Chicago Shoreline Periled by Lake’s Record High Level

Al Ostrow’s ground-floor apartment on Chicago’s fashionable North Side used to overlook a big sandy beach, beyond which the blue-gray waters of Lake Michigan rolled back and forth with the regularity of a clock’s pendulum.

Today, Ostrow’s beach has vanished, swallowed up by the swollen lake.

His patio, once the site of festive barbecues, now resembles a war-zone bunker, its sandbags and concrete barriers standing as puny fortifications against wind-whipped waves. Two weeks ago, for the first time ever, the pounding waters pushed through cracks and windows and flooded his apartment.

Storm-driven waves, some of them 20 feet high, carried sand, rocks and debris with them and thundered as if it were “the end of the world,” Ostrow recalls.

It may not be the end of the world, but a rising Lake Michigan and the shoreline erosion it is causing--once thought to be a hazard to only summer cottages, boat piers and resort beaches--is now threatening Chicago’s 30-mile-long lake front, some of the most valuable urban real estate in the Midwest. An estimated 20% of the Great Lakes’ entire coastal population is concentrated on the Windy City’s shoreline, where high rents and expensive condominiums account for its reputation as the region’s Gold Coast.

This month, the level of Lake Michigan is 2 1/2 feet above average, the highest it has been since records were first kept at the turn of the century.

Huron, Erie at Highs

Lakes Huron and Erie are also at record highs, while the level of Lake Superior remains above average but lower than last year. Lake Ontario, closest to the sea, has dropped two feet because engineers have opened floodgates to speed the flow of water through the St. Lawrence Seaway, the major drain for the Great Lakes. The five bodies of water, bordered by eight states and Canada, hold 20% of the planet’s fresh surface water and 95% of North America’s fresh surface water.

Peril Tied to Winds

When the winds are calm, the high water is generally little more than an inconvenience. But when the winds rise, Great Lakes cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Detroit and Buffalo, N.Y., might just as well be on the shore of the Pacific.

Two weeks ago, a steady, northeasterly wind of 40 m.p.h. to 50 m.p.h., the strongest of the winter, swept the length of Lake Michigan from the Straits of Mackinac to Chicago. At times, the winds gusted to more than 90 m.p.h. The storm was so powerful that it pushed waters in the giant lake southward, lowering lake water levels at Mackinac Island by more than 1 1/2 feet and raising water levels at the south end of the lake--at Calumet Harbor on Chicago’s south side--by more than 2 1/2 feet.

Worst on Record

The 20-foot waves breaking along Chicago’s coast, the worst on record, ground up giant concrete barriers as if they were coffee beans, smashed park buildings and washed tons of debris onto beaches. They left boulders weighing thousands of pounds as testimony to their force. High-rise buildings 40 stories tall, their foundations resting on bedrock, shook as waves crashed against them.

Chicago’s winter has been unusually mild, and that, paradoxically, contributed to the severity of the storm. “Balmy” temperatures in the 30’s and 40’s throughout most of January and February kept the usual shelf of ice from forming along the shoreline. In past years this ice has served as a natural breakwater to minimize damage from winter storms.

Lake Shore Drive Closes

The high water and the lack of an ice barrier allowed the lake to wash onto the city’s scenic Lake Shore Drive, where it froze. The entire 15-mile-long drive was closed by high and frozen waters for 20 hours, the first time the lake has ever intruded on the half-century-old thoroughfare.

“I grew up five blocks from the ocean in San Francisco. I surf and bodysurf and I have never seen such savage waves in my life,” recalls Rabbi Joseph A. Edelheit, whose Temple Emanuel, on Chicago’s north shoreline, has been flooded twice this winter.

Edelheit, who has been talking a lot about Noah and his ark lately, has a new daily ritual. Each morning he goes to the back of the synagogue to peer through ice-coated windows and a curtain of icicles hanging from the roof, to inspect the synagogue’s rear retaining walls.

All signs suggest that the rabbi’s morning routine will go on for a while.

It would take six to 10 years of normal rainfall just for the lakes to recede to their average levels, according to a new study by the federal government’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Mich. If the Great Lakes basin has below-normal rainfall tantamount to a drought, the lakes could reach normal levels in three to four years, says Frank H. Quinn, the laboratory’s chief hydrologist.

But a continuation of the wet conditions that have prevailed for the last two years would increase water levels in the Great Lakes by another 1 1/2 feet to 2 feet, Quinn says. At that point, Lake Michigan would be four feet or more above normal--making today’s problems even worse.

Panel Orders Studies

Nobody is willing simply to wait for the next few years to see which weather pattern prevails. The American and Canadian agency that oversees the Great Lakes, the International Joint Commission, has ordered both short-term and long-term studies to determine what, if anything, can be done to alleviate “the adverse consequences of fluctuating water levels.”

However, the options are limited. “There is no giant plug which can be pulled,” says Gen. Joseph Pratt, commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ north central division. “The lakes will likely stay high for several years to come.”

“People don’t realize . . . that the natural forces can far override what man can do in the short-term,” Quinn agrees. “We can modify in terms of inches. Nature can do it in terms of feet.”

Meanwhile, the cost of protection all along the 11,240 miles of Great Lakes coast is beginning to turn into a political issue.

Funding Costly

Experts agree that it will be expensive to build breakwaters, reefs and, perhaps, barrier islands, to shield shoreline property. It will take “hundreds of millions just to protect Chicago,” says Martin J. Oberman, chairman of Chicago’s Shoreline Protection Commission. It is a cost, Oberman says, “that is way beyond the ability of local government to fund.”

But in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Budget Director James C. Miller III indicated last week that the Reagan Administration is not inclined to help.

Urges Local Aid

“Something like this that is so obviously local in nature, you should be looking to local government to take care of the problem,” Miller said in the interview.

While the political debate goes on and while weather experts and hydrologists study rainfall, watershed and lake levels, the waves continue to take their toll. Along one stretch on Chicago’s far north side, erosion has swallowed up beach land, suddenly leaving high-rise condominiums towering at the water’s edge. It has been estimated that it would cost $750 million just to replace those buildings alone should that become necessary, not counting land values.

To the south, the waves have undermined park walkways, causing them to collapse. Virtually all of the city’s beaches have disappeared.

“Don’t say we’ve lost them, they’re just under water,” says George Wolf, assistant chief engineer for the Chicago Park District. “As far as we know the sand is still there.”

“They’re gone,” Oberman says.

And the high water is changing the way people live and work along Chicago’s shoreline. Al Ostrow now looks out through the sliding glass doors of his living room into a sandbagged bunker.

Sheli Lulkin, who lives in a condominium on the shore of Lake Michigan, carries a little portable weather radio in her purse. “I have to check the wind speeds and wave heights,” she says, “so I know if I have to rush back home to deal with a problem.”

Resembles Ice Palace

This week the back of the five-story building she lives in resembles an ice palace, and that’s a problem. Freezing spray from giant waves breaking against the shoreline has coated porches on the building with thousands of pounds of ice. The Army Corps of Engineers warns that some of them may collapse under the weight.

“By the virtue of nature, our back deck has become a de facto pier,” Lulkin says.

Richard Harris, whose basement apartment once was more than 20 feet away from the lake and now is within range of the spray from breaking waves, has installed a heavy steel door to hold back the waters, which once pushed through his old wooden one. He has built plywood barricades, has installed an outside drain, and he keeps a pair of boots handy.

“It’s an adventure I’d rather not deal with,” Harris says.

On the street outside his apartment is a new city road sign. It reads: “Dangerous Waves, Park at Your Own Risk, No Free City Tows.”