SUMMARY: The Great Lakes are an indispensable source of drinking water for more than 48 million people in the U.S. and Canada. But in six large cities on the shorelines, residents are facing a cost crisis. WBEZ reporter Maria Ines Zamudio discusses the findings of a nine-month investigation by American Public Media, Great Lakes Today, and NPR with Hari Sreenivasan.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Scientists are looking into a surprising new pollutant in the country’s waterways, those tiny plastic beads found in common cosmetic products.
The state of Illinois is the first to ban what they call microbeads.
Brandis Friedman of WTTW Chicago reports.
ACTRESS: What if you could shrink your pores?
ACTRESS: Just by washing your face?
BRANDIS FRIEDMAN, WTTW Chicago: Microbeads have been all the rage in hand sanitizers, body wash and facial scrub, even toothpaste. They’re supposed to help remove dead cells or tighten pores, as the product in this commercial claims.
But they worry Olga Lyandres.
OLGA LYANDRES, Alliance for the Great Lakes: When you think about how many of these are being used daily and washed down the drain, it’s quite staggering.
BRANDIS FRIEDMAN: Lyandres is the research manager for the Alliance for the Great Lakes.
OLGA LYANDRES: This is something that impacts the ecosystem, the wildlife by entangling fish. And birds ingest these particles, and it impacts their health. But also it’s a sort of a cultural issue, because people who grew up around Great Lakes and go to the beach don’t want to go to beach that’s dirty and littered by plastic items.
BRANDIS FRIEDMAN: Scientists are also seeing evidence that the microbeads are reaching the water. At Loyola University Chicago, Professor Timothy Hoellein and his student researchers are looking for the plastic beads in samples of water taken from rivers in and around Chicago, as well as Lake Michigan.
Last year, Sherri Mason at the State University of New York in Fredonia found anywhere from 1,500 to 1.1 million microbeads per square mile in the Great Lakes, the world’s largest source of freshwater.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): ....... This brutally cold winter has created an icy wonderland on the surface of the Great Lakes.
Special correspondent Elizabeth Brackett of WTTW Chicago ventured out to see it.
ELIZABETH BRACKETT, WTTW Chicago: The sun is just beginning to rise over Chicago’s ice-clogged harbor.
Docked at Navy Pier, the Coast Guard’s ice cutter, the Biscayne Bay, starts gearing up for a long day. Breaking a track through the harbor ice, the Biscayne Bay heads out to clear shipping lanes in Lake Michigan. The ship is based in Northern Michigan near the Straits of Mackinac. It’s rare that the icebreakers are needed in the southern half of the lake.
LT. J.G. PAUL JUNGHANS, Coast Guard: This is actually our first time this winter down to the south end of Lake Michigan, so I can’t say what it’s been like down here, but in the straits, it’s been — this has been the worst winter in 25 years.
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ELIZABETH BRACKETT: The Great Lakes haven’t seen this much ice since 1979. The Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory reports that 91 percent of all the Great Lakes have been covered with ice this winter.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Now: why some of the Great Lakes are dropping to record low levels, and the economic bite that's accompanying this environmental change.
Elizabeth Brackett of WTTW Chicago has the story.
ELIZABETH BRACKETT, WTTW: Leland Harbor is the heart of this northern Michigan town. The small town is quiet in the winter. But the population jumps 10-fold in the summer, when tourists flock to Leland Harbor, beaches and quaint shops.
That tourist economy is now in jeopardy because of the dramatic drop in Lake Michigan's water level. Harbor master Russell Dzuba says the lake is down more than two feet from its average. And that drop is threatening to close the harbor.
RUSSELL DZUBA, Harbor Master: The economic impact this harbor has on the community is strong. And when things are slow, the guy at the grocery store, the guy at the restaurant comes down and asks me what's going on.
SUMMARY: To keep Asian carp, an invasive species, from taking over in the Great Lakes, scientists and fishermen are employing an simple strategy: Catch them and eat them. But they have found that there are some pragmatic issues -- as well as marketing issues -- to overcome. Ash-har Quraishi of WTTW Chicago reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Now an update on an important fishing story in the Great Lakes region.
We have chronicled the problems that a particularly invasive species, Asian carp, have posed for the past few years. But now scientists are thinking it may be time to come up with a new solution.
ASH-HAR QURAISHI, WTTW Chicago: It's just after dawn in northern Wisconsin. Commercial fisherman Dennis Hickey is getting ready to take his fishing boat out on Lake Michigan. Hickey's family has fished these waters for more than a century.
The Great Lakes currently support a $7 billion-a-year commercial and recreational fishing industry.
MAN: Our mainstay of our fishery here in Baileys Harbor is whitefish, Lake Michigan whitefish.
ASH-HAR QURAISHI: Today, Hickey's lucky. He won't be battling the elements to bring in a catch. It is unseasonably warm on this late autumn morning. But he does have to deal with a problem that increasingly plagues fishermen throughout the Great Lakes and threatens their livelihoods.
MAN: Looks like the hearts have quite a bit of moss and slime in them again.
ASH-HAR QURAISHI: The slime is a type of alga called Cladophora, and some scientists think its extraordinary increase in the Great Lakes is related to recent and irreparable changes in the Marine ecosystem.
The culprit, they say, is a tiny invasive mollusk called the quagga mussel.
