A changing climate could cost Great Lakes communities billions. Here’s what's being done about it.
Alisa M. Schafer
MANITOWOC - On April 14, 2018, a rare spring snowstorm whipped Lake Michigan into a frenzy.
In Manitowoc, a city of 32,000 people about 80 miles north of Milwaukee, the wind and waves of the storm combined to twist metal and crack asphalt, resulting in more than $1 million in damages to the dock of the SS Badger Lake Michigan car ferry.
The ferry — a historic steamship that brings people, cargo and vehicles between Manitowoc and Ludington, Michigan, each summer — had to delay its sailing season until the dock was repaired months later.
Many cities near the Lake Michigan coast have experienced similar weather events in recent years as storms become more frequent and more violent amid a changing climate.
Results from a survey of 241 municipalities in the Great Lakes Basin show coastal damage from climate change in these regions will cost at least $1.94 billion over the next five years.
Those same communities have already spent $878 million on coastal damages over the past two years.
The survey results were released in July by the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative, a coalition of more than 120 mayors and local officials from the United States and Canada working for the protection and restoration of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River, which connects the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.
The Great Lakes Basin in the U.S. is home to approximately 23 million people. Wisconsin alone has more than 800 miles of Great Lakes coastline. More than a third of Wisconsin’s population lives in the 11 counties that form the coast of Lake Michigan.
Coastal communities face imminent costs
Cities along the Lake Michigan coast are already feeling the pull on their purse strings.
During the April 2018 snowstorm, high winds and heavy waves damaged loading equipment, structures and severely eroded the harbor side of the dock facility in Manitowoc, which is owned by the city and leased by the SS Badger.
Repair costs to the dock in Manitowoc topped $1 million. The repairs were partially funded by an emergency grant from the state of Wisconsin.
More recently, the city of Sheboygan announced a $10 million project to reinforce a major sewer line running along the shore that has been exposed by erosion caused by Lake Michigan’s rising water levels and winter storms that have gotten more intense.
The Sheboygan sewer line carries nearly 50% of all of the sewage going to the city’s wastewater treatment plant, including most of the city of Sheboygan’s sewage as well as some from the town of Sheboygan and outlying areas.
According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the water levels in Lake Michigan were 3 feet lower in 1930 when the Sheboygan sewer line was built than they are today.
The city of Sheboygan plans to use funds from the American Rescue Plan to pay for the expense, but without those funds, the city would have had to borrow the money and customers would have seen their sewer bills rise by more than $67 per year.
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According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the “cost of adapting urban storm water systems to handle more intense and frequent storms in the Midwest region could exceed $480 million per year by the end of the century.”
The EPA also estimates the Midwest region, including Wisconsin, will likely bear the brunt of expected damages to infrastructure, which could reach $3.3 billion per year by 2050.
The Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments team through NOAA estimates that investing in preparedness and adaptation avoids $4-$11 of damage for every $1 invested.
Temperatures, precipitation, water levels are key
Madeline Magee, Great Lakes and Mississippi River monitoring coordinator for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, said Lake Michigan's high water levels are only the start of the problems municipalities will have to face from climate change.
“The thing about climate change is that it’s kind of a pervasive issue and it affects almost everything,” she said. “If you think about something, I could tell you a way that climate change will affect it.”
For municipalities specifically, Magee said municipalities need to be prepared for three key issues: rising temperatures, an increase in precipitation and changes to Lake Michigan's water levels.
Rising temperatures: According to NOAA, the average annual temperature in Wisconsin has risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the start of the 20th century and is projected to continue rising.
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While a 2-degree rise in temperature doesn’t sound like much, it can wreak havoc on Wisconsin’s agricultural industry and, even worse, become dangerous to cities already experiencing urban heat island effects — an effect that occurs in areas of dense buildings and pavement that absorb heat and cause that area to be significantly warmer than the surrounding natural landscapes.
“You think about cities right along the lake where it generally doesn’t get as warm anyway and there’s a bit of a lake breeze, so many don’t have air conditioning, but then the temperature significantly increases, that can present a really big health risk for people,” Magee said.
