Long article introducing a new book being released June 1st, "Pandora's Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes--St. Lawrence Seaway" by Jeff Alexander (author and environmental reporter for the Muskegon Chronicle)
Port Herald Times Journal:
http://www.thetimesherald.com/article/20090405/NEWS01/904050314
Route marks anniversary
Ships, species shape seaway's 50 years
By BOB GROSS
For the Times Herald
April 5, 2009
The St. Lawrence Seaway celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.
One need look no further than the St. Clair River to see its legacy -- salties proceeding up river with parts for wind turbines, the Seaway Terminal on Military Street in south Port Huron, freighters moored along the riverfront of Chemical Valley in Sarnia.
But dip beneath the surface, drop a fishing line or turn over a rock, and you'll find more of the seaway's lasting legacies to the Great Lakes -- invasive species such as the roundnose goby and the zebra mussel.
The seaway was built to give shippers a route to the heartland of North America, to give farmers and manufacturers a conduit for their products to overseas markets. But little thought was given to what might be coming the other way -- the organisms stowing away in the ballast tanks of freighters.
You might call it the law of unintended consequences. Environmental journalist and author Jeff Alexander calls it "one of the world's worst environmental disasters, which will surpass the consequences of the Valdez oil spill.
"Allowing ocean freighters into the Great Lakes allowed these foreign species to get in and establish a North American beach head," he said. "And now they are spreading throughout the country."
A short history
Some parts of the system -- the four Soo Locks on the U.S. side bypassing the St. Mary Rapids at Sault Ste. Marie and the Welland Canal bypassing Niagara Falls between Lakes Erie and Ontario -- had long been in place.
What is considered the modern St. Lawrence Seaway, however, came into being in the late 1950s with the construction of seven locks -- two U.S. and five Canadian -- on the St. Lawrence River between Montreal and Lake Ontario.
The Canadian portion of the system comprises 13 locks including the Welland Canal.
The seaway was dedicated with great fanfare on June 26, 1959, at St. Lambert, Ont. Queen Elizabeth II and President Dwight Eisenhower boarded the royal yacht, Britannia, to make the first lift through the lock at that location.
The Britannia continued on through the seaway, arriving in Sarnia on July 3, 1959, escorted by a Canadian navy destroyer and the now retired U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Mackinaw. An estimated 75,000 to 125,000 people lined the river to greet the queen.
Louis J. Dunn, news editor of the Times Herald, wrote: "The queen was a majestic symbol of the British Empire as she rode through the crowds in the flag-bedecked streets beside her husband (Prince Philip) in a glass-roofed black limousine.
"Yet, she was at the same time a beautiful and gracious young woman. Perhaps those characteristics, as much as the glitter of the Royal Crown that is hers, won her a special place in the heart of Sarnians and their American neighbors who were on hand for the celebration."
Jerry Van Wormer doesn't recall much of the queen's visit. He does, however, remember the first foreign vessel to visit the new Seaway Terminal.
"The company was formed in 1959," said Van Wormer, the terminal's general manager. " ... I started March 1, 1960. I was the second one hired in."
The first foreign vessel at the terminal was the Elise Schulte, he said.
"It was a German ship, and it was picking up beans for England."
That load of 1,625 tons of dry beans was the first of many from the terminal, so many that it was unofficially christened the Bean Dock, a nickname that sticks today.
"At that time I was a lift truck operator," Van Wormer said. "On the first ship we had beans stored all over town.
"I was loading trucks. The port didn't have warehouses any where big enough to handle the loads we had coming in."
Coining a name
According to information from Acheson Ventures, the current owner of the terminal, E.W. "Cap" Kiefer, a businessman, sailor and chairman of the Port Huron Maritime Commission, pushed the idea of the terminal and helped coin the nickname that sticks in Port Huron: Midway on the Seaway.
The terminal company was formed by a group of five local businessmen that included Robert J. McIntosh, a lawyer and former congressman; William G. McAfee, a customs broker; Carlton Prichard, owner of Earl C. Smith Trucking; William R. Neal, a customs broker; and Allen Stevens, owner of Allen Stevens Trucking.
