- [Announcer] On this addition of "Great Lakes Now," trying to control the invasive sea lamprey - Sea lamprey is sort of a cross between a small snake and a giant worm, until you see its mouth, almost looks like an alien species.

- [Announcer] Environmental hazards in our homes.

- Folks experience either new illnesses or if they have illnesses those illnesses are worsened.

- [Announcer] And news from around the Great Lakes.

(soft upbeat music) - [Announcer] This program is brought to you by the Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

- [Announcer] The Consumer's Energy Foundation is committed to serving Michigan, from preserving our state's natural resources and sustaining our future to continuing business growth, academic achievement and community involvement.

Learn more at consumer'senergy.com/foundation.

The Richard C. Devereaux Foundation for energy and environmental programs at DPTV.

The Polk Family Fund, Eve and Jerry Jung, the Americana Foundation, the Brookby Foundation, Founders Brewing Company and viewers like you.

Thank you.

- Hi, I'm Ward Debtwiler, welcome to Great Lakes Now.

The Great Lakes is home to 177 species of fish, including some harmful invasive ones.

One of the worst is the sea lamprey, which has nicknamed "The Vampire of the Great Lakes."

Today, we take you to the Harper's Field Dam on Ohio's Grand River about 50 miles east of Cleveland.

(soft upbeat music) - We are here today at the Harpers Field Barrier, treating the Grand River from the barrier downstream to Lake Erie for larval sea lamprey.

(soft upbeat music) - [Announcer] The binational Great Lakes Fishery Commission administers, a cross-border sea lamprey Control Program.

In the United States, they work with the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service to keep the invasive species in check and that means targeting them in rivers.

Jill Wingfield is the commission's Communications and Policy Program Manager.

- Invasive sea lamprey, they're in all five of the Great Lakes and when they're in the Great Lakes, there's not actually anything that we can do to control their populations.

They are a unique fish though in the sense that they spawn in rivers and tributaries to the Great Lakes.

So, by being here and targeting the Laville sea lamprey populations, we're actually keeping the sea lamprey populations in Lake Erie and the other four Great Lakes in check.

(soft upbeat music) (soft instrumental music) - [Announcer] Sea lampreys were first discovered in Lake Ontario in the 1930s.

At the time Niagara Falls served as a natural barrier, preventing them from advancing further, but in 1919 waterways were constructed to bypass the falls and this provided sea lamprey with a clear path to the other Great Lakes.

The sea lamprey's physical features are the stuff of nightmares.

- Sea lamprey is sort of a cross between a small snake and a giant worm until you see its mouth.

And it almost looks like an alien species.

It has a round suckered disc, mouth filled with approximately 150 teeth with a hole in the center, which is where the rasping tongue is.

And I liken that to a drill bit almost.

- The suction is about floor times what a vacuum cleaner is.

- [Announcer] Donald Arcuri is the Ohio Advisor at Large for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.

He says the sea lamprey used their rasping tongue to feed on other fish.

And while sea lamprey only live in the Great Lakes for 12 to 18 months, the damage they cause is tremendous.

- During that time, they can destroy about 40 pounds of good fish.

They do that by latching onto the fish.

They can rasp into the fish and then they suck out the body fluids, blood and whatever.

All this causes damage sometimes severe enough to almost instantly kill the fish, but more likely than not, they're gonna cause damage to the fish that will make that fish susceptible to disease, or just stressed it so bad that it'll die.

- [Announcer] Treatment Supervisor, Chris Eilers, understands the massive threat sea lampreys pose to the 7 billion Great Lakes fishery, which once produced 15 million pounds of lake trout annually.

- Our water chemistries are looking really good.

We're meeting exactly the concentrations we want and we're targeting 2.8 parts for million.

We have 2.8 parts for a million coming out.

- Perfect.

- So everything looks good.

- Uncontrolled, the sea lamprey were able to wipe out lake trout back in the 1940s and '50s, completely decimated them from several of the lakes.