Magee also added that warming temperatures will likely cause more people to get air conditioning for their homes, which can lead to an energy drain when people are running their air conditioners all at the same time.
Increased precipitation: Along with an increase in temperature, NOAA has also predicted that Wisconsin will see an increase in precipitation, particularly in the winter and spring seasons.
NOAA has documented an increase in precipitation for the past 20 years and the frequency of heavy rain events has increased.
Many communities along Lake Michigan have seen flooding in recent years caused by high water levels, heavy precipitation and extreme storms. Each time a city is flooded, there’s a chance a bridge or a road could be washed out, or sewer and wastewater treatment plants could be overwhelmed.
“Many of our design standards that we have in the state … were designed a number of years ago,” Magee said. “They’re not designed to withstand the storms that we have been experiencing. That’s why we have seen an increase in property and infrastructure damage with these large rain events, because they weren’t really designed for the rain that we’ve been experiencing."
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Lake Michigan’s water levels: The waters in Lake Michigan, as well as the rest of the Great Lakes, rely heavily on weather patterns and the region’s climate, which is why NOAA has said climate change will cause both high and low water levels in the Great Lakes, and those levels are likely to swing more quickly and wildly than they have before.
July 2020 saw a record high water level in Lake Michigan, but six-and-a-half years before — January 2013 — the water was at a record low.
High waters have increased flooding in coastal cities and threatened to overwhelm sewer and wastewater systems.
“When you add extreme storm events on top of it, you kind of get this doubling effect … You can get really damaging storm events along the coast that can exacerbate flooding and essentially create more energy and more wave power that’s kind of running up on the coastline to infrastructure that, in some cases, isn’t protected,” Magee said.
The water levels have lowered in 2021 but are still well above average for Lake Michigan.
Low water levels come with their own set of difficulties, particularly for cities like Manitowoc and Milwaukee that have working commercial ports.
During the last period of low waters, many waterways had to be dredged so boats could reach their destinations and some docks were unusable until the water level came back up.
Solutions aren't cheap
Climate change has already started to affect Wisconsin, where many municipalities are undergoing costly repairs to infrastructure.
While there are many ways to address the challenges climate change poses, government leaders are faced with a greater challenge — where to find funding for implementing repairs and proactive strategies.
“Communities around the Great Lakes face a growing crisis, and we need both the federal governments of the U.S. and Canada to assist with the necessary investments,” Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said in a July 6 news release from the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative. “Our coastal infrastructure is vital to the economic and recreational health of our communities and coordinated action is required.”
Funding to address climate change isn’t the responsibility of just one level of government or just one agency.
“Climate change is really a multifaceted issue and it requires all agencies in the state and all levels of government from local to federal to global,” Magee said. “We need these alliances to work together to develop resources and solutions.”
She said the DNR works with other agencies and organizations to address climate change at the state level. Municipalities can call on its team of technical experts pertaining to design standards, infrastructure planning or risk assessments.
A lot of the work she has been called on to do is to help municipalities deal with infrastructure damage in a way that not only replaces what was damaged, but replaces it in a way that it will be able to withstand future increased storm events.
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Magee said the DNR is also developing resources that leaders can use to apply to a variety of situations to help with efforts to implement mitigation strategies in their own communities.
Richard Rood, a co-principal investigator with Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments, said education and expertise are two of the largest barriers leaders face when it comes to developing strategies to deal with climate change. He also said there need to be more politicians willing to pay to develop strategies before a disaster happens, rather than finding funding after the damage is already done.
“We’re not at a new normal,” Rood said. “We’re just at the beginning of a time of really quite rapid climate change.”
Rood said those leaders near the coast also need to start thinking about overhauling building codes and land use policies, and even possible population redistribution away from the increasingly volatile coast.
Regardless of what they do or where they find the funding, Rood said government leaders need to be aggressively looking for ways to handle the inevitable onslaught of increasingly extreme weather.
Contact Alisa Schafer at aschafer@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @AlisaMSchafer.