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MPC Roundtable — Immeasurable Loss: Modernizing Lake Michigan Water Use

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:54:00 -0500

During every moment of every day, northeastern Illinois is losing Lake Michigan water – and with it, the money rate payers contributed to pumping, treating and distributing this water. Yet while we know our region is losing vast sums of Lake Michigan water, and we know this inefficiency is costing us money, we do not have a clear picture of how much water or how much money we are wasting. The best available data suggest the problem is enormous – approximately 490 million gallons a week, enough water to fill more than one Willis Tower. However, the way Illinois grants Lake Michigan water permits does not capture data that identify the causes of loss and solutions to prevent it. That’s just one reason why the Ill. Dept. of Natural Resources (IDNR) has proposed changing the permit process.

At this roundtable, MPC releases our paper Immeasurable Loss: Modernizing Lake Michigan Water Use, which supports IDNR’s proposals and makes further recommendations for more efficient water use. The paper and the discussion provide up-to-date information on IDNR’s proposals and an opportunity for frank discussion.

Panelists:

Dan Injerd, Chief, Lake Michigan Management Section, Ill. Dept. of Natural Resources Michael Smyth, Sr. Manager of Field Services and Production, Illinois American Water Mike Ramsay, Public Works Supervisor, Village of Westmont Josh Ellis, Program Director, Metropolitan Planning Council.

Recorded live Tuesday, May 7, 2013 at the Metropolitan Planning Council.

A push to stop wasting Lake Michigan water

Tue, 07 May 2013 07:46:00 -0500

The Illinois Department of Natural Resources has proposed an update to the rules for diverting water from Lake Michigan. Northeast Illinois takes hundreds of millions of gallons of water out of the lake daily for municipal use and for diversion into the Chicago area waterway system, but a great deal of the diverted water actually escapes through leaky pipes.

“We waste a lot of money pumping, treating, distributing water that never gets sold,” said Josh Ellis of the non-profit Metropolitan Planning Council.

Ellis estimates that as much as 70 million gallons a day are lost to leaks in aging infrastructure across the region. That’s the equivalent of a Willis Tower full of water every few days, a loss that may not be sustainable as the regional population grows or new municipalities in northeast Illinois move to using Lake Michigan water.

“The time to start thinking and figuring out what needs to be done is now,” said Daniel Injerd, the chief of Lake Michigan management for IDNR. “We need, as an agency, to try to send a stronger message to communities to say it’s really time to start looking at water loss.”

IDNR is in charge of the permits for all Illinois entities who get water out of Lake Michigan, including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, and for the first time since 1980, the agency is proposing a significant change to the permitting policy. Rather than allowing a certain amount of leakage based on the age of the pipes in a village, town, or city, the new permitting process would require municipalities to account for all their water -- or submit a detailed plan for how to update aging infrastructure. Injerd says more than half of the 215 agencies that now have water allocation permits would be in violation of the leakage limits under the new rule.

The revised water diversion rule also includes more strict limitations on sprinkler use and requirements for water-efficient plumbing in new construction. Finally, the proposed documents suggests, but does not require, that municipalities adjust the price of water to reflect the real cost of moving and treating water and of upgrading water infrastructure.

Ellis thinks the proposed changes should go even further.

“Right now most water rate systems don’t generate enough revenue to cover the full costs of providing water services,” said Ellis. “We’re paying for the pipes, the pumps, the chemicals, the electricity...we feel that IDNR, through its permit conditions can prompt more municipalities to develop rate systems that generate enough revenue to pay for these things.”

Short of raising prices or pulling from other revenue sources, right now municipalities have to seek out state loans to support infrastructure upgrades.

But Injerd says IDNR is not planning to impose requirements on water pricing.

“Probably most of our permittees think that’s not an area we need to delve into,” said Injerd. “It’s really not our role as a state agency to set water rates. But I have no problem recommending that communities develop a water rate that represents the true cost of providing a water supply.”

A 1967 Supreme Court decision limited Illinois’ water diversion from the lake, and it’s the role of the DNR to see that what the state pulls out doesn’t exceed that limit. A full quarter of the water diverted by Illinois is stormwater runoff that would have been returned to Lake Michigan via the waterways before the Chicago River was engineered to flow out of the lake in 1900.

Public comment on the proposed water allocation rule change is open through the end of May, and the Metropolitan Planning Council will be holding an event Tuesday May 8 to discuss Lake Michigan water loss.

Lewis Wallace is a Pritzker Journalism Fellow at WBEZ. Follow him @lewispants.

