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Great Lakes circle the drain (Milwaukee
JournalSentinal) Fear hung thick in the Niagara Falls mist in June 2001, when the governors and premiers of the Great Lakes states and provinces pooled their collective political capital and pledged to do whatever it takes to keep outsiders from draining the world's largest freshwater resource. The politicians who clustered near the edge of the falls had arrived from all points of the political spectrum, pushed by a public outraged over a Canadian firm's scheme to ship about 156 million gallons of Great Lakes water annually to Asia. The Nova Group plan to haul away pieces of Lake Superior tanker by tanker had already been rejected by that time, but the fear lingered that existing laws may not hold up the next time outsiders in this increasingly thirsty world came calling for the water and regional governments tried to just say no. The Nova Group proved to be a pushover. The next group might push the issue into court. So the governors promised new laws tough enough and clever enough to protect and preserve the glacial gift, which holds 20 percent of the world's fresh surface water. The governors had no way of knowing, but on that day, their nightmare scenario might have been happening at their feet. An Army Corps of Engineers dredging project on the St. Clair River that had been completed four decades earlier had already pulled the plug on the lakes, according to a recent study, sending an average of 845 million gallons of Great Lakes water tumbling over Niagara Falls and out to the Atlantic Ocean. Every day. If the study proves true, this isn't just 1,000 times worse than the Nova Group proposal. This is more than enough water to slake over 100 cities the size of Waukesha. It is, according to the study, enough water to drop levels in both Lake Michigan and Lake Huron by as much as a foot. It is enough water to leave Cameron Davis, executive director of the Lake Michigan Federation, struggling to find a way to describe his reaction to the news. A single word finally escapes. "Shocked."Waukesha County is widely viewed as the front line in a brewing battle over Great Lakes water conservation. But if results of the new study prove true, those who fear for the future of what is arguably the region's premier natural resource might want to shift the focus of their fight 300 miles to the east, to the site of the St. Clair dredging project. Many conservationists have long worried that if the 67,000 residents of the city of Waukesha are allowed to tap Lake Michigan to solve their dwindling water supply problems, it will lead to a water-rush on the five Great Lakes. If the eight Great Lakes governors say yes to Waukesha, the argument goes, how can they say no to the next knock on the door? Waukesha desperately needs a new water supply - the little water that is left is contaminated with high levels of potentially cancer-causing radium - and it would be relatively simple to tap Lake Michigan, which lies less than 20 miles away. But the city's well-known problem is that it sits just beyond the Great Lakes basin dividing line. And as federal law now works, any community outside the basin seeking Great Lakes water must secure unanimous approval from the eight Great Lakes governors, something only two communities - Akron, Ohio, and Pleasant Prairie - have ever been able to do. The new diversion rules that the governors pledged to create in 2001 are still being drafted, and the end product could stiffen long-term protections for the lakes, yet still be loose enough to provide relief to places like the city of Waukesha, which uses an average of about 7 million gallons a day. That sounds like a lot of water. But it is a literal drop in the bucket when you're talking about a series of dredging projects that the engineer behind the study says have already cost an amount of water equal to one quarter the volume of Lake Erie. "It's an astronomical volume," said the Illinois Department of Natural Resource's Dan Injerd, a key member of the governors group drafting the batch of new diversion laws initiated at Niagara Falls known as Annex 2001. "Right now, there is a huge amount of attention focused on the Annex, and not that it is not important, but it almost pales in comparison to this, when you look at the volume," said Mary Muter, a member of Canada's Georgian Bay Association, which funded the St. Clair dredging study. Riverbed erosion Federal engineers have long believed that a 1962 Army Corps of Engineers St. Clair River dredging project, combined with historical dredging in the area, resulted in what was basically a "one-time" approximately 16-inch drop in the long-term average levels of lakes Michigan and Huron, which are actually one body of water connected by the Straits of Mackinac. The reason: expanding the river channel effectively increased the size of the drain hole for the two lakes, and the increased volume of water flowing through the lakes created a permanent dip in their long-term average levels. But the new study argues that the "drain hole" has since been expanding on its own. The theory is that the dredging created a faster-flowing St. Clair River, and that led to the river carving an ever deepening channel in a manner that is "unprecedented, even