Will Asian Carp assault Chicago, Lake Michigan similar to the way Godzilla terrorized Tokyo in the movies?

It has long been the fear of environmentalists that Asian Carp, a breed of fish considered particularly devastating to our ecology, is someday going to manage to work its way into Lake Michigan and the surrounding of the Great Lakes.

Have Asian Carp arrived at Lake Calumet? Photos by Gregory Tejeda

So it is with much trepidation that there is now evidence indicating that the Carp have made it past the electronic barricades further south near Romeoville (which the Army Corps of Engineers installed thinking that was the absolute solution to keep the Carp out of Chicago) and are now in existence in Lake Calumet.

FROM WHICH, IF they really have made it that far along the path, only now have to swim upstream through the Calumet River for about seven miles through Chicago’s South Side and will then be in Lake Michigan proper.

The Asian Carp, who initially were released accidentally into the Mississippi River somewhere down near New Orleans have managed to make it up across the nation, and across our state through the Illinois River and could now be about to take over the lake that is pride and joy to our Chicago.

Which, of course, will have many people eager to blame Chicago for letting the Asian Carp loose – even though one could claim it was the ineptitude of those who initially let the Carp loose down south who are truly to blame.

From Lake Calumet mouth to Calumet River … 

But the reality is that there’s nothing that can be done to undo the damage in the mighty Mississippi. But we can still hope that our officials can act in ways to bar them from Lake Michigan.

SO WHAT’S THE big deal about the Asian Carp? The fact is that the Asian Carp feed on anything and everything in their paths.

In doing so, they’ll devastate the ecosystems of whatever water supply they manage to get to. In a sense, everything that is alive and thriving now in Lake Michigan could wind up becoming barren, if the Carp make it that far.

And the reality is, we may well find there’s nothing we really can do to stop the Asian Carp from making the final stretch of their journey to Lake Michigan and all the other Great Lakes.

and up the river, past the Chicago Skyway bridge

If they’ve managed to work their way north from New Orleans to Chicago this far, what’s to make us think there’s anything that can be placed in their way during the final seven-mile stretch of the Calumet River?

NOW IT SHOULD be noted that the Asian Carp proper have not been found in Lake Calumet itself. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said last week that traces of DNA from Asian Carp have been found in the lake’s water.

The Chicago Tribune reported that the DNA could consist of evidence of skin cells, secretions and feces (just think, fish poop), and that those substances could well have been in the bilge water of the ships that pass through the area – if not the Asian Carp themselves.

Too bad the Asian Carp can't read signs!

It could be just genetic junk, and not the fish themselves that have made the lengthy journey from down south. Which means that rather than blaming Chicago for letting the Carp into the Great Lakes, we ought to be thinking in terms of whether or not Chicago will be “heroic” enough to prevent the trip from being completed.

I suppose we’re now on the lookout for the Asian Carp, which have been sited by the T.J. O’Brien Lock and Dam – located just south of the lake – to see if they’ve made it a few miles farther north to the lake proper, then well on their way to the “big” lake itself.

IT WILL BE intriguing to see what kind of last-ditch measures our federal and state officials (Gov. J.B. Pritzker has written to the Army Corps of Engineers offering whatever assistance the state can provide) can concoct to try to keep the Asian Carp out of the Great Lakes.

Will we see some new sort of technology devised to try to barricade off Lake Michigan? Or are we destined to see the same kind of electronic barricades erected at the mouth of the Calumet River headed into the lake as one last-ditch attempt to kill off any sort of creatures?

Will the Asian Carp be reminiscent of Godzilla films?

Is it inevitable that Lake Michigan (and the other Great Lakes) as we now know them are doomed? Or can they be saved?

It makes me wonder if we’re destined for some sort of story in our future resembling the old Godzilla movies – with the Asian Carp being a threat to our ecological well-being and threatening Chicago similar to the way the cinematic dragon-like creature used to terrorize Tokyo!

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Another piece of Chicago’s industry moves to far sout’east corner of city

Reports of a company that shreds scrap metal choosing to locate along the Calumet River in Chicago’s 10^th Ward really isn’t that surprising.