As Emanuel announces new flood control project, some say plans need to adapt for climate change

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 08:45:00 -0500

As neighborhoods from Albany Park to South Shore work to wring out water-damaged possessions and clear up flood debris, Chicago area water managers say they’re doing what they can to control flooding. But some also say climate change could make the task more difficult in the future.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced plans Sunday to construct a huge new tunnel at a cost of $45 to $55 million to help reduce flooding in the Albany Park area, which also experienced a serious flood in 2008. Speaking on the issue Monday, the mayor also noted that Albany Park has “been affected by once-in-a-century flooding that happened twice in five years.”

Donald Wuebbles, professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois, has also noticed unusually frequent extremes in Chicago’s weather.

“The projections are that we will see even more precipitation coming as larger events in the future,” Wuebbles said. He’s been writing and speaking for years about the effects of climate change on weather, and for years has been warning Chicagoans about more frequent catastrophic storms to come due to warming atmospheric temperatures.

David St. Pierre, Executive Director of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District says as far as he’s concerned, that reality is already here.

“We’re seeing a lot more severe events than we saw ten years ago, five years ago,” St. Pierre said.

He said tunnels like the one proposed by the city and the MWRD’s Deep Tunnel project can address stormwater issues to a limited extent, but even the biggest tunnel will not be able to handle the new normal. St. Pierre thinks the region also needs to look at solutions that keep water completely out of an overwhelmed sewer system.

Take, for instance, green infrastructure proposals that have been around for a while. In 2003, then-Mayor Richard Daley’s office released a document on best stormwater management practices including green roofs and permeable pavement. But the issue is a regional one, and ideas that would make green infrastructure a requirement have been slower to take shape.

The City of Chicago’s stormwater ordinance passed in 2007 regulates runoff from new developments and redevelopment projects above a certain size, suggesting on-site retention systems and permeable pavement among the management options. But its scope has been limited so far. And the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District drafted a Watershed Management Ordinance in 2009 that includes requirements for wetland protection and maintenance of permeable surfaces in new developments; it could come up for a vote this year. Meantime, the Chicago Department of Transportation is working on a draft of its own “Sustainable Urban Infrastructure Guidelines” that would mandate careful control of runoff in all new city infrastructure. Eventually, these ideas would form a patchwork of regulations to prevent flooding.

But none of these options retroactively require homes or businesses to control runoff into the city’s sewers, a limitation that could become increasingly significant with each new season of huge storms. In the meantime, city officials are asking residents who want to join neighborhood-wide mitigation programs to look into its Basement Flooding Partnership.

Correction: The audio version of this story incorrectly referred to Donald Wuebbles as John Wuebbles.

Soil moisture back to normal, now rain hampering Illinois farmers

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:19:00 -0500

It’s sprouting time across the state and farmers are breathing a sigh of relief as soil moisture in Illinois returns to normal after a year of uncertainty. Spring of 2012 was marked by arid, warm weather that led into one of the hottest summers on record and a drought that continued through the winter. Illinois farmers’ concerns about planting conditions for the spring planting season have scarcely subsided, but the forecast is better than it has been for a long time.

“Right now, we are pretty much seeing normal levels across the state, which is a lot better than what we were seeing at this time last year,” said Jennie Atkins of the Illinois State Water Survey, which monitors soil moisture daily. Above-average precipitation in January and February made up for a middling fall, and stormy weather this week can’t hurt moisture, either.

“After last year, soil moisture is a very precious commodity in the state,” said John Hawkins of the Illinois Farm Bureau.

But there’s also a downside to the influx of rain. There were flood warnings and severe storms in parts of Illinois Tuesday, and now many farmers have to wait for warmer, drier weather to plant.

“When you have a lot of rain and flood it definitely affects the larger crop productions,” said Toni Anderson, the organizer of Sacred Keepers Sustainability Garden in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. “I don’t necessarily have to worry about that in the city because we need every drop we can get.”

She says the sandy soil on Martin Luther King Avenue on Chicago’s south side drains easily, and the garden’s focus on native species means they can tolerate weather extremes. But given concerns about climate change, she’s not necessarily jumping for joy about yet another swing of the weather pendulum.

“It’s refreshing and scary all at the same time,” Anderson said.

Cleaning up Chicago’s wide, romantic beaches

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 08:30:00 -0500

Volunteers for an Adopt-A-Beach program are headed to Chicago-area beaches to clean up trash and debris starting this weekend.

And those beaches are bigger than usual this year due to record-low water levels over the winter. After hitting an all-time low in January, Lake Michigan is creeping back up, but U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projections show the lake could still dip below its 1965 low water records without a lot of rain.

That said, it’s been raining a decent amount this week, which has a different potential consequence for beach sweepers: combined sewer overflow and runoff can mean more trash along the shoreline.

Louise Kulaga, an eighth-grade science teacher at Gurrie Middle School in LaGrange, is taking a group of middle-schoolers to clean up 12th Street Beach and North Avenue Beach this spring. Cleanups involve picking up trash, recycling, conducting basic sampling and testing for bacteria in the water. Shallow waters along the shore could lead to higher bacteria counts this summer.

