'Huge' fish kill, power plants linked
Doug Schmidt
The Windsor Star
06/18/2011
When Lake Erie commercial fisherman Jerry Hatt returns to harbour with just a few perch over his catch limit, he expects to get his knuckles rapped.
"We're scrutinized fairly heavily -we can't go a pound over," said the Wheatley-based captain of the G.H. Simmons. Each day's catch is entered in official logs and government inspectors greet the tug's crew when their fresh fish is delivered to the processing plant in Kingsville.
That's why the longtime skipper, active in the world's largest freshwater commercial fishery, was astonished to hear this week that dozens of older power plants that ring the Great Lakes are allowed to kill hundreds of millions of fish each year as a consequence of employing outdated processes to cool their equipment.
"That's a lot of fish ... astronomical when you think about it," said Hatt.
"The power plants are killing fish at least comparable to what we do ... we are very concerned," said Peter Meisenheimer, executive director of the Ontario Commercial Fisheries Association.
Meisenheimer said his organization's members have long known that power plants are guilty of killing large numbers of adult and juvenile fish, larvae and eggs -they just didn't know how high.
The numbers, according to an investigation by the Chicago Tribune, are staggering and represent a threat not only to commercial and sport fisheries, but to the Great Lakes ecosystem as a whole. Accessing industry reports through the Freedom of Information Act, the Tribune discovered that numerous older power plants have been exempted from environmental regulations designed to prevent enormous industrial fish kills. These older plants, employing socalled "once-through" cooling, pump massive amounts of water from lakes and rivers through the screens of water intake systems, some so powerful they could fill an Olympic swimming pool in less than a minute.
Young fish "have to run the gauntlet of these generating stations -huge numbers get sucked in," said Meisenheimer.
The FirstEnergy Bay Shore coal plant on the Maumee River shoreline near Toledo, Ohio, for example, kills an estimated 46 million adult fish annually, as well as 2.4 billion eggs, larvae and young fish. Not far away, at the mouth of another important Lake Erie tributary, the Monroe coal plant in Michigan kills more than 25 million fish and almost a half-billion fish eggs and other organisms each year.
The Maumee, one of the Great Lakes' most biologically productive rivers, is the source of probably "as much as a third" of all the walleye in Lake Erie, said Meisenheimer. This year's Ontario quota for walleye, a valuable commercial catch, is about one million fish, down substantially from the high of 3.5 million in 2003.
Were it not for the incidental power plant cull, Meisenheimer said the current quota would be higher: "Absolutely, no question whatsoever in our mind."
More fish for commercial tugs like the G.H. Simmons would be welcome in an industry that has seen its local number of employees halved in recent years, he said.
Asked about the state of Lake Erie's commercial fishery, Meisenheimer, pointing to last year's bankruptcy of a processing plant that employed hundreds and was Ontario's oldest and largest, replied: "We're pulling ourselves off the floor."
There are just under 1,000 commercial fisheries workers currently employed in Kingsville, Leamington and Wheatley, handling a landed catch worth up to $40 million a year, and a processed value of up to $200 million annually.
"It's astonishing to us that these guys are allowed to operate the way they do," Meisenheimer said of the continuing fish kills of the power plants.
The large-scale destruction of so many fish, despite protective provisions under the 1972 Clean Water Act, is not the only concern. Vast quantities of "once-through" water used to cool equipment exits those power plants substantially warmer, creating prime growing conditions for bacteria and harming native fish habitat.
"It's not acceptable that they're allowed to continue to release all that warm water," said John Jackson, program director with Great Lakes United, a binational umbrella group of environmental organizations.
FirstEnergy's Bay Shore power plant alone withdraws more than 749 million gallons of water per day from Lake Erie.
Last year, a coalition of Ohio environmental groups submitted a report to state authorities urging that the facility, one of North America's largest, be ordered to install cooling towers, which would minimize its outflow of warm water, as well as reduce its fish kills by 95 per cent. The estimated cost would be a hefty $100 million, but the group argued the investment was "economically justified," citing a study it commissioned that estimated the economic cost of the destroyed fish populations alone at almost $30 million annually.
Jackson said environmental groups have been pushing "a long time" for such investment in technologically superior equipment, and he hopes this week's revelations will trigger action on a problem that has gone largely unaddressed on both sides of the border for decades.
The fish kill numbers revealed by the Chicago Tribune investigation published this week have already prompted much discussion.
"It's probably something we should get involved in -the numbers are scary," said Bruce Kirschner, environmental scientist with the International Joint Commission's Great Lakes office in Windsor.
The IJC's science advisory board meets next month to discuss upcoming priorities for investigation, and Kirschner told The Windsor Star on Friday he expects the giant fish kills at power plant intakes to be on the agenda. He said the binational body's scientists could look at "summing up the losses" and also investigate "the array of possible technology fixes."
The industry is starting to feel some pressure. This spring, the U.S. EPA under the Obama administration proposed new national standards under the Clean Water Act to either meet set limits on fish kills or else reduce the velocity of water intakes. Public comments continue until mid-July, and new rules are expected to be in place by July 2012.
Environmental groups, however, complain that the new rules will be left to state regulators to enforce. State laws, for example, limit how many fish that anglers can take out but place no restrictions on the number of fish that can be destroyed by power plants.
Power plant fish kills continue on the Canadian side as well, but it appears to be less of a concern.