Remnant of Republic Steel plant whose site will someday have a scrap yard. Photographs by Gregory Tejeda

What caught my attention in the reports about General Iron Industries is that the scrap yard is leaving its current location, which is along a portion of the Chicago River in the Lincoln Park neighborhood.

WHILE I REALIZE that Lincoln Park hasn’t always been the upscale place for Chicago’s excessively wealthy to live (and at one point in the 1960s was close to evolving into an ethnic enclave for people of Puerto Rican descent), it makes me snicker that such an industrial company was ever located there to begin with.

It is a reminder that lakefront (and riverfront) property once was viewed as prime sites for industry. You could bring in your raw materials on barges and dump your waste into the water.

That is, until all those pesky environmentalists started spewing their rhetoric about the need for clean water and public health. How times change!

Which is why I’m sure General Iron is moving on from their long-time site. They’re no longer going to have to listen to the complaints from area residents who can’t stand the sight of piles of scrap lying around near their million dollar-plus homes and the stench of certain metallic odors that can waft through the air.

Salt piles amongst area's cleaner substances

NOW, THEY’RE LOCATING to a place that long has been a prime location for all the kind of industry that no one – if they can at all avoid it – wants to live in proximity to.

Specifically, they’re moving to a site along the Calumet River in the East Side neighborhood; that part of Chicago where you’re south of Lake Michigan altogether and the eastern boundary is State Line Road (a.k.a., the Illinois/Indiana border). They’re actually going to be on part of the site that once was Republic Steel – the site of that Memorial Day 1937 labor protest that ended with police beating dozens of picketing union members and killing 10 of them.

Along the Calumet River

It is a place where the locals are used to certain foul stenches wafting through the air. But since they don’t have “million-dollar homes” in places like the East Side or South Deering, the political people don’t seem to care. Where else would one find a sub-neighborhood literally known as “Slag Valley” because of the piles of iron slag and petroleum coke that lie out in the open near homes – no matter how much the locals complain.

I’m familiar with the area because it is the part of Chicago that is my birthplace. Specifically, the South Chicago neighborhood, but I have cousins who live in all the other neighborhoods that comprise the 10^th Ward.

I KNOW FULL well how paying a visit to certain members of the family can be an unpleasant experience – and not because those cousins are annoying. It’s because the stink can be overpowering, and the sight of waste can be unpleasant.

Of course, this attitude is because much of the industry that sparked development of such neighborhoods has long withered away.

There no longer are steel mills working round-the-clock, and local residents justified the unpleasantness of the environment as evidence that they had working-class jobs that actually paid a living wage.

I am the grandson of two such men who worked in steel mills for a living, which is how my family developed an attachment to the area – it was near their jobs. Some of the old-timers who remain claim that old days of pollution were bearable because it was evidence they were employed.

BUT NOW THAT the jobs aren’t so plentiful, some people want to act as though we ought to be thankful for the few that remain. And may well try to act as though complaints about pollution are somehow elitist rants by people who have to right to think of themselves as elite.

When 10^th Ward Alderman Susan Sadlowski Garza says, “we’re tired of being the city’s dumping ground” (as she told the Chicago Tribune recently), I’m sure certain others in Lincoln Park are coping the attitude of “better you than me” in terms of having to cope with pollution.

Envision one-time police car soaring through air

How polluted is the part of Chicago my family hails from? One can’t help but note the continued failure of plans to turn the one-time U.S. Steel Southworks site into something economically viable – with some hints being that the pollution remaining from the plant that closed over a quarter-of-a-century ago is too toxic for serious development.

A place that too many Chicagoans regard as something utterly ignorable – except for when they stumble onto the old “The Blues Brothers” film and once again see that car-jumping scene over the 95^th Street bridge – which is only about 2 miles from the site where General Iron plans to set up its new home by 2020.

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Has Mother Nature developed a multi-color hue for Chicago's namesake river

There’s one thing that anybody who’s native to Chicago knows for sure – our namesake river ain’t blue in color.