Kulaga says the low water means a wider beach, but not necessarily more trash. That depends on weather conditions, and how recently there’s been a beach party. In past years, she and her students have already seen a lot.

“There’s always some little bit of drug paraphernalia here and there,” she said. “And diapers. The back seats of a car. A totem pole, a piece of a totem pole.”

But that’s not even the best of it. A couple years ago they found a green wine bottle with a message in it. Kulaga convinced the principal, who was out with the group, to be the one to read the message to the kids. She was a little worried about what it might say. But it turned out to be rated PG, PG-13 at worst.

“It was a little dramatic, it was about someone breaking up with a boyfriend or a girlfriend, we couldn’t quite tell,” she said. “And they were purging their feelings into Lake Michigan.”

Teams of volunteers will start combing Chicago’s wide, romantic beaches this weekend; anyone interested can join in public cleanups through the Great Lakes Alliance.

Lewis Wallace is a Pritzker Journalism Fellow at WBEZ. Follow him @lewispants.

Durbin fired up over coal-fired ferry

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 17:41:00 -0500

Illinois U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin is crying foul over a proposal by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that would allow a famous coal-fired ferry to keep running.

The 60-year-old S.S. Badger takes tourists back and forth across Lake Michigan a few hours north of Chicago. It’s also the only remaining ferry in the country that runs on coal.

“Every time that filthy scow goes across Lake Michigan, it dumps two tons of coal ash into our lake,” said Durbin Monday.

The EPA order, which must be approved by a court in Grand Rapids, would require the Badger to stop putting ash in the lake by the end of 2014. The EPA issued the consent decree in lieu of responding to a 2012 permit renewal request by the S.S. Badger, and the decree would charge the Lake Michigan Carferry Service $25,000 for violation of clean water standards in 2012.

“This consent decree offers the fastest and most certain path available to EPA to stop the discharge of coal ash from the Badger into Lake Michigan,” said EPA Region 5 Administrator Susan Hedman. “The enforcement agreement reduces the discharge of coal ash more quickly and with greater oversight than would occur during the appeal of a decision to issue or deny a permit – a process that often takes several years."

But Senator Durbin says the ship’s owners should have already fixed the problem.

“For ten years they’ve promised to clean it up, put in a diesel engine at least,” he said. “I am fed up with it."

The owners of the Badger declined to comment.

A press release says the ship will continue burning coal, but dispose of the ash on land through a “sophisticated ash retention system,” the details of which remain unknown.

—Lewis Wallace is a WBEZ Pritzker Fellow. Follow him @lewispants.

Flooding in a drought year

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:15:00 -0500

After a frighteningly dry summer, record-low lake levels over the winter and a near shut-down of the Mississippi river due to low waters, it’s flood season. This week there were flood warnings in Lake County to the north of Chicago and in parts of the Illinois River to the west, and numerous rivers and streams hit flood or near-flood levels near the Quad Cities, Cairo and St. Louis.

The sudden flooding may be hard to absorb, but it’s a fact of living in a floodplain state. Illinois’ low lands and abundant rivers mean many parts of the state are liable to flood on a yearly basis, and the Chicago area’s history is marked by almost countless catastrophic floods.

So, is anything special about this year’s flood warnings? Well, yes and no.

“Typically, our flood season for the larger rivers is in the early spring,” said Bill Morris, a hydrologist at the National Weather Service. But this year, he said, areas north of Chicago had a frost depth down to ten inches during the melt and precipitation. “So when we had additional rainfall...that water basically hit a solid surface and just started running off into the streams.”

Morris said the runoff has the added consequence of preventing much-needed water from absorbing into parched, drought-stricken soil. To make a deeper dent in the drought we’ll need rain throughout the spring.

Flood or near-flood conditions have been even more widespread closer to St. Louis, but Mike Petersen of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers St. Louis District agrees that it’s not unusual.

“I think what’s really alarming for folks is to see how quickly the river came up this year,” Petersen said.

In one day in the St. Louis area he saw the Mississippi rise ten feet due to a combination of increased water from snow melt in the north, and precipitation in the watershed. But rain doesn’t necessarily mean an end to drought.

“I think we are relieved to have some water in the river, but...we may end up facing low water conditions seeing as we’ve gone into this year with less water in the system than we started last year,” Petersen said.

Flood trouble

Flooding in the greater Chicago area is a lot more complicated than what you might imagine when you hear about a flooded river; in that TV-ready scenario, the river overflows, and water creeps into streets and front yards.

But a lot of the flooding that strikes Chicago is flash flooding or sewer backups – the result of water filling up Chicago’s notorious combined sewer system. Dramatic summertime floods afflicted multiple Chicago neighborhoods in recent summers when sudden rains overflowed the city’s drainage system.

