For the past 11 years, visiting Evanston dog beach was an almost daily routine for Karen Perlia and her American Eskimo dog, Minnie.
But this spring, the beach disappeared.
Erosion and near-record-high lake levels reduced what had been an expansive stretch of beach — large enough for dozens of dogs to run around — to what is now a sliver of sand.
“It’s heartbreaking to see it swallowed by Lake Michigan …,” Perlia said last week. “I’m sure I’m not alone in my sadness of losing one of the best things about living in Evanston. The dog beach has been such a great place to spend quality time with Minnie, meeting other people and their dogs, and just enjoying the shores of Lake Michigan.”
Lake Michigan could be about 1 foot shy of the 1986 record high by the end of the summer. It has currently risen 4 feet since January 2013, when it hit a record low.
“Even though Chicago didn’t experience a lot of snow and runoff this year, it was still recovering from the runoff from the prior two winters and had more rainfall in comparison with the past,” said Keith Kompoltowicz, chief of watershed hydrology for the Army Corps of Engineers in Detroit. “To simply put it, the problem is more water is coming into the lakes than leaving.”
Kompoltowicz said regions around the Great Lakes, including Chicago, continue to be affected by the 2013 and 2014 Arctic polar vortexes.
In Chicago, city beaches also have shrunk, but the Chicago Park District does not have any immediate plans to replenish the sand, said Jessica Maxey-Faulkner, a spokeswoman for the Park District.
“This is a natural occurrence,” Maxey-Faulkner said. “Lake Michigan has historically fluctuated over time with lake levels being historically low only a few years ago.
“The sand has not been replenished in recent history,” she said. “We did it once before, but it is just too costly and gets washed away.”
The Park District is planting native dune grasses at many beaches, including South Shore, 12th Street, 63rd Street, Kathy Osterman, Montrose and Leone to reduce the amount of sand that blows off the beach or onto pathways.
But beachgoers likely will have to contend with less sand and more surf all summer as water levels are expected to continue to rise more than 10 inches over the next six months, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Drew Gronewold, a NOAA hydrologist who has studied more than 100 years’ worth of data on the Great Lakes’ water levels, and said he believes the major difference this year is the levels never declined in the fall — instead they increased, which is unusual.
He said water levels generally rise in the spring and decline by the same amount the following fall. This did not happen in 2015 because of a combination of reduced evaporation and increased precipitation from a strong El Nino weather pattern and runoff from previous years’ snowfall.
“When you have those two in combination you’re going to have a net increase in water levels by the end of the year, and that’s the trend we are seeing now in the Great Lakes Basin,” Gronewold said.
Two very wet springs on top of two winters with very heavy snowfall have created a storm trap over the Great Lakes, Kompoltowicz said.
By the end of 2016, if water levels decline in the fall at a normal rate, Gronewold said, it is likely that the levels will be slightly above where they were at the beginning of 2016.
“But it is hard to tell. A lot of the factors that can drive changes in temperature or precipitation are very hard to predict four or five months in advance,” Gronewold said.
Both experts said the rising water levels in Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, which are considered one body of water for measurement purposes because they are linked by a strait, have contributed to significant erosion that has threatened local beaches and may damage other shoreline properties as forecasts anticipate this pattern to continue through the summer.
“We just came out of one of the longest low-level periods in history. Water levels were below average for more than 16 years,” Gronewold said. “During that time, people have gotten used to lower water levels and have put in infrastructures and have adapted.
“This long period of low water levels has changed both the conditions on the shoreline but also peoples’ expectations that I think have led to an exacerbation of this rise and people’s perceptions of it.”
When water levels were low, erosion was occurring farther away from peoples’ homes, Kompoltowicz said. When water levels come up, so does erosion, and because the wave action gets closer and closer to those structures, it has the potential to cause destruction to land and infrastructure.
“In the past when water levels were at its record high, there was documented evidence that erosion was occurring so severely that it caused homes to collapse down the face of a bluff,” Kompoltowicz said. “Erosion is always occurring; it just changes where it is occurring.”
Ray Doerner, the Evanston recreation services manager, said last week that the 15-year-old dog beach was expected to open April 1 but is now set to open May 28.
