Sunday, August 14, 2005

Battle of habitat vs. highway plays out on seaway

Environmentalists want to limit deeper dredging; shippers want to boost cargo on St. Lawrence.

By Deb Price / Detroit News Washington Bureau

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DETROIT -- After squelching calls three years ago to substantially deepen the 2,350-mile St. Lawrence Seaway and enlarge its locks, environmentalists are gearing up for another battle pitting the needs of fish and other wildlife against those of commercial shippers.

A U.S.-Canadian governmental team is studying the water highway, which is operating at half the capacity envisioned when it opened in 1959. A report due out in October 2006 may spark changes to boost ship traffic. Tim Eder, the Great Lakes navigation expert at the National Wildlife Federation, says if the report leads to deeper dredging, environmentalists will fight it.

"More ships mean more invasive species. It's ludicrous to bring in more ships when we haven't solved that problem," he said. "And we are concerned about the destruction of habitats due to dredging to deepen channels and harbors."

Environmentalists have grudgingly accepted the economic necessity of maintenance dredging to keep the system at a minimum depth of 26.6 feet -- even though it can stir up settled pollutants.

But they say the wreckage left by the building of the system in the 1950s was substantial. Fish-spawning areas, for example, were destroyed by the blasting of rocks to carve out paths for the seaway. Dredging in the Detroit River, the St. Clair River and Lake St. Clair and the enlarging of ports around southeast Michigan destroyed fish and bird habitats.

And, in one of the most lasting changes caused by the building of the system, the dredging of the St. Clair River ruptured the underwater natural dam at Port Huron that stabilizes the water levels of Lakes Huron and Michigan. In a one-shot, permanent change, the water levels of both lakes dropped a foot as water headed into the St. Clair River and eventually out to the Atlantic Ocean. Not only did the lake levels drop, but wetlands also shrank, affecting fish and other habitats

Boosting ship traffic, environmentalists warn, increases the chances for more ecological damage. In one high-profile case, the tanker Jupiter exploded and sank in 2002 in the Saginaw River at Bay City, spilling 22,000 barrels of gasoline. And, even at today's level of ship traffic, oil and other types of spills aren't uncommon in the Great Lakes. Yet port officials and others wanting more traffic on the seaway hope the report will lead to the system being deepened, even if only by about 6 inches, to a final 27 feet. Eder says even six inches of dredging "over the entire 2,300-mile system could destroy a lot of habitat."

But every inch of depth allows a ship to carry 100 tons of additional cargo.

"We need to export more out of our country. There has to be a balance," says Ron Johnson, the trade developer at the Duluth port, who would like to see oceangoing ships bring in bigger loads of heavy windmill equipment to meet the booming growth of wind farming in the Midwest.

Instead of pushing substantial dredging, U.S. and Canadian officials are studying the successful European feeder system in which huge container ships dock at major coastal ports and unload their cargo on smaller boats that then transport it via smaller waterways.

"The question for us," said Albert Jacquez, administrator of the St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corp. and one of the leaders of the study, "is how do you take advantage of a system made for feeders but that is underutilized, while other systems (like the Panama Canal) are operating at overcapacity at the same time water transit globally is increasing?"

U.S. and Canadian seaway officials also want to boost cross-lake traffic. A model is the port of Hamilton in Ontario, which aims to start a ferry in 2006 that will move trucks across Lake Ontario to the Port of Oswego, N.Y., from where they would be driven to drop-off sites in the Northeast.

Stakeholders who want to boost commercial traffic hope to enlist support from environmentalists for ideas like the feeder system by noting that, unlike deep dredging, boosting cargo movement on waterways is friendlier to the environment than transport by truck and rail. Water travel reduces road traffic and air pollution, they note.

One ship on the St. Lawrence Seaway can carry about 25,000 tons of cargo. It takes 870 tractor-trailer trucks to carry that much cargo, and 225 rail cars on a train. And water shipment uses far less fuel than either trucks or rail.