The natural muddy green of Chicago River. Photos by Gregory Tejeda

You might be able to look out to the east from downtown high rises and see a Lake Michigan that is a luscious blue in color and appears to extend off so far into the distance that you might mistake it for an ocean, rather than just a lake – albeit one of the Great Lakes that make the Midwestern U.S. so unique.

BUT EVERYBODY WHO’S ever spent time here knows the Chicago River, which the lake flows into so as to avoid having our sewage and waste wind up in our drinking water supply, knows our river water is different.

It has taken on a green hue. In fact, it has taken on different shades of green, and not just because of St. Patrick’s Day.

For on that March day, city officials go out of their way to add dyes to the river water (or at least the portion of the river that separates Downtown from the Near North Side) so that it becomes a bright Kelly green.

As opposed to the sickly, dingy green with a touch of brown to it that is the usual color of our namesake river.

Still some industry in downtown portions of Chicago River

IT’S ACTUALLY ONE of the local gags, the quality of our river. So tainted with sludge that it might almost be possible to walk across the water, even if you don’t happen to be Jesus Christ.

Or that one accidental tumble off a downtown bridge into the water and the biggest threat may not be that you’d drown, but that you’d become poisoned just by coming into contact with the water.

By comparison, salt piles along Chicago's 'other' river -- the Calumet

My own gag acknowledges the fact that the river water quality actually has improved in recent years – to where our river is no longer toxic, but is now merely polluted.

Despite all of these noxious comments (about as tainted as the river itself), I have to say I always considered the Chicago River – particularly the part of it that goes through downtown from Lake Michigan to the split between the south and north branches – to be a significant part of our city’s personality.

SO WHAT SHOULD we think about the fact our city’s river is now taking on distinct shades? Is it a split personality? A physical manifestation of Chicago’s character?

For what it’s worth, WLS-TV on Monday reported that since Friday and through the weekend, the river has taken on distinct shades of green. The south branch being the usual muddy green color that we usually associate with the river while the north branch has a brighter shade almost like that fake green trotted out every St. Patrick’s Day.

Is this Mother Nature’s way of saying we ought to celebrate St. Patty’s Day every day in Chicago?

Is the muddy green color appropriate as river passes Trump tower?

The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District and the Chicago Department of Water Management both told the television station that this multi-shade of green is actually natural, and not something we need to concern ourselves with. Not yet, anyway.

RECENT STORMS AND seasonal vegetation changes allegedly are responsible for the varying hues. Although further tests are supposedly still being taken to see if there’s going to be any lasting effect to Chicago River water.

Personally, I find this quirky – almost something to laugh about. Considering that Chicagoans of any sense know better than to drink directly from the river, and that we know it is still decades far in the future that one-time Mayor Richard J. Daley’s decades-old dream of people being able to fish in the Chicago River will become reality.

So as for our river, we’ll have to adapt to multi-shades of green, and let’s hope it doesn’t turn fiery red.

The Cleveland Indians baseball team may be closer to a World Series appearance than our Chicago White Sox, but we’re more than willing to let Cleveland and its Cuyahoga River (which caught fire due to the waste in the water back in 1969) be unique.

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On Asian carp issue, does Illinois really have faith? Or is state just cheap!

The Asian Carp, a species of fish that devours everything in its path and whose presence in the Great Lakes would likely kill off all the species of fish and plant life that are native to our area, are an issue that we’re supposedly desperate to find a solution to.

Army Corps of Engineers has new plan for Asian carp

For we have evidence that the carp have managed to creep their way up into the Calumet River and are extremely close to the mouth of Lake Michigan – which would feed them into the Great Lakes as a whole.

CATASTROPHE TIME, OR at least that is what we’ve been led to believe.

Yet I find it interesting that Illinois government officials, or at least those in positions of authority within the governor’s office, are skeptical of the latest proposal by the Army Corps of Engineers meant to keep the carp away from the lake.

They talk about an upgrade of the Brandon Road lock and dam near Joliet to include high-power water jets and loud noises – all of which would create enough of a barricade to keep the carp who have swum up the Mississippi and Illinois rivers to be up around Joliet from getting any closer to Chicago.

