‘It’s Hell for the Fish’: The US Has a Billion-Dollar Plan to Halt a Carp Invasion

Standing on a windy bridge over the Des Plaines River in Joliet, Illinois, Scott Whitney shows off a diagram of what he calls the gauntlet. Pictured is a half-mile-long underwater obstacle course for fish that runs upstream toward Lake Michigan. A curtain of turbulent bubbles is followed by a bank of speakers emitting ear-splitting noise, then a wall of electrified water and finally a navigation lock designed to flush downstream any organisms that make it that far. “It’s hell for the fish,” says Whitney, chief of the project management branch for the US Army Corps of Engineers’ Rock Island District.

He’s focused on one in particular: invasive carp, which have menaced Midwest rivers for decades. Whitney’s gauntlet—officially known as the Brandon Road Interbasin Project at the Brandon Road Lock and Dam—aims to stop the carp from getting any closer to Lake Michigan. Scientists deem this spot the fish’s likeliest entry point into the Great Lakes and its fishing industry, which the Great Lakes Fishery Commission values at $5.1 billion annually. The Corps plans to start building the BRIP in January at a cost of $1.15 billion, with Illinois, Michigan and the federal government splitting the tab.