Ontario's Ministry of the Environment shares the job of preserving the world's largest freshwater system with provincial, federal and national partners. The Great Lakes Guardian and Monitor VI are two nimble vessels that help them do it.
A sleek 11-metre boat races through Hamilton Harbour, which presents a varied view of tree-lined suburbs and steel refineries.
The Great Lakes Guardian has patrolled these waters many times since it was launched by the Ministry of the Environment (MOE) in 2003.
Directed by crew chief Wendy Page, two co-op students from Georgian College lower a contraption of plastic, metal and wires called a profiler into the lake.
Biologist Dr. Todd Howell leans out the cabin door.
"There are about seven or eight sensors in that unit," he explains.
Devices in the profiler measure water temperature, study organic matter with light pulses and collect samples at various depths, among other things.
Temperatures and water quality in a deep lake such as Ontario vary a lot between the bottom and surface. Dr. Howell stresses the importance of knowing where to examine the water column.
"If you look just on the surface you're going to miss a lot of what's actually happening," he says.
Water discharged from a sewage treatment plant, for example, stays at the bottom of the lake and may contribute to algae blooms in the harbour.
Howell points to a map of the harbour marked with a number of ragged, zig-zagging lines that illustrate a 'cruise plan' he's designed for the Guardian. It's a demanding course, meant to traverse as much of the near-shore region as possible.
To roll out such plans Howell and his fellow scientists often need to negotiate with crew chiefs like Page to translate their "lofty thoughts" into practical field research.
Scientists will often come along on trips, especially during the early stages of a project when plans might need to be re-tooled on the spot. To a large extent, however, missions are entrusted to the crew chiefs who, themselves, are capable, experienced technicians.
Howell describes this trust as well-placed. "[They] carry out operations with quality and efficiency that's unsurpassed," he says.
The Great Lakes Guardian and its sister craft, Monitor VI, are specifically tailored to search for pollution in the Great Lakes. As their names imply, the boats gather data to help preserve a vast lake system that not only provides drinking water for one of North America's most populous regions, but also for power generation, agriculture and manufacturing. The Great Lakes also supports myriad aquatic life.
The MOE shares responsibility for monitoring and managing water quality in the lakes with other Provincial agencies such as the Ministry of Natural Resources, and federal departments such as Fisheries and Oceans Canada and Environment Canada through a pact called the Canada-Ontario Agreement Respecting the Great Lakes Basin Ecosystem. Since the Great Lakes are shared with the United States, the federal government, in turn, shares the management responsibility with the U.S. under an international agreement known as the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, and an agreement with Quebec, and the eight Great Lakes states on protecting water quality in the Great Lakes system.
Hamilton Harbour is one of the Great Lakes' "Areas of Concern," that have been targeted for action in the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. It's the job of the Great Lakes Guardian and the Monitor VI to visit these regions in each of the lakes, as well as to track large-scale, long-term changes in water quality at a network of Monitoring Stations stretching from west of Thunder Bay in Lake Superior, to the Quebec border downstream of Cornwall in the St. Lawrence River.
Duncan Boyd is the supervisor in charge of the Great Lakes Monitoring Unit in the Water Monitoring and Reporting Section, which works closely with MOE Regional offices and the Laboratory Services Branch.
Over the past 25 years the Unit has used earlier boats called Monitor (IV, and V) and Guardian (I and II), including crafts many times the size of the present models.
"You're working in an environment that's like a freshwater version of the ocean," Boyd says. "We have these types of vessels so we can handle the shallow water to see what's going on in that important area near the shore, but we still have vessels big enough to safely handle rough waters"
The current Great Lakes Guardian, he explains, was designed to patrol both extremes. It's big enough to handle the rough conditions that can occur on these large lakes but still small enough to be moved between ports on the highway.
The Guardian and the 8.5-metre Monitor VI work within a few kilometres of land in the so-called "near shore zone." They're able to manoeuvre at depths from only a metre to the outer edge of the near shore zone.
"This zone is critical to the aquatic ecosystem and is also where the drinking water intakes and municipal and industrial wastewater discharges are," says Boyd.
Boyd's team are part of what he calls a "fairly ambitious" effort to eventually de-list Hamilton Harbour as an area of concern.
Along with the algae problem, his staff researches PCBs, a long-banned industrial substance which keeps being found in local fish. The goal is to determine whether there are any local sources that could be controlled in order to ease restrictions on consumption of harbour fish, and to diminish potential effects on local fish-eating wildlife.
The Great Lakes are a vast, shared resource with a shared responsibility for their protection and management. The Great Lakes Guardian's scientists and field crew work hard to ensure that Ontario is doing its part.
"We don't mean to brag," says Boyd "but we're doing work on these lakes that no one else can do, and we're doing it well."