Beverly native Kathy Parker has lived in West Morgan Park on the far South Side for six years. In spring of 2011 her house flooded during a downpour, and her finished basement filled with several feet of sewer water. She cleaned for nearly two days straight, threw out a bunch of personal possessions, and thought she’d seen the worst of it. A month later, her basement filled up again.

She described a situation that may be grossly familiar to many Chicagoans.

“This time it was even worse, water just shooting like a fountain out of the drain, and everything imaginable and nasty in there,” Parker said.

She lost her my parents’ wedding albums in the flood. Her block was lined with dumpsters where neighbors tossed carpets, flooring and personal items.

Darlene Crawford of Calumet Heights tells a similar story. She’s lived on the Southeast Side for over 40 years with her family and has no desire to leave behind the house she bought shortly after marrying her husband.

“It’s a close-knit community and most of us have lived here, raised our children and now our grandchildren,” she said, “and a lot of our kids have moved back into this area.”

But not long after they moved into the house, their basement flooded for the first time. She says it has since flooded at least twenty times, not including instances of minor leaks.

“We didn’t know to ask, or to have a home inspection [before moving in],” she said.

But it wasn’t long before they realized, as Kathy Parker had, that the problem was community-wide.

“We found out that our house wasn’t the only house experiencing this type of problem. After a rain we would see the alleys just littered with household items,” Crawford said.

Crawford eventually came together with her neighbors to demand help from the city and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD), but she says most of the solutions she and her neighbors have adopted are individual: flood insurance, remodeling, changing how they use their basements for storage and installing individual drainage systems for homes.

“Nobody does anything about it”

Someone once said everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

Not so in the metro Chicago area. Cities and counties have no choice but to act on flooding; the amount of water that melts or precipitates in sudden bursts in an average Chicago spring or summer is too much to ignore.

Chicago’s faced with a problem related to the nature of its expansive and world-famous sewer system. The system, originally constructed in the 1800s, is what’s known as a combined sewer system: raw sewage and rainwater drain into the same pipes. Once upon a time, that drainage headed to the lake; now most of it goes through some treatment and separation, and gets deposited into waterways connected to the Illinois and Chicago Rivers. But during a storm, the whole system can become quickly overwhelmed, and when it overflows, the overflow (politely called a Combined Sewer Overflow or CSO by the MWRD) is a mix of rain water and raw sewage.

The MWRD has been working since the 1970s on what’s called the “Deep Tunnel” project or TARP (Tunnel and Reservoir Plan) that involves constructing a humongous system of tunnels, some as wide as 33 feet, connected to reservoirs designed to store overflow water. The 109 miles of underground tunnels are complete, but the last of the reservoirs won’t be complete until 2029. MWRD says the construction of the TARP has reduced the numbers of days with combined sewer overflows from 100 per year to 50 per year on average.

But Chicago floods may also be addressed by community-based and development solutions.

“It’s a collective problem, rather than just an individual property problem,” said Harriet Festing, director of the water program at the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT).

CNT is researching the prevalence and cost of flooding in the Chicago area by gathering insurance claim data and personal stories about flooding experiences.

“Forty-two percent of Cook County is impervious...that’s our parking lots, our streets, our sidewalks. And that’s just volumes of rain running off those areas and into our backyards and our basements,” Festing said.

As long as that volume of runoff has nowhere to go, using personal funds to build a more waterproof basement or better drainage in your own backyard is tantamount to swimming upstream in the Calumet River (and you don’t want to do that).

According to Festing, development that takes water runoff into account can go a long way in preventing increased flood risk in urban areas; rain barrels, rain gardens and small-scale projects in individual homes can also make a difference if they’re installed across an entire neighborhood.

MWRD has been taking public comments on a proposed watershed management ordinance since 2009, and plans to release a complete draft this spring. If passed, the ordinance would authorize a more proactive district-wide approach to new development that would better absorb storm water and protect people from flooding.

Not flooded out yet? WBEZ’s Chris Bentley has more on the links between flooding and climate change.

And you can get tips from the federal government and from the City of Chicago on how to deal with flooding in your area.

Follow Lewis Wallace on Twitter.

Chicago-area waterways slated for a clean-up

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 15:09:00 -0600

Asked whether people might one day go for a swim in Chicago's Little Calumet River, environmental advocate Tom Shepherd snorted.

“When I was a kid we used to jump in there,” he said. “And we didn’t know anything about what kind of dangers were lurking in there but we did nevertheless, and we came out all black and grimy.”

Shepherd, who works with the Southeast Environmental Task Force, now knows as well as anyone that the Calumet waterways have been severely polluted for over a century by a potent mix of toxic run-off from steel mills and sewage from the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD) of the greater Chicago area. To this day, water flows from MWRD plants into the river without being disinfected to federal standards. An innocent kayaker who splashes water in her own face may be hit with a faceful of fecal bacteria.