Currently, officials have relied upon electrifying the area on the Des Plaines River so that any carp who try to swim through the area get killed – thereby preventing them from getting any closer to Chicago than they already are.

YET ILLINOIS OFFICIALS made it clear Monday they don’t think much of the Army Corps of Engineers’ proposal.

In a prepared statement that state officials say is to be attributed to Lt. Gov. Evelyn Sanguinetti (she doesn’t do much else), “this new approach is neither cost-effective nor environmentally sound.”

Illinois officials go so far as to say, “Science tells us our comprehensive strategy is working.”

SANGUINETTI: Gets to make carp stance for state

Although I’m sure those people who found evidence of the carp existing in the waters of the Calumet River (which puts them within the Chicago city limits – much too close for comfort to Lake Michigan for some people) don’t have the same faith in the existing measures.

I’M GUESSING WE have to figure out just how much faith do we have in Gov. Bruce Rauner and the judgment of his people to not want to consider taking the additional measures to try to keep the carp out of Chicago.

Because I am fairly certain that if the carp do manage to get to the Great Lakes, there are many people across the region who will be more than eager to blame Chicago for the mess. There are those who always like to bring up the late 19^th Century reversal of the flow of the Chicago River as somehow being responsible.

Because if we had let Mother Nature exist as she intended, we might not have such problems. A though of which I’m skeptical.

The point being we probably can’t rule out any solution, although I also appreciate much of the reason for Illinois’ official skepticism is the cost.

THE ARMY CORPS of Engineers’ plan has a $275.4 million price tag – of which Illinois would be on the hook for $95 million in construction costs and another $8 million per year for operations and maintenance expenses.

Could Asian carp have already made it to waters of Calumet River? Photograph by Gregory Tejeda

I know Illinois government is not flush with extra cash these days. Yet there are some expenses we’re probably going to have to just knuckle down and accept. Could this be one of them?

Because while Illinois talks about the disruption of native fish migration patterns that would be caused by noise barriers and water jets, I’m wondering.

How much more will it wind up hurting Illinois financially if the carp do wind up making it all the way into the Great Lakes? A whole lot more than some dead fish carcasses washing ashore on Oak Street Beach!

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All it takes is one to create a problem

I don’t doubt that most people give little thought to the concept of Asian Carp.
 

Not far from Great Lakes, where Calumets converge

For all I know, on the occasions they do think about it, they dismiss it as some sort of artificial emergency situation created by intellectual types who have way too much free time on their hands – perhaps similar to the doomsday we were supposed to face on Jan. 1, 2000.

IT DOESN’T SEEM that many people are getting all that worked up over the concept of the Asian Carp – a species of fish that Mother Nature never really intended to exist in this part of the globe. Maybe they think it's what you get when you order Chinese carry-out!

So the fact that scientists inadvertently let them loose into the Mississippi River and they have steadily worked their way upstream is a problem that those scientists get all worked up over. But which elicits a great big “Yawn!” from the bulk of us.

As things turn out, the Asian Carp have worked their way up the river and into Illinois – where they’re alive and thriving in the Illinois River. I recently stumbled across a news report that said the waters around Havana, Ill., have more Asian Carp than any other place on Earth.

Now why should we care about the Carp?

THE FACT IS that the eat everything in sight. They devour all the natural plant life that fish nature intended to be in the area would feed off of. As a result, the types of fish who “belong” wind up being threatened.

 

Lake Calumet a direct path to Lake Michigan

The potential exists for nature to be erased, and replaced with something glutton-ish that was never meant to be!

Back in 2010, an Asian Carp was actually pulled out of Lake Calumet – that isolated patch of area on Chicago’s far South Side that connects directly to Lake Michigan by the Calumet River.

And on Friday, the Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee said another Asian Carp was caught by a fisherman just south of the T.J. O’Brien Lock and Dam – which is near Lake Calumet – and clearly within the Chicago city limits.

