Catching three perch at a time was a thrill as I grew up. We filled the cooler in an hour or two. We caught the fish in Maumee Bay and far western Lake Erie. What fun it was. That was back in the mid 1950’s.
Catching one good size perch in the same waters is now a thrill. We take our grandkids out in Maumee Bay and western Lake Erie and often have a hard time catching any yellow perch. How different it is. It took us decades to connect the dots, but now we realize that an outdated local power plant has a lot to do with the decline of perch in our waters. The plant sucks hundreds of millions of gallons of water per day out of the Lake to cool itself. This takes a huge toll on the health of western Lake Erie, the fishery, and our way of life.
The story begins in 1987, when my family moved into our home on Maumee Bay. Down the road a couple miles is the coal-fired 650-megawatt FirstEnergy Bayshore power plant. In 1987 we were able to ice fish and ice skate on the bay, but in the mid 1990’s, the shoreline mysteriously stopped freezing.
When I called the University of Toledo's Lake Erie Center and asked why, I was told that there was some thermal inversion factor. The shore never froze again. It turned out the power plant had added a cooling water unit that sucked up water from the lake, used it to cool the plant, then pushed the now-heated water over two miles down the shore.
More mysteries surrounding the power plant and problems with fish began to emerge around 2000, when a number of local residents formed a citizens group, the Maumee Bay Association. Our group was formed to fight a proposal to fill in portions of the Maumee Bay, but as we traded stories, we swiftly realized we had other problems. A commercial fisherman, Frank Reynolds, would come to meetings with a jar of larval fish saying that he had scooped them up that day. He said that the fish were being killed in the Bayshore power plant intake.
Month after month, Reynolds would bring in a jar of larval fish and said we should check into it. He said we could get information from something called a 316b report from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. Thinking that this was just a fisherman’s "beef," but intrigued by the jars of fish, I called Ohio EPA.
It turned out that Reynolds was referring to part of FirstEnergy’s Clean Water Act permit for Bayshore. This is a permit that places limits on the amount of pollution that the power plant is allowed to dump into Maumee Bay. It is also supposed to regulate the power plant’s cooling water intake and require strict limits on how many fish it is allowed to kill. We requested a copy to figure out how this could all be happening.
There was something fishy about the Bayshore plant’s permit. First Energy had been renewing the permit for fish kills and water discharges every five years since 1978. But each renewal permit referenced the original 1978 permit -- which, curiously, Ohio EPA could not find and First Energy said was confidential. Six months later, after many attempts, the permit was provided.
When we finally got a copy of the 1978 permit documents, we were stunned by the massive number of fish kills that it authorized. In sucking in cooling water though its intake, the Bayshore plant kills tens of millions of fish every year, which get caught against screens at the intake, and over 2 billion juvenile and larval fish every year, which get sucked into the plant itself.
Wow. That is a lot of fish. It turns out Bayshore’s location makes its cooling water system a fish death trap. It’s located at the mouth of the Maumee River, the Great Lakes’ most biologically productive river. In the fall, all of the river passes through the power plant. How could this level of destruction be allowed to continue, unabated, for more than twenty years, as local residents and fishermen scratched their heads at the disappearance of fish?
From 1978 to 2005 neither Ohio EPA nor the Ohio Department of Natural Resources ever required any follow up studies or questioned the five year permit renewals, even though commercial fisherman Frank Reynolds repeatedly asked. Reynolds was told the fish kills did not matter. But they did matter to fishermen. At the same time Reynolds was complaining about the power plant’s body count, Ohio DNR was setting quotas for commercial fishermen which later resulted in a ban on commercial fishermen from taking walleye.
Now commercial fishermen are required to have monitors on their boats to ensure catch limit and size compliance for walleye, yellow perch, and bass. But Bayshore is not required to report fish kills by type and/or quantity, and it pays nothing for fish killed at Bayshore.
Only when Riverkeeper, NRDC, and other environmental groups sued in federal court on fish kills in power plant intakes did the courts finally require fish kill reductions. As a result of this court victory, Ohio EPA required Bayshore to count fish in their intakes in 2005-2006. The plant reported massive fish deaths -- 46 million adult fish caught on the screens and 2.1 billion juvenile fish, fish eggs, and larvae sucked into the plant, including 14 million walleye larvae and 4 million yellow perch larvae.
With the fish kill numbers this large, Ohio EPA could not continue to ignore the problem completely. Last December, Ohio EPA issued a new permit to Bayshore that finally required some reductions in fish kills -- and FirstEnergy has responded by proposing to build a new system of “reverse louvers” and finer mesh screens to cover the cooling water intake and prevent some of the fish getting sucked in. This is an experimental new design, however, and it is not clear how well it will work to protect the fish or the Bay. For one thing, louvers will do nothing to reduce the thermal plume of hot water coming out the other side of the plant’s cooling water system. The reverse louver system would also require FirstEnergy to redirect current in Maumee Bay by cutting a new channel through a dredge disposal facility near the plant, which could cause even more pollution to get into the Bay.
One thing is clear, though: there is technology available that would achieve higher reductions in fish deaths and thermal impacts by greatly reducing the amount of cooling water that the Bayshore plant would need to use. It’s called closed cycle cooling, which recycles water in cooling towers instead of sucking it in and spitting it out again, as Bayshore does now. But FirstEnergy has resisted adopting closed cycle cooling technology, because of the supposed cost, and because there is no single federal standard for limiting fish kills from power plant cooling systems, Ohio EPA has refused to require it.
But what about the cost to us? An economic loss study conducted in 2010 estimates that Bayshore’s fish kills cost our local fishing economy $29.7 million annually. You only have to add up about three and a half years of those losses before you would equal how much it would cost Bayshore to put in cooling towers. After Ohio EPA allowed FirstEnergy to experiment with reverse louvers at Bayshore instead of installing cooling towers, my citizens’ group -- now known as the Lake Erie Waterkeeper Association -- joined with NRDC, Sierra Club, and other environmental groups in filing a legal challenge to Ohio EPA’s decision.
While we continue the battle to reduce fish kills with the best available technology, my grandsons grow older and the number of walleye and perch in western Lake Erie are on the decline. Will my grandsons ever catch three perch at a time? Why are fishermen held to one standard for fish takes while power plants have no standards? We need a single, national requirement that power plants use the best available technology to limit fish kills. We need a level playing field where fish taken or killed are counted and regulated fairly for all.
Photo (cc) from ronnie44052 on Flickr