“Our dog beach has slowly been getting smaller over the past few years and now has some pretty significant damage to it,” he said. “The middle section of our dog beach is completely underwater and essentially gone any day there are high winds or waves.”
Doerner said the city dredged sand from the Church Street boat ramp to build a new dog beach on the south side of the ramp. This beach will be around 90 feet long and 20 feet wide versus the old beach, which was about 300 feet long and 75 feet wide, he said.
“From everybody that I’ve talked to who works along the lakefront, and certainly from my own observation, the lakefront has definitely impacted the size of all of our beaches, both our swimming beaches as well as our dog beach,” Doerner said.
Trucking in new sand was discussed at public meetings but is not feasible due to cost and Mother Nature’s unpredictability, he said.
Doerner said the city also looked at what happened in Waukegan last year after it brought in tons of sand to fill hazardous holes that formed on the beach because of the lake.
“Their investment was completely washed away with one storm,” he said.
Jim Selegean, a hydraulic engineer with the Army Corps, said it is common for sand to be pushed around by wind, waves and other uncontrollable forces.
Historically, coastal bluffs have dispersed sand naturally down the shoreline, replenishing beaches. But people are changing that process.
“As people build more and more houses along the shoreline of the Great Lakes, there’s more and more of a need for them to build shore protection,” Selegean said. “They’ll build big steel sheet pile structures at the bottom or use large armor stone, which essentially stops the erosion of the bluff they’ve built their house on and that’s good for their house — but it’s bad for the sediment supply that’s feeding these beaches.”
“The waves are carrying all of this stuff away and it is not being replenished, and that’s why we are seeing shrinking beaches,” he said.
“So, the sand that we see when we stand on our beaches, the vast majority of it, came from eroding coastal bluffs somewhere up above us, so if we stop the erosion of coastal bluffs, we are cutting off the sand supply that’s feeding the beaches,” Selegean said.
In Chicago, various shore-protection structures, such as revetments, breakwaters and bulkheads, have reduced the degree and extent of coastal erosion since the late 1800s, according to Roy Deda, a deputy project manager for the Army Corps.
“If you go anywhere on the North Side, near Fullerton, you will see the steel sheet pile front and the concrete stair step revetment behind that to prevent erosion of the parkland, as well as to prevent flooding of Lake Shore Drive,” Deda said.
Deda said he doesn’t foresee any issues in terms of erosion or flooding along the 9.6 miles of a shoreline protection project started in 2000 to rebuild crumbling revetments and woodpile cribs.
“Our design of the Chicago shoreline considered the long-term average of lake levels on Lake Michigan and looked at the all-time maximum,” Deda said.
He said there are still some areas that flood during severe storms, such as the North Avenue to Oak Street Beach stretch, which occasionally floods Lake Shore Drive, plus an area north of Montrose Beach and a few areas on the South Side from 67th Street to Rainbow Beach between 71st and 75th streets.
Without funding from Chicago, the Army Corps cannot study or address the problem areas, and budget issues make that unlikely to happen in the near future.
Tom Murphy has lived in the Edgewater neighborhood since 1980 and said he remembers when the Army Corps built a wall of rocks to protect Thorndale Avenue Beach and the surrounding buildings when the water was at its highest.
“Some of the storms were so bad it actually would cause buildings to shake,” Murphy, 74, said. “I remember getting off of Lake Shore Drive, and I could see icicles dangling from fourth-floor balconies and they’d be shaking from the violent waves below.”
For years, he was a long-distance runner and said he would use the path connecting Thorndale Avenue Beach and Kathy Osterman Beach during his lakefront jog. But when the water rises, that path becomes submerged, like it was Monday.
“They’re technically one long beach …,” he said. “But it just depends on whether there was a storm recently and how high the water levels are.”
Murphy used to teach environmental science at DePaul University and would regularly research the Great Lakes. He said water levels are driven by a number of things such as climate change, rainfall, temperatures and snowpack, but ultimately he said the lake will do what it wants.
“It’s all uncontrollable. People try to control it, but it’s futile. If a storm wants to come in and take out your pier, front yard or house, it will,” he said. “It can also dump 100 feet of sand offshore and redistribute it elsewhere, you just never know.”
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