 

ENVIRONMENTAL AND WILDLIFE types like to talk about those electronic gates they erected south of the city that supposedly kill off any Asian Carp that try to swim too close to Chicago or Lake Michigan. But it also seems at least two managed to figure out a way to get past.
 

Could the Carp someday swim past 95th St. bridge?

Which creates the possibility that many more also succeeded. For all we know, they have managed to get to Lake Michigan proper – and we just don’t know it yet. Or equally likely, they are going to continue to try and the day will come when we’ll have the Asian Carp feeding off the Great Lakes.

Now those who want to think of issues in a partisan way often want to place blame on the Asian Carp issue on Chicago itself. We are the city that back in the 19^th Century created the connections between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River.

Those connections were a large part of the reason why Chicago became the dominant Midwestern city so much larger than places like Detroit, Milwaukee or St. Louis.

ARE WE SUPPOSED to wither away and cease to exist because others allowed the Mississippi River to become tainted by the Asian Carp?

Now I’m not about to offer up the solution to keeping the Asian Carp out of Lake Michigan. It seems we’re doing what we possibly can thus far, and this may wind up being an issue of how things can always go wrong.

Fact that area fenced off causes many to give Calumet lake little thought. All photographs by Gregory Tejeda

All I know is that this issue is one we all ought to be giving greater thought to, rather than thinking of it as something that is occurring down around that lake many of us never pay attention to.

For if we do wind up facing the day of devastation to the Great Lake upon which our city’s existence is so reliant, it won’t be as “ho-hum” an event as it was the day after Dec. 21, 2012 – when the world didn’t come to an end as the Mayans allegedly once predicted it would.

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What a plunge!!! Was it worth it?

It’s not something we hear that much of – a suicidal jump off the Chicago Skyway into the Calumet River.

That's quite a plunge from bridge to river. Photographs by Gregory Tejeda

We’re more likely to hear of someone taking a plunge into the Chicago River – where the pollution likely would infect them with something more deadly than exposure to icy-cold water.

PART OF IT is that the Skyway is 10^th Ward – that far southeastern corner of Chicago that often feels ever so isolated. Plus there’s the fact that getting onto the Skyway isn’t that easy without a car. And even with one, there really isn’t a place to park it before jumping – you’re likely to get hit by a motorist somewhere along the 7.8 mile stretch before you can take the leap.

Unless you want to stop off at the McDonald’s franchise on the Skyway near the Illinois/Indiana border. How depressing would it be for one’s final image of life to be Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar? Or to learn that the particular McDonald’s franchise has gone out of business. No final glimpse of “Mayor McCheese” for you, bud.

So it is with that premise in mind that I read the news report from the Chicago Sun-Times about the person who got onto the Skyway, then took a plunge into the Calumet River.

Which for all I know is even more contaminated with industrial waste than the Chicago River ever was.

The Calumet River, a place where salt and sludge are stored openly

OF COURSE, CONSIDERING that the Chicago Skyway toll road is nearly 200 feet in the air, that would be one heck of a plunge – one that theoretically could kill someone before being exposed to the Calumet River water.

I was surprised to learn that the person who jumped Monday afternoon was actually still alive when pulled from the water by Chicago Fire Department rescue crews.

Taken to Advocate Trinity Hospital, the person was listed in critical condition initially, but then later died. Officials were not immediately willing to identify the woman, but said it is an apparent suicide.

Now I don’t know anything more specific about this incident other than what the Sun-Times was able to publish on their web site. I don’t know anything about who this individual was – or why she felt that life wasn’t worth living any longer.

The area bridge most people know - the Blues Brothers

ALTHOUGH IT WOULDN’T shock me to learn in the future that some of my cousins, aunts or uncles who still live on the Southeast Side may well have come into contact with this individual at some point in their lives.

Neighborhoods like South Chicago, the East Side, South Deering and Hegewisch do have the feel at times of isolated rural towns – feeling cut off from the rest of the city and sometimes even from themselves.

I do sympathize with this person, wishing they could somehow have found something in life to make them realize just how much it is worth living.

