The Water That The Coast Guard Won’t Save You From

About 25 miles south of Chicago lies a stretch of water that nothing lives in. It’s not pollution or over-fishing that has wiped out nearly everything save for insects and bacteria here, it’s electricity. At the river bottom there are multiple 160-foot wide grids of electrodes issuing 2.3 volts per inch every 2.5 milliseconds. The Chicago Electric Dispersal Barrier was implemented to repel fish traveling up the shipping and sanitary canals to the Great Lakes. Specifically, the barrier’s voltage was meant to turn away Asian Carp—a voracious invasive species that most worry would destroy Great Lakes fisheries. And the electricity does its job. It turns away larger fish, and so far the Great Lakes haven’t been overrun. There is much more to this story: more about the effectiveness of the barrier and the all-out campaign of carnage (think poisoning whole river systems) undertaken to combat the Asian carp (read here ...