Coburn Dukehart and Tad Dukehart
To protect against powerful waves that have whittled away land in recent years, the village of Ephraim recently completed a large project placing large rocks along the Lake Michigan shoreline.
Mike Kahr, an engineer and owner of Death’s Door Marine, has watched Lake Michigan’s water levels fluctuate during his 40-plus year career. But even he hasn’t seen water levels swing quite this rapidly.
Eight years ago, Kahr and his crew dredged sand from the lake bottom so passenger and cargo boats could reach port. But as water levels surged to a record high last year, Kahr fielded call after call from property owners rushing to protect their shorelines by installing barriers to keep the waves from eroding their beaches — more requests than his crew could handle.
Kahr isn’t necessarily celebrating the boom in business.
“Yes, I make money at it,” says Kahr, whose business is based in Sturgeon Bay. “But I don’t like to take people’s money when the waves are lapping at their shoreline, and they’re taking money out of the retirement account.”
Unlike the oceans, whose waters are rising as Earth’s steady warming melts glaciers, Great Lakes water levels largely depend on weather and are harder to predict. Lake Michigan’s levels have tended to fluctuate in cycles throughout its recorded history, swinging up or down roughly every three to 10 years.
Contractors, ferry boat captains, climate scientists and home owners call those ebbs and flows part of life along the lake. But they are now living through the most dramatic shifts in their lifetimes.
Between record low waters in January 2013 and a record high in July 2020, lakes Michigan and Huron collectively swung more than 6 feet, according to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers data. The lakes have since dipped about a foot and a half, but remain above average. Climate scientists attribute the volatility to the interplay of the region’s rising temperatures and precipitation from more frequent and intense storms.
Low-water years require crews like Kahr’s to dredge waterways. But high water brings storm surges that swallow beaches, swamp docks, erode lakeside bluffs, and shutter businesses.
The Great Lakes region will spend nearly $2 billion over the next five years combatting coastal damage exacerbated by climate change, according to a recent survey of 241 local governments by the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative, a coalition of 128 U.S. and Canadian mayors. Wisconsin will bear an estimated burden of at least $245 million, says Sheboygan Mayor Ryan Sorenson, a coalition board member.
“Whether you think it’s cyclical, whether you think it’s climate change, folks in Sheboygan and Wisconsin understand that something needs to be done, regardless of your political affiliation,” Sorenson says.
Door County Pulse-
Hoyt Purinton is president of the Washington Island Ferry line.
Powerful Lake Michigan waters
On a windy late-September morning, the Washington Island Ferry rocked like an ocean liner in a squall. As the boat headed north through Death’s Door, an often turbulent passage between the mainland and Washington Island, waves crashed into its bow, spritzing passengers. In the distance to the east, past the abandoned lighthouse resembling the skeleton of a forgotten church, Lake Michigan’s waters stretched endlessly into the horizon.
The Great Lakes hold about 20 percent of the Earth’s surface freshwater. And Lake Michigan, the third-biggest Great Lake by surface area, stretches 118 miles across at its widest point. Holding 1.3 quadrillion gallons of water, its waves can sink ships and pulverize shoreline structures.
Hoyt Purinton, president of the Washington Island Ferry line, leads a fleet of five ships that navigate the waters off of Wisconsin’s Door County peninsula year-round — each big enough to carry about 150 passengers and 20 vehicles between the county’s mainland and its inhabited island to the north.
A thumb jutting into Lake Michigan, Door County boasts 300 miles of shoreline. Tourists flock to its beaches in the summer; come autumn, its sugar maples explode with orange and yellow. In 2020, despite the COVID-19 pandemic’s challenges, tourism generated nearly $400 million for the local economy.
Purinton, whose family has lived in the area since before Wisconsin’s statehood, has faced a host of water challenges in recent years. Low waters in 2013 forced the ferry to move operations to deeper waters, costing up to $750,000.
High water in 2020 swamped parts of the Washington Island Ferry’s landing and the island, leaving captains to contend with floating debris. Water also flooded the dock at popular camping spot Rock Island, just east of Washington Island. A submerged dock and pandemic-related health concerns forced the closure of Rock Island State Park much of last year, cutting into state park system revenues.
“It’s been a wild ride. It opens up your world view. It reminds you you’re not in charge,” Purinton says. “The water always wins.”
Climate ‘tug of war’
As of 2013, Lake Michigan had experienced nearly 15 years of low water.
Many assumed the trend would continue, and nobody predicted the lake’s dramatic rise in the following years, says Drew Gronewold, a University of Michigan professor and expert on weather’s impact on the Great Lakes.
“In 2013, everyone was concerned about rising temperatures, loss of ice cover, and there was a narrative at that time that water levels are just going to continue to decline forever in light of climate change,” Gronewold says.