on a geological time scale," said Rob Nairn, the study's author and an engineer with Baird & Associates Coastal Engineers. The Army Corps dredged a channel to about 30 feet deep in 1962 to open the upper Great Lakes to freighters. Erosion has since doubled that depth in some places, according to the study. And the study says the total drop in the long-term average level of lakes Michigan and Huron is about 30 inches, not 16. Twelve of those inches can be attributed to erosion just since the '62 dredging project. The Army Corps does not deny there might be a problem, but officials say more studies are needed to figure out its exact cause and scope. "There definitely seems to be a change in the way water moves . . . from lakes Huron to Erie," said Scott Thieme, chief of the Corps' Great Lakes office for hydraulics and hydrology. "We do think there is an issue here that we have been watching and looking at for a while, (but) I think it is more complex than what this report tends to address." 'Something alarming' Great Lakes levels, of course, have always fluctuated based on seasonal and annual precipitation levels. Their levels can vary by as much as five feet over a period of decades, but the key here is that the difference in levels between the lakes historically remained about the same. If, for example, lakes Michigan and Huron go down 12 inches, so should levels in Lake Erie. But the Baird study, which compares the level of lakes Michigan and Huron to the level of Lake Erie over the last three decades, shows that has not been happening. The report shows that the difference in levels between the lakes, historically about 8 feet, has been shrinking. Some argue that a potential explanation is not necessarily increased outflow from lakes Huron and Michigan but could be that the Lake Erie basin may be receiving more precipitation, which could cause an increase in Lake Erie's level but not Huron-Michigan. Another explanation might be that the earth's crust continues to rebound from the last glacier, and the crust under the Michigan-Huron basin could be rising more slowly than the crust under Erie. But the scientists behind the Baird study say they examined the potential for crustal rebound and increased precipitation in the Lake Erie basin, and neither holds water. "We've got something alarming going on here," Nairn said. "We're certain it's Michigan-Huron dropping." This doesn't mean that the lake levels will never again reach their historic average level. What it means is that, with the water lost to date, the peak level will be about 2 ½ feet lower than it otherwise would be. And the lows will be 2 ½ feet lower. Baird researchers say the problem has likely been masked by the fact that lake levels were above average for much of the 1970s, '80s and '90s. The problem only became apparent recently, when lakes Michigan and Huron came within 8 inches of their all-time lows before rebounding slightly. Indeed, Georgian Bay's Muter, who helped raise the $200,000 for the study, said she was accustomed to long-term fluctuations. But she got worried in the late '90s when the lake dropped almost four feet over four years, turning wetlands into meadows, docks into useless slabs of concrete and prime swimming spots into vast mud flats. "We saw these wetlands drying up and we went, 'Whoa!' This was a huge loss of habitat," Muter said. "So we started taking aerial photos, to measure habitat loss." Muter said she then compared those photos to historic ones, and "you can see huge shoreline changes over years," particularly near where Lake Huron drains into the St. Clair River. The association wanted the government to look into the matter, and when various agencies declined, members went door to door asking for $100 or $200 donations to hire an engineering firm for their own study. Muter says they specifically picked Baird because of its prestigious reputation and the fact it had done work for the International Joint Commission and the Army Corps. Turns out they bought a load of bad news. Muter claims the rebound of lake levels in the last couple of years won't hold, and it won't be long - maybe another five or 10 years - until we see lakes begin to drop to levels never before seen. The bright side of the gloomy scenario, she says, is the problem can be fixed. Long term solutions could be a dam-like structure to control the outflow, similar to facilities in place to check the outflows of Lake Superior and Ontario. A short-term fix, and maybe the only fix that is needed, is much simpler. "The good news is, we know if you fill in the riverbed with hard cover, you not only stop erosion, but that may return some of the water to the basin," says Muter. "We're not talking about the cost of (navigation) locks . . . We're talking about taking a barge load of rocks into the river, and carefully dropping them into the riverbed." The Army Corps and IJC say it is too early to jump to that conclusion. They say they need more funding to conduct a more thorough examination of the problem. "Right now, nobody is exactly sure where that (money) is going to come from," says the Corps' Thieme. The Chicago exception Watching all of this unfold with no small amount of wonder is Dan Duchniak, general manager of the Waukesha Water Utility. For many environmentalists, Duchniak