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Previously it was announced that Congress was providing $6 million in assistance to bulk up the barricade, and just last week the state announced it would be dumping the poison Rotenone into a canal near Romeoville to kill off the fish, but it looks like these measures have come too late. An order has been issued to "clean out" the Sanitary and Ship Canal in an emergency effort.
Henry Henderson, Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Midwest Program did not mince words about the Army Corps of Engineers' shortcomings -- in a statement issued this afternoon, Henderson said:
"Today’s announcement that Asian carp have gotten past the electric fish fence is sobering, but predictable. The responsible federal and state agencies have known about this problem for 13 years, but have utterly failed to act with the urgency that this threat requires. The prospect of 100 pound fish off of Oak Street Beach and leaping out at boaters in the Great Lakes should spur action that should have been undertaken years ago. We have seen how zebra and quagga mussels have literally transformed Lake Michigan, and I fear that the Asian carp could do far worse to the ecosystem... The Army Corps of Engineers needs to stop reacting to events, and get ahead of this problem with real solutions...The only thing aggressive about the virtual fish fence has been its multi-million dollar price tag."
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While the Corps of Engineers has definitely had its shortcomings over the decades, I think people tend to expect too much of it. What happened in New Orleans with Katrina was a completely predictable event stemming not from poor levee construction, but from the fact that an entire city had been built below sea level next to a tropical gulf prone to hurricanes. No levee could have prevented this from happening eventually, and no levee will prevent it from happening again. The very existence of levees actually makes the potential for severe flooding worse, as they will lead to more and more land subsidence in southern Louisiana. The true tragedy of Katrina is not that it happened, but that response to it was so poor.
Similarly, the natural expansion of an invasive species once introduced is virtually impossible to stop. There is no fence that will keep the Asian carp out of Lake Michigan, and no amount of poisoning will work. Once the carp were in the Mississippi basin, it was only a matter of time before they got to the Great Lakes. Nothing will stop them short of filling in the canals and permanently closing off the Chicago River.
While it is insane that New Orleans is below sea level, the reason it flooded was due to the incompetence of the Corps!
The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet never should have been dug & it was the reason that NO flooded. The Corps has the mentality that every river must be straight & they never met a dam they didn't want built.
MR GO had walls that were too low, no gates to prevent a storm surge from blasting up it & that's where the levee breaches were.
Maybe having to pay out a few billion $$$ will finally cause Congress to put the brakes on the Corps!
As for the Asian carp, they're in the Calumet River not the Chicago River or Sanitary & Ship Canal, yet!
I say poison the hell out of all three NOW!
The Mississippi has been flowing through its current outlet in the Plaquemines-Balize Delta for about the last 1200 years. The Corps of Engineers, therefore, had nothing to do with the river's modern course. What the corps did do, however, was prevent the natural shift in the river's course that likely would have occurred in the second half of the last century by preventing it from diverting to the course of the Atchafalaya. This ultimately proves a zero-sum game in terms of flooding, as a shift in course would have caused the same reduction in sedimentation as the construction of levees, and thus you still would have the same subsidence of land. And in a sutuation like Katrina, the problem isn't water from upstream, but from downstream and from Lake Ponchartrain. The folly with New Orleans' levees isn't that they were too week, but that they existed at all. And they wouldn't have existed had people not insisted on living below sea level.
And the further problem with charging the corps for this is that people will use this $100 billion of whatever it amounts to in order to rebuild in exactly the same location, and will come crying again when the next inevitable flood comes.
But isn't it the job of the Army Corps to anticipate, and plan for, predictable natural disasters?
Both with regard to a hurricane hitting New Orleans and with regard to Asian carp migrating up the Mississippi River, the warning signs were well known years in advance, but the Corps failed to take the appropriate actions to solve the problem.
This is not to say that the Corps should take all of the blame. None of the federal or state agencies involved in the Asian Carp Rapid Response Group have demonstrated the political courage to propose a permanent solution to this problem: closure of the Chicago Diversion and modernization of Chicago's infrastructure.
"But isn't it the job of the Army Corps to anticipate, and plan for, predictable natural disasters?"
It is the job of the corps to anticipate and plan for those predictable disasters it is possible to prevent. No levee, no matter how strong, will prevent a city below sea level from flooding in a storm like Katrina, just as no fence and no amount of poison will prevent an invasive species from moving across a basin. The failure with Katrina was in state and federal disaster relief efforts and their evacuation plans. The failure with the carp lies with whomever released the thing.
Sorry, but there are limits to what we as humans can prevent.
New Orleans has been under sea level for centuries right in prime hurricane territory and it didn't get devastated by flooding until 2005. The real surprise is that the city wasn't nailed earlier.
Basically, if people expect anything from the Corps of Engineers, they expect too much.