But early 2014 delivered a global-scale phenomenon: a polar vortex. “The cold Arctic air surrounding the top hemisphere — it wobbled, and it wobbled dramatically,” Gronewold says.
That “wobbling” destabilized a band of Arctic air, sending south a blast of frigid air that parked over the Great Lakes region for weeks. Wind chills in Chicago and Madison dropped to minus 42 degrees.
The freeze thickened ice cover on the lakes, limiting evaporation. That set the stage for high water in the following years — along with intense rain and snow likely linked to Earth’s warming, Gronewold says.
More than a century of data from the Army Corps of Engineers show the cyclical fluctuation of waters in lakes Michigan and Huron — measured together because of their connection at the Straits of Mackinac.
Weather primarily drives the ebbs and flows, four scientists who track water levels told Wisconsin Watch. Precipitation boosts water levels, while evaporation — which increases with warmer temperatures — drops them.
The Great Lakes region is warming faster than elsewhere in the contiguous United States over the past century, according to a 2019 report by the Environmental Law and Policy Center. That’s tending to cause ice cover to form later in the year and lengthening the season for evaporation. Meanwhile, the region saw much more rain and snow, with more precipitation coming from “unusually large events,” like severe storms.
These two factors create an increasingly powerful “tug of war” effect that will likely bring more extreme lake level shifts, Gronewold says: “These two forces are opposite each other, and they are gaining strength as the climate changes.”
Intense evaporation from 1998 to 2013 dramatically lowered the lakes. Waters then rose during the region’s subsequent “wettest five- to 10-year period in recorded history.”
These dramatic shifts in water levels on lakes Michigan and Huron will likely become increasingly common, says Michael Notaro, associate director of University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Climatic Research.
Beyond speeding up coastal erosion, more frequent, intense storms bring heavier rains that increase the runoff of fertilizer into lakes, feeding algal blooms on nutrient-rich lakes that harm fish and other wildlife. “It’s already happening,” says Notaro.
Communities respond to rising water
Sorenson, who at 27 serves as Sheboygan’s youngest-ever mayor, grew up in the lakeside city of 48,000. Sometimes called the Malibu of the Midwest, Sheboygan is home to fleets of charter fishing boats, sandy beaches, and surfers who brave winter waters.
Sorenson remembers summer days he spent at the beach as a child, swimming, catching fish, and building sand castles. And he remembers when rising waters began to wash those beaches away. Wanting to help property owners respond to lakeshore erosion is part of what inspired him to run for mayor, he said in a 2020 campaign video.
“In the last few years, we’ve seen tremendously high water impact the business community on the boardwalk, where we’ve had to throw sandbags out there just to try to keep it at bay. And that’s not a long term solution for our community,” he says.
“We’re seeing cliffs just getting washed away, falling into the lake.”
Great Lakes communities have spent $878 million in the past two years responding to coastal damage, according to the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative. Wisconsin’s expected $245 million in costs over the next five years is conservative, Sorenson says, because the group’s survey doesn’t include every jurisdiction.
Shoreline erosion — and how to afford infrastructure improvements needed to protect against damage from high water — challenges urban centers and small towns along the Great Lakes.
In Door County, just north of Sheboygan, marina owners and village crews scrambled to rescue property, limit damage to piers, and stack sandbags to protect the town’s buildings after November gales battered the village of Ephraim in 2019. After stones and debris washed onto the road at the south end of the village, the Wisconsin Department of Transportation added several hundred feet of rock alongside the highway to protect it from a future storm surge.
Additionally, the village launched a $358,000 project to rebuild a limestone wall and add more shoreline protection near Ephraim’s historic downtown.
DNR analyzing Door County shores
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has begun an analysis of the Door Peninsula to inform residents on how to grapple with an unpredictable Lake Michigan.
Prompting DNR’s analysis: a soaring tally of permitting requests from residents to build barriers during high water years and dredge during low-water years, says James Pardee, DNR environmental analysis and review specialist.
For Sheboygan, preparing for the future means reinforcing breakwater areas and adding an additional seawall or protective rock layers called riprap, says Sorenson. It also means planting native vegetation, which stabilizes bluff slopes to help limit erosion.
But budgeting for such investments isn’t easy for a mid-sized city like Sheboygan. That’s why the mayor hopes to secure federal and state aid.
“I can’t do this alone,” Sorenson says. “Whether it’s Sheboygan, Racine, Sturgeon Bay, Green Bay, Marinette, Milwaukee, and everywhere in between, we need to have a clear focus in terms of how we address this.”
Jack Kelly contributed to this report. Wisconsin Watch is the news arm of the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. This story was produced as part of the NEW (Northeast Wisconsin) News Lab.