I know in my own case, the recent death of my brother has had me pondering more often in recent weeks about what the afterlife, if there is any, is truly like.

Truly an isolated part of Chicago

BUT IT ALSO has me convinced of the need to make what is left of the rest of my life as worthwhile as possible.

Because I suspect if there is an afterlife and I am destined to meet up with my brother again, he’ll be waiting for me and would pound the living daylights out of me if I were to let my loss of him totally devastate me into accomplishing nothing else with my time alive on Planet Earth.

I’d like to believe that the most significant thing I accomplish in my life has yet to be done. That’s the best way I can think of to pay tribute.

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Petcoke cleanup underway, but it will be awhile before Sout’East Side is clean

The far Southeast corner of Chicago (the land where the eastern boundary is Indiana – NOT Lake Michigan) has always been a heavily industrialized portion of the city.

Chicago's southeast corner far from pristine. Photographs by Gregory Tejeda

 

It’s a place where the steel mill and other factory jobs that created the bulk of the local economy were located literally across the street. It was a place where the employees could walk to work.

HENCE, IT ALSO is a place that is far from pristine – particularly since it saw decades worth of buildup of various pollutants from back in an era when some people were inclined to think of “environmental cleanup” as some sort of alien concept.

I am a native of that part of Chicago (I am the grandson of immigrant steel mill workers whose one-time employers are now large, vacant plots of land), and my visits to the “old neighborhood” have always included being able to see things that just wouldn’t be tolerated elsewhere.

Although now, it seems they’re not even being tolerated in places like the East Side or South Chicago – as in a couple of the neighborhoods that comprise that distant part of Chicago. How distant? Try standing on the 106^th Street bridge over the Calumet River.

Look off to the north, and you can barely see the tip of the top of the Sears Tower (You call it Willis, I’m refusing to right now).

BUT THIS AREA got the attention of downtown this week when officials reached an agreement with companies that have had piles of petroleum coke along the edge of the Calumet River. That agreement by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the Illinois attorney general’s office was to be filed with a court on Thursday, although Emanuel said later in the day he would not be willing to go so far as an outright ban in Chicago.

A whole 'nother world from the Loop

Known more commonly as petcoke, the substance is a byproduct of the petroleum-making process. It results in mounds of the substance that then gets blown about by the breezes.

Which means that people who live in the area have been stuck having to accept as fact that their homes will get covered in the petcoke dust. Some people tell stories of finding the dust all over their freshly-washed clothes (if they put them out on a clothesline to dry).

It is inevitable that they (and I, when I have reason to return to visit) have inhaled the petcoke dust. Who knows what long-term damage is being caused?

The Port of Chicago presence (off in the distance) hasn't completely devastated Lake Calumet

 

THAT IS WHAT has motivated the activist-minded residents of the area, who in turn have put their share of pressure on government officials. Which is why government officials felt inclined to do something that makes it appear as though they’re resolving the situation.

Although it should be noted that earlier this month, locals noticed that the petcoke piles were being put onto ships and being taken out of the area. The agreement reached this week says that companies in the area that have petcoke are going to have to store it indoors, and also will have to monitor the levels of air pollution around those facilities.

Which sounds sensible enough; something that should have been agreed upon a long time ago. Except that such actions create expense that reduce the financial bottom-line, and therefore are considered to be a hassle by the more corporate-minded.

Yes, I’m pleased to learn that something is being done with regards to petcoke. I have relatives who live within blocks of these piles. I’m sure they will (literally) breathe easier.

ALTHOUGH IT’S FAR from over. All those decades of industry have left more than their share of pollution. With the vacant remains of many of those factories still in place, I can’t even envision just how tainted those Southeastern neighborhoods remain.

And how much of a miracle it is that something like Lake Calumet still manages to maintain so many species of nature despite all the toxins in the area.

What would they think in Lake View?

It’s going to be a long time, if ever, that my part of Chicago will be as clean as a place like Beverly or Sauganash – where the concept of a giant pile of salt out in the open would be unheard of, yet doesn’t even capture a second glance from the locals.

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