Pandora's Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway

07/ DANGEROUS CARGO

89 89 It is estimated that more than 10,000 marine species each day hitch rides around the globe in the ballast tanks of cargo ships. —James Carlton, Williams College biologist, 1993 07 DANGEROUS CARGO S hips are among the most alluring of all human inventions. A freighter moving through the high seas invokes a sense of wonder for observers on land. It is difficult for non–shipping types to comprehend the physics and technology that enable a vessel longer than two football fields to carry 50 million pounds of cargo, or more, and not sink like a stone. But the romanticism surrounding ships is more than a reverence for technology. Freighters entering ports from distant waters stoke the curiosity and imagination of ship lovers and landlubbers alike. Where has a given ship come from? What is it carrying in its cargo holds? Did its crew battle angry seas on their journey? And the most common query: How big is it? That sense of wonder lures thousands of self-declared boat nerds to Duluth, Minnesota, every year. Planted on the side of a rocky bluff overlooking the 90 C H A P T E R 7 90 west end of Lake Superior, Duluth is the busiest of all Great Lakes ports. It was where I ended up on a mild autumn night in 2007, watching the Russian freighter Grigoriy Aleksandrov slip into Duluth Harbor under cover of darkness . The 605-foot-long bulk carrier came to the west end of the St. Lawrence Seaway—the heart of North America—to pick up a load of spring wheat it would haul back to Rotterdam. The Aleksandrov was not particularly notable. It wasn’t the largest, fastest, or most historic ship to call on Duluth. Rather, it was a symbol of a grand, unplanned biological experiment born of the St. Lawrence Seaway. The Aleksandrov announced its arrival with the traditional series of horn blasts: one long bass blast, followed by two shorter blasts that echoed off the nearby hillside. After passing under Duluth’s famous lift bridge, the ship headed to one of the towering grain elevators that lined the harbor. There, crews filled the ship’s cargo holds with thousands of tons of wheat, which would be distributed to milling operations across the Netherlands. As it took on cargo, the Aleksandrov left a part of Europe in Duluth. The ship pumped millions of gallons of untreated ballast water from distant oceans and freshwater ports into the St. Louis River estuary, which forms Duluth Harbor before flowing into Lake Superior. Just as civic leaders did at the dedication of the Erie Canal in 1825, the Welland Canal in 1829, and the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959, the Aleksandrov performed a wedding of the waters. Was the Russian freighter’s wedding of waters from around the globe with those of the Great Lakes the type of marriage that supporters of the St. Lawrence Seaway had in mind when they lobbied so forcefully for opening the lakes to global shipping? That was doubtful. The wedding of waters forged by the Seaway was supposed to bolster the industrial economies of port cities around the lakes. It did. In the year 2000, ships hauled 192 million tons of cargo on the Seaway, the network of ports around Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, and the St. Lawrence River. About 44,000 jobs in the United States and Canada in 2000 were directly related to shipping activity on the Seaway. Another 108,000 jobs in the region were indirectly related to the Seaway. Industries connected to shipping on the Seaway generated $1.6 billion in direct wages and another $3.4 billion in revenue annually in the United States. Seaway-related industries also paid $1.3 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2000. Shipping on the Great Lakes was a huge industry but it wasn’t the only industry. 91 91 Smithsonian Environmental Research Center Transoceanic freighters from around the globe visit the Great Lakes each year. Pictured is a Russian freighter taking on grain at the port of Duluth-Superior. Foreign freighters discharge more ballast water in Duluth harbor than in any other Great Lakes port. The Chinese mitten crab was discovered in the St. Lawrence River in 1965. Imported to North America in the ballast tanks of ocean freighters, the foreign crabs have also been spotted in Lakes Erie...