World Water Day
Floor Speech
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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I want to welcome the Congressman and doctor, Dan Benishek, from Michigan's First District, which encompasses Marquette and Mackinac Island and Traverse City, to name a few famous towns and island. I welcome him to participate this evening as well as our other colleagues from the Great Lakes.
I rise tonight to mark the occasion of World Water Day. As such, I would like to discuss the Great Lakes, an American freshwater treasure, irreplaceable on our globe. Actually, it is the largest source of freshwater in the United States and represents about 20 percent of the world's freshwater supply.
The district that I represent, which is a little south of Michigan, down in Ohio, sits nestled across Lake Erie's entire south coast, extending from Cleveland all the way west to Toledo and encompasses all of Ohio's ports but for one.
There should be a sign, actually, on the Ohio Turnpike nearby that marks our shoreline as the step-off point, since Lake Erie is the most southern of all the lakes, as the largest body of freshwater on the face of the Earth.
I see our dear colleague, the co-chair of the Great Lakes Task Force with me, Congressman Mike Kelly of Erie, Pennsylvania, who has joined us. It is also a great port city, nestled along these Great Lakes.
Let me begin by saying, since the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, Lake Erie itself has been on a path to recovery. It got very sick back in the 20th century.
Point sources of pollution, such as inadequate wastewater treatment facilities and infrastructure and industrial outfalls have been slowly coming. Since back then and the passage of the Clean Water Act and the establishment of Earth Day, they have been coming into EPA compliance.
One needs no further proof in tracking the rebirth of America's symbol, the bald eagle, than to really track Lake Erie's health. Lake Erie is the shallowest of the lakes; and, therefore, it is kind of the canary in the coal mine. What happens there will happen in the other lakes subsequently.
The bald eagle had actually become an endangered species by the time of the 1970s, and only two eagles were left on our great lake, Lake Erie. There were no eaglets being born.
Due to the Clean Water Act's passage and literally the banning of DDT and the repair of many of the industrial outfalls, which we are still working on, and the combined sewer overflows, what happened, as we moved into the 21st century, was human progress.
Today hundreds of baby eaglets are being born across Lake Erie, and they are flying other places around the country. Amazingly, the bald eagle has been taken off the endangered species list. So progress is possible. Humans can really repair the environment if they are dedicated to us.
For those of us who live in Lake Erie's western basin, which is the far western part of the State, the health of our lake is a living reality and access to freshwater has become the background noise of our daily lives, becoming more pronounced when tragedy strikes, as it did most recently in Flint, Michigan, and Sebring, Ohio, with lead in freshwater.
Our region works and plays with a new normal that includes very frequent water quality reports now, updates on beach postings--whether you can swim or not--water utility fee increases, and a general concern about a troubling set of scientific questions that still go unanswered.
Unfortunately, this administration has not recognized these concerns and seeks to cut Federal support to Great Lakes States by $148 million for next year. Some would call that an oxymoron; it makes no sense in view of what is happening across our region, but it is happening.
This evening--and I am going to yield to my colleagues before I get into these topics--I would like to address the water infrastructure needs of the Great Lakes, harmful algal blooms, which literally shut down the city of Toledo's water system a year-and-a-half ago, denying fresh water for 3 days to citizens, to businesses, and to institutions in that region because of something called microcystin, which is the toxic part of certain types of algal blooms which we are trying to address. So harmful algal blooms will be one of my topics.
Another topic will be the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which is so important to all of us in helping to improve our Great Lakes.
Stopping the Asian carp is another topic.
The next topic will be the Great Lakes navigation system itself, an antiquated system that has to be updated for this 21st century.
Finally, I will discuss the harbor maintenance fund. These are all major issues across the Great Lakes region, which we would like to place on the Record this evening.
I would like to ask my colleagues to join me. Congressman Benishek, I thank you again so very much for being a leader for the Great Lakes and for coming down this evening.
I now yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Benishek).
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Ms. KAPTUR. I thank Congressman Benishek very, very much. I thank him for his leadership on Great Lakes issues. That is a vast district that he represents and one that is vital to our country. I thank him for participating this evening.
Before I yield to Congressman Mike Kelly of the Third District of Pennsylvania, I just want to say that the region that we are talking about, the Great Lakes, actually, if it were a country on its own, would be the third largest economy in the world. We are talking about a vast and important part of our Nation with more fresh water than any other part of the continent.
The Great Lakes navigation system, including the Soo Locks that Congressman Benishek referenced, encompasses this vast region, and the Seaway that is a part of this that was actually built by President Eisenhower--it was built back in the 1950s--constitutes through the locks the shortest distance between the heartland of America and the ports of northern Europe and many other global destinations.
