The $1.2-billion Brandon Road Interbasin Project, intended to prevent Asian carp and other invasive species from entering the Great Lakes, can advance now that Illinois has acquired 50 acres of land needed for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project near Joliet, Ill.  

The property, which provides riverbed access for the Corps-owned Brandon Road lock, was donated on May 23 to the state by Midwest Generation LLC, which operates power generating facilities in Illinois in Joliet, Pekin, Romeoville and Waukegan. 

Acquiring the title for the land allows Illinois to authorize land rights to the federal agency, the Corps, which is needed for the project that will apply multiple layers of technological deterrents designed to prevent invasive carp from reaching the Great Lakes. The joint project involves the Corps and the states of Illinois and Michigan. It is being built on a site considered a pinch point at which carp could enter the Great Lakes through Illinois waterways.  

The financial closing that took place on May 23 was originally scheduled for Feb. 11. It was postponed by the Illinois Dept. of Natural Resources, which sent a letter to the Corps in March saying it wanted written assurance from the White House that it would receive the remaining $117 million in federal funding promised for the project before it would schedule the financial closing. 

On May 9 the White House issued a memorandum supporting the project. 

“This threat [of Asian carp] affects every state that borders the Great Lakes:  Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin,” the memo signed by President Donald J. Trump states. “Curbing this threat requires immediate and effective deployment of resources, infrastructure, and expertise.” 

 “After receiving the necessary assurances from the federal government, my administration acted quickly and formally acquired the land needed for construction,” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said in a news release. 

The White House memo notes that the Army Corps has done design work, started site preparation and is ready to begin construction of deterrent measures and wrote that  the “State of Illinois and any applicable localities should grant all permits or approvals required to facilitate Army Corps construction within 30 days of such permits or approvals becoming ripe for consideration.”

“Current construction on the Brandon Road Interbasin Project is essentially the removal of bedrock and other material in preparation for future construction. That work is on schedule to be completed by the end of June,” said Allen Marshall, a Corps spokesperson. 

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, who went to Washington D.C. to advocate for the project, also applauded the news that the project is moving forward. 

 “The transformational effort will help stop invasive carp from moving into the Great Lakes, protecting Michigan’s maritime economy,” Whitmer said in a news release. “Brandon Road has been a top Michigan priority for over 20 years, and after a long process and relentless advocacy, it is finally getting done.”

The project’s features include an engineered channel to enhance the operations of the deterrents and provide a platform for future technologies, flushing the lock, providing a bubble curtain, which is a continuous curtain of air that rises from the channel floor and is a visual and tactile deterrent to fish, installing an underwater line of acoustic speakers emitting specific sounds that have been found to deter Asian carp, establishing an electric field that stretches across the channel to repel and stun fish from moving upstream, installing a linear wash station anchored to the river bed that uses large air bubbles to clear aquatic nuisance species from barge hulls before entering the channel, building infrastructure to support operations and maintenance of deterrents and installing boat launches to provide access for operation, maintenance, repair, replacement and emergency response. 

The Army Corps, Michigan and Illinois have all taken measures over the last two decades to fight the invasive carp, which reproduce rapidly and have no significant natural predators in the Great Lakes or in rivers in both states. The name Asian carp applies to four species of the fish; bighead carp, silver carp, grass carp, and black carp, some of which were introduced into the lakes and waterways in the two states as long ago as the 1960s.
The efforts to mitigate their invasion and keep them out of the Great Lakes have had varying degrees of success over the last two decades and environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council have argued for different approaches that do not focus on electric fencing or audio annoyance of the fish, but the Brandon Road Interbasin Project has been touted as a long-term solution by the Corps and both states.