“We have been advocating for disinfection for a long time,” Shepherd said.

That disinfecting treatment is finally in sight. Illinois Governor Pat Quinn announced Monday that the state is giving $250 million in loans to the MWRD to help clean up Chicago-area waterways and replace aging infrastructure. More than half of the money will go to build facilities at the Calumet and O’Brien treatment plants that take dangerous bacteria out of wastewater before it hits the Chicago or Calumet Rivers. Some of the funded projects will also help keep sewers from overflowing, which sends raw sewage into the waterways with relative frequency.

Quinn also touted the creation of 2,000 unionized jobs with the low-interest loans, which are a part of the Illinois Clean Water Initiative.

The shift towards cleaner rivers hasn’t come easy. For years the publicly-elected MWRD commission fought for the right to not clean up Chicago’s waterways. After a prolonged legal struggle, in 2011 the MWRD announced it had reached an agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to start better managing polluted storm runoff and enforcing EPA standards for water it releases from its plants. At that time the Chicago Tribune reported that between 60 and 100 percent of the water in the Chicago River on a given day originated in a wastewater treatment plant and came out only partially treated. The numbers in the Little Calumet, Chicago’s branch of the Calumet River, are similar.

Shepherd said he doesn’t see swimmers getting in the Little Calumet any time soon, but boaters are already coming back.

“It’s pretty exciting. This summer we’re doing more paddling on the river, we’re bringing recreation, we have a great trail that’s being developed,” he said.

With Governor Quinn’s support, in 2011 the Southeast Environmental Task Force was involved with declaring a large area of heavily polluted wetlands near Lake Calumet a future wildlife reserve. At a press conference Monday, Quinn referenced the positive effects the water clean-up will have on that project, called the Millenium Reserve.

“You have eagles who actually live here. How many urban areas in the whole United States have eagles?” Quinn said. “It’ll be the largest conservation area in any urban environment in the whole United States, but in order to make it worthwhile, you’ve gotta have clean water.”

Shepherd, who has seen the eagles nesting in the south side wetlands, was hopeful about the clean-up efforts, but a little more reserved than Quinn.

“Someday we may be able to fish out there,” he said.

What’s causing the record-low levels in Lake Michigan?

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 15:32:00 -0600

Earlier this month WBEZ reported that Lake Michigan water levels are at a record low. Today the lake levels are still dropping, putting the livelihoods of shippers, boaters and whole coastal towns at risk.

That news is not getting old, either: As of Jan. 28, the lake was two inches below the previous record set in 1965 (down from just one inch in early January). It was more than five feet below the record high of 1987. A person of an average height can stand on dry land today in spots where 26 years ago she would have been up to her neck in water.

A few commenters on this story asked about the reasons for today’s low levels in Lake Michigan. The short answer is that there is no short-term answer. Lake levels are subject to long-term fluctuations caused by weather and precipitation patterns.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers tests the lake levels in all five Great Lakes daily, and they have data on lake levels going back to 1860. That data shows relatively consistent fluctuations of several feet of depth, usually over the space of a decade or more. In one instance, the water in Lake Michigan went up three whole feet in only three years (1926-1929). Between 1965 and 1987, the levels went up five feet. Now they’re back down, but our environmental concerns are drastically different than they were fifty years ago. As Greg Buckley, the City Manager of Two Rivers, Wis. put it, “In ‘64 nobody talked about climate change.”

The big picture

The Great Lakes shapes and sizes have been in flux since the lakes were formed over 10,000 years ago by receding glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. As recently as 9,000 years ago, what is now Lake Michigan covered a much larger surface area, and drained out to the Mississippi River system through outlets to the south. What is now Chicago was completely submerged.

It took another five millenia for the waters to recede to more or less their current level, by which point the St. Lawrence River far to the east had become the lakes’ main outlet. Simultaneously, the land surrounding the newly-formed glacial lakes began to rebound; without the weight of the massive glaciers pushing it down, the Great Lakes basin landforms rise on their own at a rate of about three inches every hundred years. And according to the Great Lakes Information Network, sometime in the last 10,000 years the lakes were a full five feet higher than any levels recorded by the U.S. government.

Glacial change is powerful - but it’s slow. Neither a few inches per century of naturally rising lands nor five feet of lake level loss in 10,000 years compares to Lake Michigan’s recent decline of five feet over less than 50 years.

Bottled water is chump change

Some have suggested that bottled water and municipal water use are draining the lakes.

“Water withdrawals for drinking water, for bottled water, and for municipal use… are unlikely to be a significant factor in lowering lake levels,” said Dr. David Allan, a professor in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of Michigan (and co-creator of a new Great Lakes mapping project). “If you look at it from a water budget perspective, inputs and outputs, the inputs in the form of precipitation and runoff, and the outputs in terms of evaporation and flow...those values just dwarf the water use of human activity. They’re just a small fraction of the total water budget.”