So without sea lamprey control, we would be looking at lakes without lake trout, lakes without salmon, lakes without steelhead and I don't think that's something that anybody wants.

So we wanna stop them before they go out to the Great Lakes, because once they're in the Great Lakes, we can't stop them.

(bright instrumental music) - [Announcer] Today, Chris and his crew will treat a 32-mile stretch of the Grand River that is infested with sea lamprey larva.

- So the strategy today, is that we are applying lampricides below Harper's Field Dam and the dam is a barrier, so the Lamprey cannot go past the dam.

So we know that all of the larvae and all of the eggs that have been laid are downstream from the dam.

So we're ensuring that we're controlling the entire infested length of the stream.

(soft upbeat music) So the chemical we're applying today is called TFM, which is short for three tri flora methyl for nitro phenol.

It's kind of a mouthful, which is why we call it TFM.

And TFM was discovered in the 1950s by scientists with the United States Geological Survey at Hammond Bay Biological Station and we've been using it ever since.

- [Announcer] While the Lamprey side application only takes about 12 hours, the team has been planning for several days.

- There's lots of calculations involved.

We look at the pH that's in the stream.

It's several different sites up and down because the toxicity of the chemical changes based on what the pH of the river is.

We also look at all of the discharges in the stream, and then all of the tributaries.

- [Announcer] Now that the calculations are done and the weather report looks good, Chris and his team, including station supervisor, Jenna Jenna Tews, are ready to start.

- On the bank of the stream, you have a large container of concentrated lampricide and the five gallon jugs of TFM are emptied into the container where a pump then pulls the concentrated lampricide down to the stream edge where another pump mixes the concentrated lampricide with the fresh stream water, pulls that in and then pushes it across the spreader hose.

And it's a perforated hose that we string from bank to bank and that helps mix the concentrated lampricide throughout the water column as quickly as possible.

- If you look out at the river, you can see the chemicals being applied.

You can see the yellow color to the river is where the chemical is.

And once it gets further downstream, the whole stream will be yellow.

(soft dramatic music) - [Announcer] Exposure to lampricide makes the sea lamprey larva emerge from the sediment and then they die shortly thereafter.

According to the us fish and wildlife service, lampricide is effective and safe.

The flow of the river ensures that lampricide is only in the system for a short period of time and the chemical is unique in that it's specifically targets sea lamprey, but it isn't perfect, some sensitive species like mud puppies can be affected by the lampricide.

- [Chris] We do know that there's going to be some non-target mortality associated with the lampricide application and unfortunately it's unavoidable.

- [Announcer] But it's something the team tries to minimize.

- We're gonna get our next sample at 14:30 down here and see how we're doing.

- Yeah, and they're doing 30-minute feed checks too.

- [Announcer] Every hour throughout the day long treatment, water samples are taken downstream and analyzed at the team's remote lab located near the dam.

- We closely monitor the dosages that we're applying to the river and we adjust and change those dosages every hour if they're not within limits.

- [Announcer] The aim is to effectively eliminate the sea lamprey while minimizing the effect on other species.

- In a lot of times like you'll walk this way and- - [Announcer] A Risk Management Unit led by Fish Biologist, Cheryl Kaye- - to see a fish, that's- - [Announcer] Also takes steps to rescue non-target species.

- And you could know that people are gonna have canoes to float the river, but mostly they're gonna be walking, so the canoes are just to carry equipment, to carry fresh water, if we see animals that are alive, like if we see mud puppies, we will pick the mud puppies up and put them in fresh water and then return them to the river.

- We gather some fresh water so that we have a live well for any living organisms that we find.

- [Announcer] While the toll on non-target species is regrettable, it's seen as worth it to protect the ecosystem and fishery from sea lamprey.

- If we were to stop the sea lamprey control program, they would rapidly multiply and do a lot of harm.

- In the grand scheme of things, we are protecting a lot more fish than we're harming by applying the pesticide.

- Before the sea lamprey control program was formed, Sea Lampreys were killing 100 million pounds of fish a year.

