A great water resource is vanishing

News release Restore our Water February 4, 2013 

As water levels in Lakes Michigan, Huron and Georgian Bay set new monthly record lows, the International Joint Commission (IJC) has recently sent signals that it will ignore the public’s concern and request for a viable solution, announcing instead a ‘Great Lakes Regional Adaptive Management Plan’.

In January of 2013, American IJC Commissioner Dareth Glance acknowledged that water levels were getting lower but still “within historical ranges”. Ms. Glance said that because there is “so much uncertainty”, both the Canadian and American governments should simply ‘adapt’ to the reality of lower water levels.

However water levels in Michigan/Huron/Georgian Bay have declined far more than those of the other Great Lakes and show no signs of either leveling off or rising after 13 years of low levels. Ongoing erosion from earlier dredging of the St. Clair River and removal of the sand content of the water is causing excess outflow from Michigan/Huron/Georgian Bay through the lower lakes and out into the Atlantic Ocean. This in turn results in local wetlands being drained and shorelines exposed to new invasive species, causing the ecosystem to deteriorate rapidly.

The Commissioners did hear a loud and clear message at their summer 2012 public hearings around the Great Lakes – “Restore Our Water Levels.” At the conclusion of the IJC hearings Canadian Commissioner Lyall Knott said “we hear you loud and clear – restore our water levels.” The over 1,200 public attendees at the Georgian Bay hearings alone will not be happy to learn the IJC is now telling them to get used to lower water levels. The one thing that is not needed now is more “study”. “We need solutions now,” says Mary Muter, the Chair of the Sierra Club Ontario’s Great Lakes Section.

“We expect the recent numbers to get worse, compounding the effects,” says Dr. Pat Chow-Fraser, Director of Life Sciences at McMaster University, who monitors the damage to the ecosystem. “Lack of snow and ice means more evaporation in winter, and even lower water levels next spring. The Michigan/Huron/Georgian Bay ecosystem is being affected most profoundly.”

A viable solution to the water loss was submitted to the IJC by the Sierra Club, a national environmental organization, in the summer of 2012. It proposed submerged sills, or water ‘speed bumps’, in the St. Clair River, which would slow down the water flow and allow the 

Michigan/Huron/Georgian Bay levels to rise gradually over time – and allow wetlands to flood again, fish to be able to get into rivers to spawn again. These sills are based on a design agreed upon by both Canada and the US in 1962, and their shared cost over several years would be an estimated $200-million (CDN) to install. This price tag is a bargain compared to the cost of doing nothing except to keep dredging and blasting to maintain access. Local stakeholders are watching the frightful scene of billions of dollars being lost due to lightly loaded cargo ships, dried up harbours, marinas and wetlands, a steady decline in recreational fishing, and continued algal blooms.

“At these numbers, it would take years of consistent rain to naturally improve the situation.” says Roger Gauthier, a retired hydrologist of the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) “Continued dredging and blasting on Michigan/Huron/Georgian Bay can only do so much. We cannot continue to spend billions of dollars when there is a viable economically and environmentally responsible solution. Both our countries agreed to compensation and it is high time the terms of that agreement were now met.”

“The cost of doing nothing now is in the billions – and increased ecosystem damage” says Mary Muter. “Water levels can be restored responsibly by gradually installing sills at the head of the St. Clair River to meet the terms of the 1956 bi-national agreement as a condition of dredging the St. Clair River for the St. Lawrence Seaway Project. It’s time for governments to work together to finish the job, before we have further disasters.”

For more information, please visit www.restoreourwater.com where there is background information on this crisis.

By Jim Lynch The Detroit News Feb 1 2012 

The water levels of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron set a record for the lowest mean average for any month in history.

The lakes, which sit at the same level, previously broke the low-water mark for December and, despite what may have seemed like a wintry, wet January in Metro Detroit, the month is ending in territory not seen before.