Many cities and towns that draw water from Lake Michigan end up returning that water, used and semi-sanitized, to the same water basin. And although a controversial legal loophole allows Great Lakes water to be bottled and sold, the lake water that’s disappearing to China enclosed in Nestle company plastic is a fraction of Chicago’s daily use alone. It’s not enough to drain the lake by a long shot.

But bottling and some municipal water uses are a net loss to the lake. Illinois is unique in that on the small Illinois slice of the coast, water is pumped out of Lake Michigan to give Chicago and surrounding suburbs showers, fire hydrants and delicious drinking water – but it doesn’t return. After it’s used once, that water drains out into the Chicago River system.

The Chicago River has a special relationship to Chicagoans’ consumption habits. It used to flow into Lake Michigan and return Chicago’s runoff and sewage. But since 1900, when Chicagoans decided they didn’t want to drink their own sewage, it’s been flowing the other way, out into the Mississippi River system. Even though a federal court decision keeps a cap on Illinois’ water diversion, nearly 2 billion gallons a day leave Lake Michigan for a single use in the Chicago area and never trickle back down.

Despite that gargantuan-sounding number, Allan says the impact on overall water levels is tiny. After all, we’re talking about 4 percent of the entire world’s surface fresh water in Lake Michigan alone. That’s 1,180 cubic miles of water. A cubic mile of water holds more than a trillion gallons.

So when it comes to drinking water, the concern for northeastern Illinois is not so much that the lake will run out, but that Illinoisans could hit that federal cap as soon as the year 2030. That means Illinois is going to have to limit use, keep the groundwater in the area clean enough to drink, or renegotiate the deal.

Of course, scientists will continue to disagree on how urgently coastal communities need to reduce their diversions.

What we think we know

There are a few factors most researchers can agree are affecting lake levels.

1. Precipitation. The lake’s major sources of water replenishment are rivers and streams, runoff, and rain directly over the lake. The water basin is the whole area that drains into that lake, and the area of the Great Lakes water basin is about 295,200 square miles. Last year’s massive drought meant reduced precipitation in many parts of the basin. And when water evaporates from Lake Michigan, the movement of weather systems generally dictates that it comes back down further to the East, raining on Ohio or New York. And of course, no water system is contained: at the far eastern end of the Great Lakes basin, water flows out of Lake Ontario, into the St. Lawrence River, and towards the Atlantic. Moisture that leaves here headed east is unlikely to make a quick return.

2. Surface temperature. The sun has an upper hand on any human attempts to control or extract water from the lake. Evaporation across the lake’s broad surface is the most reliable cause of water loss. And after the hottest year ever in 2012, we’re now experiencing the second consecutive warm winter in the region. Those combined factors mean the lake’s surface temperature stays a little warmer, and when the sun shines down, the water disappears even more rapidly than usual. Nearly a foot of the water lost to Lake Michigan disappeared in the hot spell between 2011-2012.

3. Ice cover. It’s probably obvious that ice cover on the lakes is the inverse of warm surface temperatures. And through the winter months it can serve as a protective layer against evaporation. Great Lakes ice cover has declined 71 percent since 1973 due to rising temperatures.

4. Dredging in the St. Clair River. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says Chicago’s perpetual diversion of water out of the system via the Chicago River is more than offset by other diversions into the Great Lakes basin from the north. But they concur with researchers who say that further east, the deepening of the St. Clair River accounts for over a foot of permanent loss in Lakes Michigan and Huron. The St. Clair, which connects Lake Huron with Lake St. Clair near Detroit, has been dredged to keep shipping channels open since the mid-1800s. Lakes Erie and Ontario, which receive the flow diverted through the St. Clair, are not facing the same low water crisis.

Climate change, right?

Is climate change causing the water to disappear? As Allan puts it, “the answer is a decisive maybe.”

Looking back at the loss of five feet of water over the last thirty years, he said, “you’d like to be able to say what fraction of that drop is due to climate change. And I don’t know how one would do that.”

But climate is the major factor in changing lake levels, so even if cause is immeasurable, a correlation between climate change and low water is hardly a stretch. Global temperatures are rising, the Great Lakes region is warming, the lakes are heating up, which means more evaporation and less ice cover.

“There’s a whole argument that says falling lake levels are consistent with climate change,” Allan said. “What I don’t think we have the ability to do at the present time is say, ‘our models tell us that lake levels should drop by x amount.’”

The return of the glaciers

What’s left of the ancient glaciers is now melting away, but this time the runoff isn’t flowing into inland freshwater lakes. So as lake levels go down, the salty seas are rising. As in the lakes, a process that might have happened naturally over many thousands of years has been accelerating exponentially in recent decades.

