy’s ELOHA (Ecological Limits of Hydrologic Alteration) framework, a global research and conservation effort aimed at developing comprehensive stream-flow policies around the world.

“We didn’t look just at favorite species such as trout or bass; we looked at the entire community,” says Seelbach. “When you reduce the flow, the species fall away. We gave curves to the policymakers on the Michigan Groundwater Conservation Advisory Council (a body appointed by the Michigan legislature) to use as a risk discussion. The curve doesn’t tell you how much water to take, but it shows you where the top of the cliff is and where the bottom is. The policymakers ended up being fairly conservative on behalf of the environment, and relatively more restrictive on withdrawals.”

The model was posted to the Internet for public access on October 1, and its use will become mandatory on July 1, 2009. Seelbach describes it as “a coarse filter to sort out the easy cases.”

“Just as you shouldn’t go to the doctor if all you need is an aspirin, this model provides an exciting depth of efficiency,” he says. “It singles out the cases of concern for the Department of Environmental Quality to focus on.

“You can site your well and get an answer about the degree of risk to the fish community in 30 seconds,” adds Seelbach. “If there’s enough water for your well in that spot, it will tell you go ahead. You get your approval through the Internet. If there’s a problem, you can change your well site, depth, and pumping rate to see what would be the best plan.

“The vast majority of smallish well cases will be good to go,” he continues. “For larger wells and in risky spots, the model never says no. It sends you to humans. You can sit with them, look at local data, and bring in your consultants. The final determination will be made with a site-level review.”

Seelbach says research will continue to expand the model to encompass human uses of water. “People are part of this ecosystem, and we need to have their water budgets better understood,” he says. “We’ve looked at the hydrology and the fish, but we’re weak on the human part.”

Lampreys and Ballast Water Another major research thrust involves exotic species admitted to the Great Lakes by shipping. The most notorious alien, the sea lamprey, is a parasitic fish that entered Lake Ontario in the early 19th century and established equilibrium with the native species there. Niagara Falls blocked it from access to the upper lakes.

To allow shipping to bypass Niagara Falls, the Welland Canal was built in the 1820s and 1830s, and rebuilt three times—in the 1840s and 1850s, in the 1880s, and from 1913 to 1932. The 20th-century reconstruction “allowed the direct mixing of waters from Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, and let the sea lamprey into the upper lakes,” says Scarpino. “The lampreys didn’t do all that well in Lake Erie, which is relatively shallow and warm. In the colder lakes, they had a smorgasbord available. They were first reported in Lake Huron in 1932, Lake Michigan in 1936, and Lake Superior in 1946. Lamprey populations exploded, and lake trout abundance went into freefall. In the US waters of Lake Huron, the commercial lake trout catch was 1.7 million pounds in 1935, 940,000 pounds in 1940, 172,000 pounds in 1945, and just 4,000 pounds in 1948.”

Now lampreys are more or less under control, thanks to their unique and vulnerable life cycle, adds Scarpino. They spawn in certain types of tributary streams, where the larvae live in a non-parasitic form before migrating into open lake waters. Great Lakes Fishery Commission researchers figured out their spawning requirements, and put electric barriers across spawning streams. Later, the researchers developed a lampricide, a selective poison that kills the larvae in spawning streams. “We have to do this forever,” he says. “The lampreys will rebound like a coiled spring as soon as you take the pressure off.”

The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 enabled ocean-going freighters to travel directly into the Great Lakes, bringing ballast water taken on in foreign seas all over the world. “With the ballast water comes whatever happens to be living in it,” says Scarpino.

Species introduced by ships discharging their ballast water in the Great Lakes include the zebra mussel, native to lakes in southeastern Russia; and the quagga mussel, from the Dnieper River in Ukraine. Both compete with native species by filtering phytoplankton from the water, and they befoul boats, docking facilities, and the water intake pipes of power plants and water treatment plants.

Another recent arrival, a hemorrhagic fish virus similar to Ebola, is spreading among Great Lakes fish. It ruptures their blood vessels and damages their internal organs. Researchers aren’t sure whether it came from the Atlantic coast or Eurasia.

“The Great Lakes compact says they’re going to look at getting ballast water under control,” says Scarpino. “It’s a thorny problem. Even if you require ships to discharge their ballast water outside the St. Lawrence system, they still will have residue in the tanks. Can you force them to chlorinate their ballast water? Who regulates this, how do you do it, and what’s the penalty for violations? How do you harmonize all that?”

Nonpoint Sources The 1972 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement dealt with control of domestic sewage, phosphates and detergents, and other identifiable sources of water pollution. It stimulated the construction of sewage-treatment plants in the US and Canada and the control of boat wastes.

Scarpino says research published in 1978 disclosed another major threat, pollutants deposited in the lakes by wind and rain. Today, the primary concern is with these “nonpoint sources”—airborne fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.

“One objective of the new compact is to control nonpoint sources, but it’s a much harder problem to solve,” he says. “With point sources, the problem was figuring out a way to pay for control. It may cost people a little bit more, but if you build a sewage-treatment plant or a factory has to put in its own plant, that doesn’t require any citizen to change his lifestyle. Effective control of nonpoint sources will have an impact on people’s lifestyles. It will affect the fertilizer on the lawns of millions of residents.”

Broader Issues Blomquist says the new compact and agreement symbolize broader issues, including “recognition of the importance and growing scarcity of freshwater supplies throughout the world,” and “the willingness and ability of states and provinces to undertake their own environmental policies, without necessarily waiting for their national governments to set policies for them.”

Canada’s involvement is vital to the success of the new compact and agreement, Scarpino emphasizes. “Canadians are constantly figuring out how to get along with their much larger neighbor to the south,” he says. “They know they can’t control pollution without us. Because of our larger size, we contribute more pollution. If you’re a Canadian, the common end might not be the same as if you’re an American.”

Scarpino says the compact and agreement offer an opportunity for Americans and Canadians alike “to take an integrated look at the system, to see it ecologically, rather than looking at fisheries, transportation, and water quality in isolation.”

He adds that, for most of the time since the first European explorers arrived in the Great Lakes basin, the basin residents believed that their fishing, farming, and industrial and urban development were socially beneficial.

“Most people believed the basin’s resources were limitless,” he states. “Until the middle of the 20th century, people did not think ecologically. They didn’t realize the Great Lakes are an interconnected and interdependent system, and need to be managed that way. It’s not that ignorant and greedy people messed things up, but the unintended consequences of things they did have encouraged them to rethink their relationship with the lakes.”