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Movement
would thrust greatness
on Lake St. Clair
LA Times - 10/21
Standing on the
edge of Lake St. Clair, the water stretches as far as one can see,
beyond fishermen in motorboats in the foreground and long, narrow
freighters far in the distance. Clearly, this is one big lake.
But is it a
"Great Lake"?
Some would like
it to be, and a movement to get Lake St. Clair named the sixth
official Great Lake is getting underway. Jim LaHood thinks the
idea is, well, a great one. "I've always considered Lake St.
Clair the greatest of all the Great Lakes," says LaHood, who
owns Lakeshore Lanes, a bowling alley that his father built here
in 1950.
"I'd get up
every morning and look out on the lake," says LaHood, stocky
and tanned with a shock of white hair ringing his head. "Of
course it's a Great Lake. It's not as big as the other Great
Lakes, but you can't see to the other side. It sure doesn't feel
like an inland lake."
Lake St. Clair
lies between southeast Michigan and Canada, just north of Detroit.
Connecting Lake Huron to Lake Erie, it's a critical passage on the
shipping route stretching from Duluth, Minn., to the Atlantic
Ocean. Three thousand freighters a year pass through it. Teeming
with perch, walleye, bass and muskie, it's home to more than
153,000 pleasure boats on the American side alone.
But at 670 square
miles, it's only one-eleventh the size of Lake Ontario -- the
smallest of the five Great Lakes -- though more than three times
the size of Lake Tahoe. Lake Superior is 47 times as large. And
the lake is shallow, averaging only 10 feet except where the
shipping channel has been dredged. At Metro Beach in Harrison
Township, the biggest beach in the Detroit region, swimmers can
wade out 300 feet and still be only waist deep.
Trying to
classify it as a Great Lake is not so much for tourism or bragging
rights as for federal grants that would accompany the designation
and help clean up the frequently fouled waters.
Lack of water
treatment facilities, funds and scientific data to better control
the problem have led to raw sewage and chemical runoff, soil
erosion and contamination, and alarmingly high levels of plant
growth and E. coli bacteria in the lake.
"Ninety
percent of the total flow into Lake Erie comes through us,"
says Doug Martz, chairman of the Macomb County Water Quality Board
and the driving force behind the sixth Great Lake campaign.
"The majority of their pollution is coming from us."
Martz says
pregnant women and children shouldn't eat fish out of Lake St.
Clair. Recent tests have found E. coli concentrations at 170 times
what is considered safe. He also complains that there's little
monitoring of more than 70 chemical plants and refineries upriver
in Sarnia, Canada -- known locally as "Chemical Valley."
Back in June
1994, there was a billion-gallon sewage spill when heavy rains
caused retention basins to overflow. It closed many of the lake's
beaches, and excessive plant growth tangled the waters up to
several hundred feet offshore. "You could walk on it and your
feet would stay dry," says Metro Beach Supt. Jim Pershing,
still amazed.
Still, the lake
has a romantic draw to those who live in the towns that ring it.
"It's sort
of a source of energy for me. I can walk to the end of my street
and watch a sunrise," says Tom Stanton, 41, a writer who
lives a block from the lake in New Baltimore. He has gone boating
and water skiing, summer and winter fishing and even cross-country
skiing on the lake, which often freezes over in the winter.
Yet for all his
fondness, Stanton is a skeptic about the Great Lake designation.
"It's a wonderful lake. But it's not a Great Lake," he
says. "When you look at a map, you see that Lake St. Clair
just doesn't measure up."
Even the
pollution concerns aren't persuading some residents to back
Martz's grass-roots campaign.
"I think it
stinks," Ed Fritz said of the idea as he packed up his
motorboat and catch of about 30 perch at a loading dock in
Harrison last week. "You're going to have to change all the
history books," said the 76-year-old retiree who used to work
on furnaces for Ford Motor Co.
His fishing buddy
Larry Jeziorski, 63, a retired financial planner who remembers
boating on Lake St. Clair in the 1940s when you could see the
bottom, was more sympathetic to the notion of six Great Lakes.
"But I don't
know if it's going to change anything," said Jeziorski, who
has been to all five Great Lakes but likes the fishing here best.
"It's a nice lake, but I don't know if it's a Great
Lake."
Some officials
who work on lake and waterway issues are supportive of Martz's
efforts to clean up the lake, if not enthusiastic about the Great
Lake designation. "I don't think it needs to be designated a
Great Lake to get attention," says Jessica Opfer, executive
director of the Clinton River Watershed Council in nearby
Rochester Hills. "Most grant funding available to the Great
Lakes system includes connecting waterways." The 1970
Merchant Marine Act declared the Great Lakes system as "the
nation's fourth sea coast" and as part of that system, Lake
St. Clair is eligible for some grants that come with the
designation.
But Great Lakes
Commissioner Michael Donahue, whose board represents eight states
and two Canadian provinces, agrees that Lake St. Clair has fallen
through the cracks. "It simply has not received the attention
and funding it deserves from an economic and ecological
standpoint."
The commission
isn't taking a position on adding a Great Lake, although at least
one member, Rex Damschroder of Ohio, is vehemently opposed.
"It's clearly not a Great Lake, neither in size nor
volume," he told the Detroit News last week.
Martz calls it
the forgotten lake, insisting: "This lake has been lost, and
I want it found again."
A wiry, tireless
fellow of 53 who says he works 60 hours a week on local water
quality issues, Martz is somewhat of a showman. A few years ago he
drove around Macomb County in a 1972 Cadillac Fleetwood with
plungers mounted on the fenders and a toilet attached to the roof
collecting signatures to support clean water initiatives.
At a Great Lakes
Commission meeting in Cleveland last week, Martz passed out bumper
stickers saying, "Lake St. Clair: Heart of the Great
Lakes" and laid out his case to commissioners. No vote was
taken; it's up to Congress to elevate the lake's status. The next
step for Martz and fellow water quality board member Bill Smith,
who is helping to spearhead the campaign, is to lobby U.S.
senators and congress members.
It wouldn't be
the first effort to declare Great Lake No. 6. In 1998 Sen. Patrick
Leahy of Vermont unsuccessfully sought an amendment to bestow the
title to Lake Champlain, which sits between Vermont and New York.
True Great Lakers snort at the thought. "That's not even in
our drainage basin," says Commissioner Donahue.
Schoolchildren in
America, no matter where they grow up, learn about the five Great
Lakes in geography lessons. LaHood, the bowling alley owner, says
Americans should know the name of Lake St. Clair as well.
"We're very
critical to the Great Lakes," he says, "because we link
it all together."
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