A saltwater invasion threatens coastal crops and raises the likelihood of full-scale destruction of coastal communities by storms and flooding. Plus, rising sea waters threaten fresh-water aquifers along the ocean coasts, which makes the preservation of clean potable water like the Great Lakes all the more pressing.

A master index of Great Lakes stressors

Dr. Allan and a team of researchers at the Great Lakes Environmental Assessment and Mapping Project (GLEAM) recently launched a website that breaks down environmental stressors including temperature change, ice cover, and loss of precipitation into a series of individual maps and a total “stress index”. Check out this video for a guide to how to use the site.

“I would caution people that the whole mapping tool is designed to be something of a 10,000 foot look at the Great Lakes,” he said. “The data get fuzzier the more you zoom in. But you can certainly get a broad picture.”

The stress index across most of Lake Michigan’s coast on the GLEAM map is very high. For example, those wide beaches Chicagoans have enjoyed in recent summers also mean shallower water just off the coasts, which can cause a host of problems including increased presence of dangerous bacteria. So much for a summer of safe Lake Michigan swimming. Check out the site for more information, but before you go, watch our instructional guide.

What happens if the water in Lake Michigan keeps disappearing?

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 13:20:00 -0600

Just how bad are low water levels in Lake Michigan? Well, consider this holiday tale.

Each December in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, a guy in a Santa suit sets out to deliver a boat load of Christmas trees to nearby Manitowoc. But this year, Santa Claus almost didn’t make it out of town.

"Santa Claus had to get on top of the boat because he couldn’t get inside the boat, cause it was too low so they had to put him on the roof," says Michael LeClair, the white-haired owner of Susie Q's, the town's main commercial fishery.

"He could walk right off the top of the dock right onto the top of the boat, that’s how low the water is...25 trees in the boat and he was sitting on top of the pilot house," LeClair added. "That’s how he got on and off. It’s just a problem for everything and everyone."

And it seems to be a problem nearly everywhere along Lake Michigan.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reported water levels in Lakes Michigan and Huron hit record lows in December, at nearly two and a half feet below average. Army Corps projections for lake levels have been dire since September, when it became clear that a relatively warm, dry fall and winter would not provide relief from a long drought and one of the the hottest summers ever.

Now the water is an inch below its record low for this time of year in 1964, and continues to drop. Shippers, fishermen, and small-town tourist harbors say federal help with digging out channels and repairing infrastructure could keep the low water problem from becoming a crisis.

At Michael LeClair’s sizeable fishing operation, he says the low water has started to hurt his business. Behind the Susie Q’s smokehouse, LeClair keeps stacks of large gray plastic bins his fishermen have to lower down from the dock with ropes, fill with smelt, and lift back up.

“It’s about three times the work of what it usually is,” said LeClair. He also worries that the shallow channel will freeze over entirely this winter, making it impossible to send his boats out for smelt at all. But he’s resigned to do what’s needed; this is his grandfather’s company, and it's one of the town’s biggest employers.

“All we can do is wait. Hope things change.”

Great Lakes, shrinking harbors

“All you have to do is go up and down the coast lines and see it,” said Chuck May of the Great Lakes Small Harbors Coalition. “You see boats that haven’t been able to get out yet this year, we’ve got on this lake we’ve got a pontoon boat sitting at the end of its 200 foot or so dock setting on bare dry land, there isn’t any water within at least 30 feet of the boat.”

May retired to Portage Lake in the small Michigan town of Onekama. When the water dropped nearly a foot from the previous year’s levels, May saw parts of the lake turn into mud flats. In Onekama, as in countless other harbors, the water is so low that wooden pilings are exposed and deteriorating and boats can no longer get in and out of the harbor.

But according to May, it doesn’t have to be that way. The federal government taxes all the cargo that comes in and out of its harbors, purportedly in order to fund harbor maintenance and dredging, which is what keeps channels passable, particularly in low water years. Infrastructure repair is also essential during a time like this, when the wooden bases of 100-year-old seawalls are exposed and crumbling.

But for years now, the federal government has held back much of the money in the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund, which brings in about $1.5 billion a year. May accuses politicians of trying to make a dent in the deficit at the expense of smaller federal harbors like Portage Lake; a tiny fraction of the $750 million in unused funds could solve the city’s problems.

In order to get around the funding dry-up, Great Lakes harbors have routinely sought out earmarks and special appropriations to stay operational. The frugal fiscal cliff environment in Washington is unfavorable to that approach these days. The Army Corps’ detailed list of necessary repairs seems to have an urgent project budgeted for nearly every single Great Lakes harbor, and the vast majority of the projects are unfunded for FY2013. This year only 15 out of 140 federal harbors in the Great Lakes will get dredged.

