Ballast ban proposed on Great Lakes

The Michigan Natural Resources Commission has now put the idea of banning ballast water in the Great Lakes on the legislative table. One shipping industry representative says the toll such a ban would take on the region’s economy would be catastrophic.

The Michigan commission’s request came in the form of a resolution to ban the uptake of ballast water in all Great Lakes waters infected by viral hemorrhagic septicaemia, a disease that poses no danger to humans but causes fish to bleed to death. The disease, first discovered in the Great Lakes in 2005, has been detected in Lakes Erie and Ontario, as well as Michigan’s Lake St. Clair and the lower St. Lawrence River.

To halt its spread, the federal government’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has issued emergency restrictions on many live fish shipments from the eight Great Lakes states. APHIS officials say they are also considering the Michigan request to ban ballast uptakes, though they will not discuss how long it may take to reach a decision.

The idea of a ballast ban is to prevent a ship from accidentally picking up VHS-infected water or fish in the eastern Great Lakes and transporting it to the presently virus-free Lakes Superior, Michigan and Huron. Jim Weakley, president of the Lake Carriers’ Association, which represents U.S. ships operating inside the Great Lakes, said that freighters can take precautions to avoid the likelihood of picking up unwanted hitchhikers, but the requested outright ban on ballast water uptakes would essentially kill the movement of critical raw materials across the region.

“It would stop the flow of iron ore, coal and limestone to all of Lake Erie and the Detroit-St. Clair corridor,” Weakley said. “So not only would you put steelworkers out of business, you’d shut down the construction industry, and it would likely result in brownouts and power outages because you wouldn’t have coal for power generation.”

Trains and trucks, he said, are simply not a viable transportation alternative. One 1,000-foot lake carrier can transport as much ore as 700 railroad cars, or 2,800 trucks.

“The capacity doesn’t exist in the rail or truck mode to move that amount of cargo, even if it was forced to go that way,” he said. “Without the efficient transportation of heavy, dry bulk cargo, you simply could not maintain the Great Lakes region as the manufacturing heartland of North America.” But others worry what the spread of VHS or the next unwanted fish, critter or bug could do to the health of the world’s largest freshwater ecosystem and the $4.5 billion fishery it sustains.

The Great Lakes are now home to more than 180 non-native species, and research shows ballast water can be blamed for the majority of species invasions during the past three decades. It is not the fleet of lake-bound “lakers” that are responsible for the problem. Rather, it is the ocean-going fleet of “salties” that arrive in the Great Lakes from foreign ports via the St. Lawrence Seaway that open the door to many of the invaders now in the region, including zebra mussels and round gobies.

Caught somewhere in the middle is the Great Lakes Commission, a bi-national agency created by the Great Lakes states and provinces to promote both the economic development and conservation of Great Lakes resources. “We have not sorted out what the commission’s position is, but it’s becoming more and more apparent we have to have a solution to the ballast water problem, and we have to have a solution that respects the importance of the Great Lakes as a freshwater resource – a resource that we rely on for drinking water,” said Tim Eder, the commission’s executive director. “Whether that (rule) is federal, bi-national, international or just regional, at this point I don’t care, as long as it happens quickly.”

Weakley said he’d like to see the federal government pass tougher ballast regulations for the oceangoing vessels. Legislation to accomplish just that has languished in Congress for several years.