Since sea lamprey control has become effective, we've reduced populations by about 90 percent in most areas of the Great Lakes, so now sea lamprey are killing about 10 million pounds of fish each year, which is still too many, but definitely much better than it was historically.

- [Announcer] But to maintain this level of progress, control methods must continue on a regular basis.

- Even though we do a great job of controlling sea lamprey as it is, it's a never ending battle.

Female sea lampreys can lay over 100,000 eggs in one go, so you can imagine that they can repopulate the Great Lakes very quickly if we were to let them go and let them repopulate.

(whooshing sound) - If you're concerned that a sea lamprey could attack you the next time you're in the lake, you can stop worrying.

Fortunately, sea lamprey have a strong preference for cold-blooded creatures.

For more about sea lamprey and efforts to fight them, visit Great Lakes Now.org.

When you think about environmental issues, you might picture toxic chemicals in the air or the water, but the environment we humans inhabit most of the time is our home and there are problems there too.

- [Announcer] Housing stock in Great Lake cities is aging.

And in Detroit, 80 percent of housing units were built before 1960, so it's no surprise that things like old windows lead paint and aging heating and cooling systems are becoming a big problem for residents and the planet.

It's something journalist Nina Ignaczak has been thinking about.

Last year, she co-wrote a piece for Outlier media about the intersection of Detroit housing and environmental issues.

- What we came to discover through reporting, especially on issues like asthma is that housing is as much of an environmental health issue and environmental stressor to Detroiters as much as air pollution and water quality.

- [Announcer] Some of the most common and dangerous issues in these old homes are lead paint and lead water service lines.

Lead can create a variety of neurological and developmental issues, particularly in children.

Other issues like damaged roofs or flooded basements can lead to mold and chronic respiratory issues like asthma.

- We all have asthma because of the basement has mold and mildew in it.

- [Announcer] Thomasenia Weston lives on the Southwest side of Detroit with her grandchildren.

She's been in her home for more than 20 years and has experienced a variety of issues that illustrate the many ways our homes and the areas surrounding them can become a threat to our health.

- I don't get much sleep, once you're woken up, you're woken up.

It's like, you just go back to sleep and the crazy, crazy thing about it is is the house shakes.

My bed shakes, because of the rumbling of the trucks.

And when it's like a bunch of them, you'd think you're on a rollercoaster ride (laughs).

- [Announcer] Thomasenia says she suffered some hearing loss and a constant ringing in her ears called tinnitus as a result of the constant truck traffic just outside her home.

- It's awful and it's making my quality of life crap.

- [Announcer] Another issue with old housing stock is old windows and insufficient insulation, leading to high energy bills and in some cases, dangerous indoor temperatures.

- Climate change has these multitude of effects, but extreme heat was the one that really brought me into this space of climate change research, basically because my grandparents were experiencing it firsthand.

- [Announcer] Jalonne White Newsome is a native Detroiter and the CEO and Founder of Empowering a Green Environment and Economy LLC, a community and climate-focused consulting firm.

- My parents have been in a home that unfortunately has suffered flooding five times in the last three years.

And it's not just a little bit of water or sprinkle of water in the basement, but it's been feet up to eight, nine feet of water in their basement.

And so when I think about how climate change has impacted me personally and the lives of my family members, it has caused stress, it has caused health issues, it has caused for them to have the need to relocate and really be displaced from their home, it's been a financial strain all of those things.

- [Announcer] And the data reveals a disturbing trend.

Housing-related health problems tend to be most severe and low income communities of color, meaning that this is an environmental justice issue.

- So we know that the practice of redlining, which concentrated poor people, poor low income, predominantly people of color into certain areas, created areas of disinvestment.

And those areas were disinvested in terms of maintenance of the homes, in terms of lack of attention to neighborhood amenities like trees.

They also tended to be places that were easy to put roads through and highways through.

And so the people living in these areas have just had to deal with multiple environmental stressors, all of these things just kind of pile up and create a very unhealthy environment.

- You have people living in communities that don't have clean air, don't have clean water, and they're actually not healthy places to be.

