Three winters of meager snows and measly rains around the Great Lakes have driven water levels to their lowest point in years, giving Lake Michigan extraordinarily wide beaches but comically short boat ramps that never reach water.
Along with the obvious changes along the lakefront, this ebb and flow of water could lead to more beach closings and is part of a larger weather pattern that has raised the specter of drought for Downstate farmers.
Off Rogers Park, the dropping lake levels revealed what may be a 120-foot-long wooden pier that has been hidden beneath the water for years, and longtime lake watchers say they don’t recall seeing it and can’t quite say what it is.
And as the Great Lakes shipping season opens in coming weeks, carriers are being warned that they won’t be able to fill their boats to capacity again this summer because heavy loads could cause them to run aground.
The long-term patterns that have been pushing down the Great Lakes levels could cause serious trouble Downstate, where aquifers are dropping and rivers are running narrow and shallow.
The Illinois State Water Survey is warning of possible shortages this summer, and some Downstate aquifers are so low that residents are already being forced to haul water to their homes by truck.
“The pattern of rainfall since July 1999 is similar in magnitude to the early stages of many historic droughts in the state, including those in 1908, 1917, 1930, 1953 and 1976,” said state climatologist Jim Angel at the Water Survey.
On Lake Michigan and the other Great Lakes, the water levels are expected to be about 9 inches lower than last summer, when levels were low enough to force oceangoing shippers to reduce their loads to make it out of the lakes.
Although no one is predicting the levels will fall to the record lows set in 1964, the turnaround in the lake levels has been a dramatic lesson in the cycles that drain and replenish the Great Lakes.
It wasn’t long ago that Lake Michigan was splashing at its edges like an over-filled bathtub. During the summer of 1986, when high-level records were set and some lakefront homes were washed off their bluffs, the lake was more than 5 feet higher than it is now.
The dry forecast for the Great Lakes is written in the barren, snowless Canadian drainage basin for Lake Superior, which acts as the headwaters for the Great Lakes. Photographs taken March 6 by high-flying aircraft operated by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration showed the basin had almost none of the snow that in most years would melt to provide a flush of new water to the Great Lakes.
“For there to be no snow up there now is almost unheard of,” said Adam Fox, a physical scientist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Detroit.
While this is leaving gorgeous, expansive beaches, it is also raising the possibility that water-quality problems will force those beaches to be closed more often. The Lake Michigan Federation, an environmental group that has been charting beach closings for several years, has found that the closings have been on the rise as lake levels have dropped.
“As those lake levels go down, Lake Michigan heats up and the bacteria have a field day,” said Cameron Davis, the federation’s executive director.
Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers has been getting calls from a number of cities along the shore where boat ramps no longer reach the water. “If you run out of ramp before the boat is in the water, you can’t launch,” said Steve Hungness, operations chief for the corps in Chicago.
Chicago Park District officials will be forced to extend boat launching ramps at certain locations and evaluate over the next two weeks whether any of the harbors needs dredging, said lakefront director Bridget Gainer Kibby. The harbors open May 15.
The Park District plans to extend the boat ramps starting next week at the Wilson boat launch, Jackson Park Harbor and Burnham Harbor. There is also a possibility the entrances to Park District harbors will be too shallow for some boats. Authorities are hoping rain will solve the problem.
In Calumet Harbor, the combination of low lake levels and sediment accumulation has left less than the 27 feet of water ships require, and the boats are being forced to carry lighter loads, a corps spokeswoman said. Because of low levels in the Great Lakes last summer, 1,000-foot oceangoing ships were forced to lighten their loads by up to 3,500 tons to get through the locks that lead out of lakes, said Glen Nekvasil, a spokesman for the Lake Carriers Association, an industry trade group.
“It will be worse this year,” Nekvasil said.
Downstate, “we are seeing an increase in water hauling from private wells as the ground-water levels have receded,” said Vernon Knapp of the Water Survey.
The survey predicts that if rainfall is 4 inches below normal for the next 12 months–and there is a 25 percent chance it will be–then crops would suffer and water supplies could fall short.
The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency issued a statement Monday “recommending that officials of surface water supplies start planning for possible water shortages in coming months.”
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One of the oddest effects of the low levels was the revelation of a heretofore hidden structure at Rogers Avenue Beach, north of Howard Street.
Over the years, William Rossberger, who lives across the street from the beach, has found Indian-head coins, shards of china and a rusted water pump from an Evanston canoe club in the sand and rocks. But his latest find has him perplexed.
Jutting out of the edge of the rocky beach stands a wall of wooden planks that stretches about 120 feet. A maritime history buff and board member of the Chicago Maritime Society, Rossberger has searched the lakefront maps, one of which dates back to 1911, hanging in his basement rec room. He’s called all his usual sources–the Evanston Historical Society, the National Archives and the Army Corps of Engineers–but has found no answers.
“It keeps me awake at night,” he said. “I’d like to know what it is.”
Rossberger has a theory. In addition to the exposed L-shaped wall at the water’s edge, wooden planks also poke out of rocks farther up the beach. He thinks it’s all part of a pier probably constructed during the mid- to late 1800s by an entrepreneur trying to make a profit off the hundreds of schooners that went up and down Lake Michigan every day, bringing lumber into the city.
The Park District, formed in 1934, has no record of the pier.
“It’s one of those quirky stories,” said Gainer Kibby. “Now that we see the water levels so low, we’re discovering parts of Lake Michigan that have been hidden from us.”