During the first years of operation, the terminal and the seaway lived up to their promise, Van Wormer said.
"It was very busy," he said. "It was mostly all through the 60s until the oil embargo come along in the 1970s.
"Container ships started coming into the picture, and all of the big ports around England and there wanted all their beans to come in on containers. That kind of slowed us down a bit," he said.
Port Huron benefited from the Russian grain deal of the 1970s, he said. Russian vessels heading back to the ocean from the wheat loading ports in Lake Superior would stop at Port Huron to top off with 100-pound bags of beans to prevent the grain from shifting during heavy seas.
"We were a very, very busy port," Van Wormer said. "It was all foreign. We handled very little domestically."
He recalls one November when more than 20 foreign vessels tied up at the terminal. During the Vietnam War, he said, manpower was often so scarce that he could hardly find enough men to unload the ships.
The peak year for shipments by salties was 1978 with 23.076 million metric tons, or 40.5% of the cargo for that year, according to information from the Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation, the entity that manages the U.S. portion of the seaway.
"I thought it helped (the local economy) a lot," Van Wormer said. "The sailors would come to town, and they would go to Sears Roebuck and buy luggage and all sorts of stuff."
He said the flow of goods from Port Huron slowed with the advent of container ships. Much of what previously moved through the Seaway Terminal now is shipped by rail to the Ohio River where it is placed on barges, he said, then floated down the Ohio and the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
"The most I ever loaded out of the Seaway Terminal was 20,000 tons out of one ship," he said. "Down in the Gulf, they could load 50, 60,000 tons.
"It was like the difference between loading gravel out of your pickup truck or out of a gravel train."
According to a statement from the seaway development corporation, during the first 25 years of the seaway's existence, most grain from the Canadian provinces and the Dakotas moved by rail to Great Lakes ports. It now moves either west by rail to Pacific ports or by barge down the Mississippi.
The Seaway Terminal today is used as the home berth for the Highlander Sea, a tall ship, and the decommissioned U.S. Coast Guard buoytender Bramble. A large-lift ship, the MV Enchanter, docked there last summer to deliver two 300-ton transformers to be used at ITC Transmission's Bunce Creek Station in Marysville. Another delivery is expected this summer.
"Near the end it was getting tough, then Mr. (James) Acheson came along and took it and put a few million bucks into it, and I'm very, very proud of it," Van Wormer said. "It's a nice facility and lots of people use it.
"It's still worth it I think. I think it's a big asset to the community."
He considers the St. Lawrence Seaway itself a big asset to the United States and Canada.
"It's a very, very good thing, but you're asking the wrong guy because I made my whole career there." he said. "I've got 49 years in there, heading toward 50."
According to information from the St. Lawrence Seaway Management Corporation, a Canadian entity, and the Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation, 2.5 billion metric tons of cargo worth more than $375 billion have flowed through the seaway since 1959.
Ecosystem damage
The argument can be made, however, that the lakes have paid a heavy cost for all the shipping.
There are now between 185 and 188 aquatic invasive species in the Great Lakes, not all of which can be laid at the seaway's door. Some, like the steelhead running up rivers and the brown trout that were planted this past week in the St. Clair and Black rivers, were purposely introduced.
Others, like the rainbow smelt being netted along the riverfront, were introduced accidentally into the lakes.
"There's a poster, and it's called the Fishes of the Great Lakes," said Steve Stewart, Michigan Sea Grant agent in Clinton Township. "One of the things I like to do is (display it) because it includes many of the fishes people are familiar with, but maybe half of the fish on there are not native to the Great Lakes."
According to the National Academy of Sciences, introduction by ocean freighters accounts for 57 species, or about 30% of the total, Alexander said.
"But they account for most of the really bad ones," he said. "The ones that they bought in include the zebra and quagga mussels, the round goby, the spiny water flea, the bloody red shrimp. These few species are having profound effects on the ecosystems of the Great Lakes."
He said some researchers have estimated that ship-borne invasives do $200 million damage to the Great Lakes annually -- and that's not counting Canada.