And so when you talk about environmental justice, to me, it's the goal or the aspiration, because we all wanna live in an environment that is healthy, that's safe and clean.

And so environmental justice is that movement of people that grassroots movement of people, regular citizens, regular folks that are saying, "I'm not gonna tolerate this anymore."

So we need to change our laws, we need to change our practices, we wanna demand an environment that we can be healthy in.

- [Announcer] Dr. Ijeoma Nnodim Opara is an Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit.

She's a physician and an advocate for health equity.

- We know that when we are in homes that are not protected against those toxins folks experience either new illnesses or if they have illnesses, those illnesses are worsened.

We know and studies show that when you have a healthy neighborhood, first of all, when your house is part of a neighborhood and a community with strong cohesion, where folks are together and working together, that folks are healthier in those places.

And so that becomes very, very key.

When you have a place where a neighborhood or community, where you have homes that are old and not maintained, and you have folks that are falling ill, that impacts upon the health and wellness of everybody in that area, as a matter of fact.

So healthy communities, healthy neighborhoods of folks who are in stable, affordable, well-maintained home is really key to building a healthy society that can prosper and thrive, it's all interconnected.

- [Announcer] In the summer of 2021 Detroiters were surveyed about how the city should spend $426 million in federal funds that it would receive for community investment under the American Rescue Plan Act, their top choice?

"Rebuild our neighborhoods."

Later that year, the city created Renew Detroit, an initiative that will use 30 million in federal ARPA funds to pay for critical home repairs.

Other cities also plan to use ARPA funds to address problems with aging homes.

It's a big step, but the cost to correct the problem is huge.

- Michigan Poverty Solutions, which is a think tank out of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor set the cost at bringing every home in the Metro area up to a healthy standard at 2 billion.

So, the cost is as much or more as it would cost to fix our water infrastructure for example, it's a massive, massive cost.

(whooshing sound) - For more about housing issues in the Great Lakes region, visit greatlakesnow.org.

And now it's time for the catch, our Roundup of news from around the lakes.

- [Announcer] In Ohio, the recreation and tourism organization, Destination Toledo has a new mobile passport called the Great Lake Erie Birding Trail.

It allows bird lovers to connect and explore nearly 40 different birding hotspots throughout the Western basin of Lake Erie.

Kimberly Kaufman is the Executive Director of the Black Swamp Bird Observatory.

- There's so much to take in, in Northwest Ohio that any kind of tools that enhance the visitor's experience are something that we welcome and we're very pleased to see offered to the public.

- [Announcer] In the springtime, the area is a hotspot for migratory birds, which stopped to rest and refuel before flying across Lake Erie, but some birds stay throughout the summer.

- Beautiful species, like the little yellow warbler (bird chirps) the male with this rich red Chestnut streaking down its breast and the common yellow throat, the little masked bandit that nest in the marshes.

So some of those warblers will stay here with us all through the summer, and that makes 'em really special to bird lovers.

- [Announcer] And there's a growing number of people interested in bird watching.

Kim says, it's a result of so many finding new COVID friendly hobbies during the last two years.

- More people than ever before discovered birds right in their backyard and the beauty of it is that those birds are still here in the summer.

Things like downy woodpeckers, red velvet woodpeckers and the beautiful gold and black American goldfinches, those are birds that are here with us year round.

So there we're celebrating too, as much as we love and celebrate spring migration, the backyard birds that stay here all summer.

And if you don't have a big yard where you can attract birds, get out into any park, the Metro park system, a county park and you're sure to find some of those wonderful summer birds that are here with us year round.

- [Announcer] In Milwaukee, officials are working to eliminate combined sewage overflows that can pour pollution into local waterways, including Lake Michigan.

Wisconsin Public Radio's, Jonah Beleckis Jonah BKO has been following the story.

- We're talking about these combined sewage systems, which are pipes in our water infrastructure that are collecting both wastewater and storm water.

