Falling Superior Puts Damper on Business, Tourism

By Tina Lam, Detroit Free Press

Oct. 4–BIG BAY — Harbormaster Kim Bourgeois has watched the wavy waterline on rusty pilings in Big Bay Harbor plunge a foot in the past year and 2 feet in the last decade. She wasn’t surprised at the announcement this week that Lake Superior hit a record low for September.

This summer, shallow water kept all but six pleasure boats out of the harbor. In a good year, 65 to 100 dock there, she said.

“We were barely open,” Bourgeois said. No boats meant less business for restaurants, campgrounds and motels.

What once was a harbor of refuge where small boats could seek safety in storms is neither safe nor a refuge.

“When people called, I told them, ‘Don’t come in,’ ” said Bourgeois, 48. Only small sailboats familiar with the harbor’s channels could navigate it.

Along the shoreline of Superior, low levels have affected people, boats and businesses. Favorite swimming beaches have turned into puddles, docks have been lengthened, small boats and large ships have struggled.

Big Bay’s problems are echoed at other harbors, where low water levels have been made worse by a lack of funds for dredging. “It’s a double whammy,” Bourgeois said.

Last month, Lake Superior dropped to its lowest average September level in 147 years of government record keeping. The level fell 1.6 inches below the previous record set in September 1926 during a drought, said Cynthia Sellinger, deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor.

A lack of rain and snow and warmer winters — meaning less ice and more evaporation — are the prime culprits.

Superior, the largest and deepest of the Great Lakes, feeds Lakes Michigan and Huron, which also are well below normal. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers predicts that Superior will set record lows each month through at least January.

September’s record came despite more than normal rainfall in the Superior basin during the month, said Scott Thieme, chief hydrologist for the corps in Detroit.

Shipping industry takes a hit

The low water hits the shipping industry where it hurts — the pocketbook. Freighters carrying coal for power plants, limestone for construction and iron for steel plants have been forced to lighten their loads. In August, the largest cargo on a coal boat was 64,500 tons, compared with 71,000 tons a decade ago when water levels were high, said Glen Nekvasil, spokesman for the Lake Carriers’ Association in Cleveland.

The lower capacity means the freighters need to make more trips to deliver their products, increasing the cost.

“It’s challenging to deliver the raw materials to our customers,” Nekvasil said. “This is about maintaining industrial production.”

Lack of government funds for dredging has been a big issue for shippers for two decades, but plunging water levels make it critical, Nekvasil said. Some $230 million would be required to dredge all the Great Lakes harbors in need; shippers are hoping for half that in federal funds for next year, he said.

The Wenonah, a 149-passenger ferry, didn’t make its usual runs from Grand Portage, Minn., to Isle Royale National Park this summer because of shallow water. Its owners said the water was 2 feet too shallow to guide the boat safely.

With the Wenonah out of service, the boat company had to turn away about 1,500 passengers to Isle Royale, said Don Szczech, chief financial officer.

The company used a boat that carried one-third as many people. It was the first time in 30 years the Wenonah skipped the island.

At Whitefish Point in the lake’s southeastern end, the harbor’s low water and silted mouth were so treacherous that the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society couldn’t bring its research vessel, the 47-foot David Boyd, into the harbor for winter. The society runs a museum nearby and keeps the boat at the harbor.

The Boyd’s propeller was damaged twice in attempts to navigate into the harbor, said Sean Ley, development officer for the society. Instead, the Boyd went to the Grand Marais harbor, which has problems but more depth, Ley said.

Whitefish Point is a harbor of refuge, but powerboats and sailboats have had a difficult time, too.

“There could be loss of life, it’s so bad,” Ley said. A boat could get grounded on a sandbar and its skipper swept off by rough water in a storm, or the boat could slam into a steel wall or rocks and injure people, he said.

Low water did help uncover the Cyprus, a ship that sank 100 years ago between Grand Marais and Whitefish Point.

“We found it because the water was so low,” Ley said. “The wave action helped scour the sand away.”

At Sherman Park in Sault Ste. Marie, buoys that usually mark the swimming area at the park’s beach were in mud late last month. At Naomikong Point farther west, the wide beach looked like an oceanfront at low tide. Logs, rocks and waving grass poked up from shallow water.

A bad summer for boating

In front of his summer home at the Huron Mountain Club, along Lake Superior west of Marquette, club member Paul Townsend was excited about the size of his beach.

“It’s twice as big as usual,” said Townsend, an attorney who lives in Grosse Pointe.

But the low levels have left boat docks on dry land on the nearby Pine River, which flows into the lake and is 18 inches lower than normal.

“I haven’t had my motorboat in the river in three years,” Townsend said. This year, the club couldn’t even run its traditional canoe races there because the river was so shallow.

At the mouth of the Tahquamenon River near Paradise, John Shoup of Bloomfield Hills and Marc Caza of Riverview said the rivers they normally fish were low and so was their catch.

Low levels create changes in habitat along the banks of rivers and the lake, affecting behavior, spawning and food sources for fish, said Phil Schneeberger, manager of the state fisheries research station in Marquette.

Schneeberger said the station’s new research boat, the 56-foot Lake Char, had a tough time navigating harbors this summer.

Pete Lindquist, owner of Shipwreck Tours in Munising, which offers glass-bottom boat tours in the lake, said he had applied for a permit to extend his launch because of difficulty getting his boats in and out of the water. He changed routes of some boats to avoid rocks and other hazards.

Lindquist fears that if the trend continues, by next summer the lake could be too shallow for his boats to pass safely over sunken shipwrecks.

September rains raised the lake level only about half an inch, starting around Sept. 20, said scientist Sellinger. Every inch of rise in the lake’s level requires 529 billion gallons of water.

“It would take a whole lot of rain to fill it up again,” she said.

Contact TINA LAM at 313-222-6421 or tlam@freepress.com.

—–

To see more of the Detroit Free Press, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.freep.com

Copyright (c) 2007, Detroit Free Press

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.