Most people have never been through the Soo Locks because we tend to move commerce through the locks. We have some tourism, obviously, but it really is a busy industrial corridor and has the lowest cost transportation. Waterborne transportation is the lowest cost mode of transportation. So you have the big containers and so forth that move through the Seaway, and then we have the interlake trade, which is heavily industrial, as Congressman Benishek referenced.
In recent years, the number of passages through the locks that go all the way from Duluth all the way out through Massena, New York, going throughout these Great Lakes, this whole system has averaged about 10,000 vessels per year. That is down a bit from prior years because what has happened is the vessels got larger and they could carry more freight. But the system exists. It operates every day.
The ports and channels of the Great Lakes-Saint Lawrence Seaway System support over 226,000 jobs in both the United States and Canada because the Seaway is operated by both countries, and it brings a total of $33.5 billion in business revenue to the United States and Canada annually. For Ohio, our largest trading partner is Canada, and some of those goods move across the water.
In the United States alone, the system supports over 128,000 jobs and produces a total of $18.1 billion in business revenue annually. Over 42,000 of these jobs are direct jobs in the iron ore and steel industry, which Congressman Benishek referenced. The Great Lakes region produces 90 percent--90 percent--of America's iron ore, and the Great Lakes region also manufactures 58 percent of automobiles on the roads in the United States and Canada. I think Congressman Kelly knows a whole lot about the automobile industry. So this manufacturing and commodity supply chain can only function through the Great Lakes navigation system, which needs modernization.
I am more than pleased to yield to the co-chair of the Great Lakes Task Force here in the House of Representatives, the very esteemed gentleman from Pennsylvania's Third District (Mr. Kelly) centered at Erie.
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Ms. KAPTUR. I thank Congressman Kelly so very much. I thank him for his passion and for participating this evening and for all the effort he puts forward on our Great Lakes Task Force to try to elevate this region of the country as so vital to our future.
And when the gentlemen were talking about Great Lakes and the word ``lakes,'' there are some people who have said they should have been named the Great Seas.
I had an experience with schoolchildren a few years back. I loaded up a schoolbus with children who came from a region that wasn't close to the lake, and I took them out to Lake Erie. Their first reaction was actually fear when they saw how big it was. They said: Oh, the ocean.
So, it isn't like a little puddle jumper. These lakes are vast. You have described them well. Most Americans have not visited them, so they don't have a complete understanding of how massive these lakes really are. There is nothing else like them on the face of the Earth.
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Ms. KAPTUR. The gentleman has the same passion.
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Ms. KAPTUR. This is a moment I am glad that is actually being broadcast because we are down here tonight on a bipartisan basis discussing a vital resource that this Nation shares with Canada. We work well together. Most of the news is about how Members of Congress don't work together, they don't do this, and here we are participating, after hours--we are not required to be here--and we are talking about something we believe to be truly irreplaceable for our country.
I thank the gentleman for his leadership, and I will share this story with him.
When I was a little girl, I still remember the seventh grade when our grandparents and parents took us to Erie, Pennsylvania, to Presque Isle. I remember that. It was such a big deal. It was a long trip from Toledo, Ohio, to Erie, Pennsylvania, and I still remember our relatives there and understanding how big that waterway really is, how we went swimming at Presque Isle back in those days--the 1950s, I guess.
So I have always had an affinity for Erie, Pennsylvania, remembering back to those early times and what a good time we had. The people of Erie were so hospitable.
It is great to have the gentleman as a leader in the Great Lakes Task Force and coming down here this evening to make time for the Great Lakes. I thank him very much. I thank him for his concerted leadership and all he has done to be a champion not just for Presque Isle, not just for Lake Erie, but for our entire Great Lakes system.
I yield to gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Kildee), the vice chair of the Great Lakes Task Force, who has come to Congress with all this energy and intelligence and capacity to make a difference for the country. And then what was handed him in this last 2 months was the terrible tragedy in his hometown of Flint, Michigan, with lead in the water pipes and the water system there. So many people in Flint are so unnecessarily ill and the community is damaged. All of America wants to help Flint.
I thank Congressman Kildee so much for coming down tonight.
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Ms. KAPTUR. I thank Congressman Kildee so very, very much for coming down. He has his hands full in trying to repair the damage in Flint. We respect him so much for the leadership he has shown there, because that could happen anywhere. Sadly, it happened in Flint, Michigan, and he and the delegation and the entire Great Lakes region have really provided stellar leadership.
We all are here to try and help him and the citizens of Flint. He is focusing national attention on the importance of water infrastructure and what can happen when systems age. You have brought this to the attention of the American people. We can all learn from the experience in Flint.
I want to thank my colleagues for coming to the floor tonight to discuss the important challenges that still remain in the Great Lakes of water infrastructure improvement, addressing the harmful algal blooms, making sure there is significant support in the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, stopping the Asian carp from coming into the Great Lakes, improving our Great Lakes navigation system, and making sure that the harbor maintenance trust fund is available for the Great Lakes.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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