Through Jan. 31, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials pegged the monthly mean water level at 576.02 feet above sea level. Previously, the all-time lowest monthly mean came in March 1964 — a month that produced a mean water level of 576.05 feet.

Gov. Rick Snyder next week is expected to announce emergency action  to help dredge harbors in Michigan because the state counts on tourism and other industries that require access to the lakes.

Shorelines are extending, canals are getting dangerously dry and access to the shore is literally drying up for some residents.

Meantime, what’s happening in Lake Michigan and Lake Huron could have longer-range impacts on the other downstream lakes. Each of the Great Lakes currently sits far below its long-term average. Years of drought-like conditions in much of the region were exacerbated when last year’s winter produced little snow  and the spring season produced little rain.

The snow and ice that accumulate in the upper Great Lakes during the late fall and winter , particularly in and around Lake Superior, create the runoff that dictates how high or low the levels will sink during the year.

By Peter S. Green Bloomberg Jan 31, 2013

The headlines were alarming: “Drought Could Reverse Flow of Chicago River,” hailed the website of WLS-TV, the local ABC News affiliate. “Ongoing Drought Could Send the Chicago River Flowing in Reverse,” read Smithsonian magazine’s normally sedate web pages. 

It turns out, a backwards flow may be the least of the river’s concerns.  

Here’s the scenario: the worst U.S. drought since the 1930s is lowering the level of Lake Michigan, and if it drops another 6 inches or so this winter, it could fall below the level of the Chicago River. That means the dirty waters of the Chicago River, which were diverted 100 years ago to preserving the relatively pristine lake, would be sucked backwards. 

In practice, three sets of locks that divide the river from the lake would only allow a relatively small amount of river water to leak back into the lake when the locks are opened to ships, says Margaret Frisbie, executive director of Friends of the Chicago River. It’s roughly the equivalent of putting a thimbleful of dirty water into a bathtub. 

The bigger concern is that if the flow from the lake stops, so too does the flow of the Chicago River. The lake water that currently flushes the Chicago River and its burden of treated and untreated sewage through the Des Plaines and Illinois rivers into the Mississippi would stop flowing, temporarily transforming swaths of the Chicago River into a lifeless, de-oxygenated bog. 

The future of the river’s health is now in question, with the lake at its lowest point since accurate record keeping began.

“If you live around lot of water you don’t think of it as a precious resource,” says David St. Pierre, executive director of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, the city’s sewage utility. “Conservation is a conversation that’s just started to happen in the Chicago region.”

The river spilling backwards into the lake wouldn’t be unprecedented. About once a year, heavy rains threaten to push the river over its banks and the locks are opened, reversing the river’s flow for a day or less, with little ill effect, Fribsie says. She notes that water treatment plants have made the river far cleaner today than it was just two decades ago. 

The Great Lakes usually rise about a foot to 14 inches from snowmelt and runoff every spring. Last year, Lake Michigan rose only 4 inches. By last month, Lake Michigan and Lake Huron above it were 28 inches below the long-term average. 

Waterways made Chicago. Then Chicago remade its waterways. Engineers reversed the Chicago River a century ago to use the lake’s water to refresh the waterway. The future of the river’s health is now in question, with the lake at its lowest point since accurate record keeping began in 1918.

“There’s more evaporation, less precipitation falling on the lakes and less runoff making it to the lakes,” says Keith Kompoltowicz, chief of watershed hydrology for the Great Lakes with Army Corps of Engineers in Detroit. Just how permanent the shifts are is hard to know, he says. “We don’t even 100 years of data yet so it’s impossible to determine if there are in fact cycles of low water and high water.”

Like so many of the systemic challenges we face these days — in financial markets, in public health, with climate change — what happens to the short-term flow of the Chicago River over the next couple months may be just a shadow of the elevated risks we’re courting over the next couple of decades. 

“It’s a micro-story in a much larger problem of what we are doing to the environment,” says Frisbie. “One of the U.S.’s great water resources is vanishing.”