And that can work well during dry seasons and everything can go where it needs to go, but it gets a little bit more complicated when there's heavier rainfall, which is due to climate change something that we've been experiencing, especially in this Great Lakes region in Wisconsin, we've seen a lot of rainfall in the 2010s.

And when there is this excessive rainfall or just excessive precipitation events, then these combined sewer systems can overflow and that can have various consequences.

- [Announcer] Overflows can lead to drinking water advisories, restrictions on boating and swimming that drive local tourism and even harmful algae blooms.

These issues are part of why state and local agencies are trying to get a handle on the problem.

- The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District set this goal to have no overflows, basement backups and an overall improved storm water management process by the year 2035.

It's also looking at addressing this problem of flooding through green infrastructure and not just more concrete as the answer, but to lessen the flooding as we are gonna be seeing more rainfall that we're supposed to use some of this greener infrastructure to help absorb more water and reduce the flooding on the back end.

Things like porous pavement, green roofs and patches of native plants and soil that what they can do is soak up the rainfall as it's coming in, instead of worrying about where it goes.

- [Announcer] And this problem isn't limited to Wisconsin, there are around 150 permitted combined sewage systems in the Great Lakes region, and most of the places struggling with overflows are small communities with limited financial resources.

- You may have to see these places, look at private financing to get the green infrastructure that's needed, and that this is gonna cost a lot and that's one way that you're able to lessen the burden on rate payers and people who live in these communities that on their water bill, for example, that they might not need to bear the entire brunt of this cost for projects like this.

- [Announcer] There are thousands of shipwrecks in the depths of the Great Lakes, but you don't need scuba gear to see all of them.

Author and Editorial Director of Michigantrailmaps.com, Jim DuFresne has published "A Landlubbers Guide to Shoreline Shipwrecks."

He says many shipwrecks are near or on the shore, accessible to snorkelers or even hikers.

- The heart of shipwreck territory in Michigan is generally considered to be Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Northwest part of the peninsula.

It has probably a half dozen or more wrecks, including the James McBride, which is at the end of the dunes trail.

- [Announcer] The James McBride was a 121-foot brig that ran a ground in a storm in October of 1857.

Today it rests just off shore in shallow water.

Another ship wreck can be found a ferry ride in a short hike away off the shore of South Manitou Island.

It's the wreck of the Francisco Morison.

The ocean going Liberian freighter was bound for Holland when it ran a ground in 1960.

Much of the wreck is visible above the water, a few 100 yards from the shore.

- But there's a lot of other ship wrecks on Lake Huron and in Lake Superior as well, including a great set of three wrecks in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

And that one is an easy hike.

You see these wrecks and then you end up at the Au Sable Light Station where the Park Service allows you to climb to the top of the tower, it's been renovated.

There's also a great wreck on Isle Royal National Park, just outside of Windigo where it's at the west end of the park, and that's the America.

And it's only about three feet below the surface on one end of it.

And you can rent a kayak or a canoe, and it's in the protected Windigo Harbor there.

- [Announcer] If you're up for a more convenient shipwreck viewing experience, Michigan is also home to the Great Lake Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point in the upper peninsula.

- It's there because the Edmund Fitzgerald, which is the most famous wreck sank off of Lake Superior close to that point, and that one fascinates everybody, and they have quite a few pieces that up from that bowl, and it's very well done.

- Thanks for watching for more on these stories and the Great Lakes in general, visit greatlakesnow.org.

When you get there, you can follow us on social media or subscribe to our newsletter to get updates about our work.

See you out on the lakes.

(bright upbeat music) - [Announcer] This program is brought to you by the Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

- [Announcer] The consumer's energy foundation is committed to serving Michigan from preserving our state's natural resources and sustaining our future to continuing business growth, academic achievement, and community involvement.

Learn more at consumersenergy.com/foundation.

- [Announcer] The Richard C. Devereaux Foundation for energy and environmental programs at DPTV, the Polk Family Fund, Eve and Jerry Jung, the Americana Foundation, the Brookby Foundation, Founders Brewing Company and viewers like you.

Thank you.

(bright piano music)