Last week, Illinois officials took possession of a 50-acre stretch of riverbed in Chicago’s shipping channel in a last-ditch effort to prevent an ecological disaster from reaching Lake Michigan.

It is there, on a sliver of land where a coal-fired power plant once stood, that the state plans a last stand against the invasive Asian carp. It wants to build a $1.1 billion barricade, called the Brandon Road Interbasin Project, to keep the particularly voracious predator from muscling past the channel that connects the Mississippi River Basin with the Great Lakes .

But to keep the fish from breaching the divide, the state needs more land. It has a couple of acres in mind, but there’s a catch: The ground is contaminated by coal ash , the carcinogenic byproduct of burning that fossil fuel to

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