A press release from the seaway development corporation calls the estimate "a seriously flawed analysis and to continue to refer to it as an authoritative finding is shockingly irresponsible."
According to the group's information, a study in 2001 found the economic benefit to the U.S. was $3.4 billion, accounting directly for 44,000 jobs and supporting about 152,000 jobs.
"The conclusion I came to in my book was when they built the seaway, it was the early 50s and the environment was not a high priority," Alexander said. "As far as I can determine there was no thought whether this would open a can of worms ecologically."
Perhaps they should have. Builders of the seaway had as examples the Erie Canal, which connected Lake Erie with the Atlantic Ocean through the Hudson River, and the Welland Canal, which bypasses the 176-foot barrier of Niagara Falls, connecting Lakes Ontario and Erie.
The Welland Canal especially served as a conduit into the upper lakes for invaders from the Atlantic Ocean. Alewives, a small oily herring-like fish, quickly became the dominant forage fish in the lakes. The sea lamprey, a parasite that feeds by attaching itself o larger fish, also quickly established itself in the upper lakes.
The sea lamprey's immediate impact was to contribute to a staggering decline in the lake trout population. Without an apex predator, alewife populations soared. Massive die-offs of the small fish fouled beaches in the early 1960s, especially on the Lake Michigan side of the state.
Michigan and other Great Lakes states and provinces reacted by establishing a new predator, Pacific salmon, in the lakes. King and coho salmon became the foundation of a charter fishing industry that is estimated at $21 million annually, according to data from Michigan Sea Grant.
"We were planting salmonids to control alewives," Stewart said. "An introduced species to control another introduced species."
Fishing concerns
In a situation fraught with irony, sportfishing interests are now concerned that the alewife population has crashed, cutting the forage base for salmon and leading to decreases in both the size and numbers of salmon.
Alexander said that opening the Welland Canal and the Ere Canal started the domino effect, and that the seaway added to it.
Think of the lakes as being analogous to a living organism. Niagara Falls comprised the first line of defense for the upper lakes. Breaching that defense allowed in the local pathogens -- alewives and sea lampreys.
Building the seaway gave vessels carrying other pathogens a conduit across the ocean to the lakes -- like a mosquito carrying the West Nile virus.
"I think a common misperception is these are ocean species coming into the lakes, but they are not, they are freshwater species," Alexander said.
"You have things being picked up in ballast in ports all around the year," Stewart said. "That was kind of a new addition to the puzzle in terms of things that might be coming from a great distance away."
Part of the issue, he said, is that the invasives are still showing up at such a rapid rate -- about two new ones each year. Typically, when a new plant or animal establishes in an ecosystem, it experiences a rapid growth in population, then reaches a point of equilibrium.
That's not happening in the Great Lakes.
"When something new comes in, it sets up a reverberation throughout the system," Stewart said. "It takes a while to reach an equilibrium."
Alexander said in his research he found at least five opportunities where the two governments could have either prevented or slowed the introduction of exotic invaders through ballast water. In particular he cites a 1981 Canadian study that found exotic species in the ballast water of every freighter that was examined.
New regulations now require that ocean-going vessels exchange their ballast water before entering the seaway -- what Alexander calls "swish and spit." That process is 95 to 99% effective, he said.
Alexander's book, on sale June 1 from Michigan State University Press, is "Pandora's Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes--St. Lawrence Seaway." It implies the genie is out of the bottle.
He said while closing the seaway is the only solution that would be 100% effective, that's not going to happen.
"It's owned and operated by two countries," he said. "They have a huge investment in it."
A statement from the Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation confirms that.
"Closing the St. Lawrence Seaway to oceangoing vessels is not an option," the statement reads. "The seaway is a binational entity. Canada paid roughly two-thirds of the cost of its construction. The Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 that the U.S. and Canada signed maintains the force of international law. It requires both nations to refrain from interfering with free navigation by either party."
And closing the seaway would be analogous to closing the barn door after the horse is gone, Alexander said.
"There's no going back," he said. "We have to try to deal with what we've got."
---
Distributed without profit to ESA Great Lakes District members who have expressed an interest in receiving
aquatic invasive species information for research and educational purposes.
