• Posted: February 25, 2019
• better construction, Lyons-Pinner Electric, Scott Morris

During the height of the Chicago summer, as the waters warm and the boats begin to populate Lake Michigan and the surrounding Great Lakes, so too do Asian Carp, a nuisance species known for disrupting the food supply of the fish currently in the Great Lakes.

Asian Carp were initially imported to eat the algae in catfish ponds, but flooding and other accidents released the non-native fish into the Mississippi River. From there, the carp spread because they have no natural predators and will out-compete native fish for micro plankton and zoo plankton. This ultimately cuts off the food supply for other, native fish.

To prevent the carp from getting into Lake Michigan, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers designed an electric barrier within the Chicago Area Waterway System, the only known continuous connection between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River basins, where Asian Carp are known to live.

“It’s like a big toaster,” said Scott Morris, Project Manager at Lyons & Pinner Electric. “It creates an electromagnetic field that basically paralyzes the fish and then allows them to float back out of the zone.”

Morris and his team at Lyons & Pinner Electric have been working alongside the Army Corps of Engineers in Romeoville, Illinois in the Chicago Sanitary and Shipping Canal for nearly ten years in an effort to protect the Great Lakes.

During a recent visit to the canal on a sunny afternoon in early August, Morris and his team were busy replacing some of the 5X5 steel billets that measure 160 feet long and run across the bottom of the canal some 25-35 feet below. These billets house the cables necessary to create the electric barrier.

“Right now, we’re doing electro replacement so we’re pulling out the cables and getting everything ready,” said Rob Willy, Lyons & Pinner’s Foreman on the site. “We are making the attachments of our cables to the billets and prepping everything so we’re ready to work with the divers. We’ll work with the divers to install the billets and then they’ll work with us to feed the cables to make our final connections.”

Later this year, as the water begins to cool and the fish pass through the canal less frequently, divers will go down and pull up part of the existing billets and replace them with new ones. This is done to prevent further corrosion and to ensure the electric barrier remains as effective as possible. This work poses and a new challenge, but also an exciting opportunity, for Local 134 electricians.

“The challenging part is the water aspect,” Morris said. “Getting the electrodes in the water up and the cables up is challenging. Everything else is just conduit and wire with connections inside the building.”