wears the black cowboy hat in the ongoing battle over Great Lakes water diversions. The 37-year-old is the point man for the City of Waukesha's push to get Great Lakes water, a plan that has perhaps stirred as much controversy as the 1998 Nova Group proposal to take water out of Lake Superior. Duchniak said he believes use of Great Lakes water should be regulated in a manner that protects the lakes, "but we also need to understand the sheer volume of water that is there. And the amount of water for resolving a public health issue for southeastern Wisconsin, Northern Illinois and northern Indiana is really an insignificant amount and almost immeasurable." He points not only to the St. Clair dredging but to the Chicago diversion of 2.1 billion gallons a day, which is excluded from the diversion debate by a controversial but watertight U.S. Supreme Court decision. Only about half of the diversion, around 1 billion gallons, is used to supply the water needs for the Chicago area's approximately 7 million residents. Much of the rest helps with navigation on the Chicago River (which, thanks to remarkable engineering, now flows out of Lake Michigan instead of into it) and the downstream Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which provides an artificial link to the Mississippi River Basin. Waukesha is not the only community interested in Lake Michigan water; tainted well water is a problem in the booming suburbs all across this part of the state, and regional planners figure all of southeastern Wisconsin's well water woes could be solved with a pipe into the lake that could pump around 50 million gallons a day - a paltry figure compared to the 845 million gallons allegedly getting dumped daily over Niagara Falls and on to the Atlantic Ocean. Problems in perspective As the law now works, Congress has delegated management of the Great Lakes to their surrounding states. The eight Great Lakes governors, in turn, have developed a system that allows any one of them to veto a request to divert water outside the basin. The rationale is that most water pumped from the Great Lakes but kept within the basin eventually flows back into the lakes. Water pumped outside the basin never returns to the lakes, and the worry is that, over time, diversions could cause the lakes to shrink. The veto system is being reworked because the governors worry it is too arbitrary to hold up in court The governors released their first crack at new diversion rules last summer, the gist of which is that any community that takes water out of the basin must send its treated wastewater back to the lakes. More than 10,000 people have submitted written comments on the plan, and many thought the new rules were too liberal toward diversions. The governors are back at the drawing board, reportedly working on tightening up the hoops a community must jump through to be granted a diversion. Their latest proposal could be released to the public later this summer. Meanwhile, the same conservationists fighting to develop new diversion rules to protect the lakes are lobbying government to do something about the St. Clair dredging issue. They say each issue is equally important. "We shouldn't be losing water by poking big holes in the St. Clair River," said Lake Michigan Federation's Davis. "Nor should we be losing and wasting water by sending it outside the basin. Both scenarios deserve enormous scrutiny." But Noah Hall, an attorney with the National Wildlife Federation, acknowledged that Waukesha might not be the threat to the lakes that many perceive it to be. "Waukesha withdrawing 7 million gallons a day is not going to drain the Great Lakes, obviously," he said. "The immediate threat to the Great Lakes is the states and provinces losing control over management of the lakes." And he said the fact that we may have already lost so much water doesn't diminish the need for new, strict diversion rules. In fact, he argued, it heightens the need for them. "If anything, it reinforces the urgency for implementing
Annex 2001," he insisted. "It isn't that the Great Lakes are
about to go dry. It's that we want to keep management and control of the
Great Lakes within the Great Lakes states and provinces. And the fact
that a federal agency has inadvertently allowed nearly a billion gallons
to leave the system every day only reinforces the urgency." |
Great Lakes
Photo/Karen Sherlock Mary Muter, a member of Canada's Georgian Bay Association, helped raise $200,000 to conduct a study that shows the drain has been pulled on the Great Lakes. Muter, who lives on Lake Huron, was in Racine Wednesday attending a conference at Wingspread. Quotable
- Mary Muter, Water Loss
Great Lakes water loss Graphic/Alfred Elicierto Recent Coverage 2/12/05: Spigot on lake water may be tightened 1/24/05: Drain in Great Lakes is open, report says Archived Coverage |
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Revised 03-Mar, 2005
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The
good news is, we know if you fill in the riverbed with hard cover, you
not only stop erosion, but that may return some of the water to the basin.
We're not talking about the cost of (navigation) locks . . . We're talking
about taking a barge load of rocks into the river, and carefully dropping
them into the riverbed.