May founded the Great Lakes Small Harbors Coalition in 2007 to try to pass federal legislation that would require the government to spend all the money in the fund on its harbors. That legislation, known as the RAMP Act, is creeping its way through congressional committees and could come to a vote this year.

The heart of Two Rivers

Back across the lake in Two Rivers, Wis., City Manager Greg Buckley agrees that the need for federal help in small harbors is dire. A wide federal channel is the center of Two Rivers, and it hasn’t been dredged for decades.

“There are areas where there’s only two feet of water,” said Buckley, standing at the meeting point of the city’s two rivers looking out onto the channel. Right now in a kind of DIY-dredging larger fishing boats use their propellers to pick up sand and silt as they go. If the water gets much lower, they could hit rock.

The town of Two Rivers needs its waterways. From the channel’s meeting point with Lake Michigan, a massive brick factory stretches all the way back through town on the riverfront - and it’s almost completely empty. The Hamilton factory opened in the 1800s to make wood type, and later made kitchen appliances and office furniture.

“Our community band was the Hamilton band, our city hall is the reuse of the Hamilton community school,” said Buckley. “It’s eerily quiet now.” The operations of the former Hamilton company, which were bought and sold by various larger companies over the years, have been leaving incrementally for nearly two decades. The last manufacturing jobs associated with Hamilton moved to Mexico in 2011.

“We’ll pick ourselves up from that, something good will ultimately come from it,” said Buckley “and a lot of that relates to the water resources we sit right on top of, assuming we still have water in the lake and water in the rivers.”

Buckley envisions Two Rivers as a tourist destination, with beautiful beaches and quaint harbors to complement the blue collar fishing town. He wants to redevelop the Hamilton building and turn Two Rivers’ beaches and boating opportunities into a draw for potential homeowners. He checks out Illinois license plates when they come through town, hopeful that wealthy Chicagoans will look to Two Rivers for summer homes.

The trouble with dredging

Dredging, or digging up sand and silt from the bottoms of rivers to keep them at set depths, is how the federal government has maintained its waterways since the 1800s. But it’s also part of the reason why Lake Michigan is particularly low these days. Scientists agree that routine dredging of the St. Clair River, which connects Lake Huron to Lake Erie via Lake St. Clair, has permanently lowered average levels in Michigan-Huron by a full foot. Dredging solves immediate problems for shipping, but it does not return water to the lake.

And dredging can have immediate environmental consequences, too. In an industrial place like Indiana Harbor at the southern tip of Lake Michigan, the actual material dredged up is toxic and has to be carefully stored.

Indiana’s not immune

Back down in Indiana Harbor, managers for huge shipping operations agree with the small harbor leaders that the federal government should release all the harbor maintenance funds to the Army Corps to fix up the harbors.

Indiana Harbor will get dredged this year for the first time in 40 years. But freight operators who bring iron ore down from the Upper Peninsula to Indiana’s steel plants say there are already other harbors where their ships are unable to navigate, redirecting freight which is then trucked to where it needs to go. That sort of inefficiency is bad for everyone in the industry.

“If we had another summer like we had this summer, you know, lord help us,” said Dan Cornellie of ArcelorMittal steel.

For every inch of water the lake loses, the ships supplying two large steel plants here have to lighten their loads by hundreds of tons. Right now freighters are coming into the harbor with two and a half feet less draft than just a few years ago, so for every six trips a ship makes, ArcelorMittal pays for a seventh to make up the difference. The result is a pricier bottom line for the thin, high-quality steel used to make everything from refrigerators to coffee machines.

Cornellie has been in the industry for a long time, and he remembers the low lake levels of 1964, but he said this time it doesn’t feel the same.

“Well, in '64 nobody talked about climate change,” he said. “There’s no mystery what’s going on. It’s a question of whether any of those temperature or precipitation trends reverse.”

A future in drought?

2012 was just tallied as the hottest year on record, and U.S. climatologists predict a continued rise in average temperatures in coming years. Precipitation in the Michigan-Huron basin in 2012 was at 87 percent of its long-term average. Although the drought is expected to let up near Lake Michigan, parts of the Midwest will likely stay in severe drought conditions into the coming summer. The Mississippi River is currently barely holding off a shipping shut-down as it nears its own record low south of St. Louis.

The water will likely go back up in spring and summer, as it does every year; late winter is generally the lowest time in the lakes’ yearly cycle. But another summer of extreme heat or drought, and this winter’s woes will seem like kid stuff.

“Maybe we can’t just glibly talk about hey the lakes go up and down and hey what are you gonna do, give it a few years it’ll be back,” said Buckley, back up in Two Rivers. “We’re not keeping up with the infrastructure needs now, if you exacerbate that situation with dropping lake levels, the economic impact long term could be pretty profound. Now whether that’s climate change, whether that’s the fact that we humans have just sat here and observed these things for 150 years and think that’s the norm when maybe it isn’t, well, I don’t know.”