Extreme Storms, Toxic Algae Blooms, More Pollution - What The Future Looks Like For Superior
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Storms: Plenty of Minnesotans well remember the so-called “500-year storm” that struck Duluth in June 2012; fewer may connect the dots between that monster and the “1,000-year” event of July 2016 that was roughly centered on Ashland, followed by another “1,000-year” storm in June 2018 that caused havoc from Ashland to Houghton, Michigan. Matt Hudson, a Northland faculty member who specializes in watershed restoration, pointed out that the Ashland region has been designated as rainfall “hotspots” by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – official recognition of current, continuing precipitation patterns far outside historical norms. In Ashland’s case, the volume of rain in heavy storms nowadays is at least 37 percent greater than what was “normal” in the mid-1900s.
Unfortunately, those obsolete rainfall data are the basis of calculations made by engineers and transportation planners when they design roadbeds and determine the size of culverts needed to channel floodwaters underneath them. Also, when they decide how high a bridge needs to be. So when the 2016 storm came to town, blown-out culverts and other damage cut road (and rail) access across the Ashland region; some 8,000 people were able to travel only if heading west. Villages on the Bad River Indian Reservation became islands. Infrastructure being expensive, Hudson said, planners face difficulty in persuading governments to invested in culvert upgrades based on storm volumes that are still supposed to be once- or twice-in-a-millennium occurrences. And the Federal Emergency Management Agency has rules that allow aid for infrastructure replacement but not enhancement, which encourages continued investment in outdated capacities.
Algal blooms: Until 2012, according to National Park Service ecologist Brenda Lafrancois, the only known instances of algae producing blooms in western Lake Superior consisted of a few small events in the 1960s that were associated with iron entering the lake from mine tailings. It was widely assumed that the lake was simply too cold and too clean — meaning nutrient-poor — for cyanobacteria to form large blue-green masses. That happy fantasy came to an end a few weeks after the big 2012 storm, when a large bloom formed in the Apostle Islands. It lasted only a couple of days, and was followed by small blooms in 2016 and 2017 that were noticed only by park staff, she said. But in August 2018 the lake grew a five-day bloom that stretched eastward from Superior, Wisconsin, all the way past the Chequamegon Peninsula to Long Island, visible from downtown Ashland.
Granted, this is not a problem on the scale of the Lake Erie bloom that forced Toledo’s water utility to close the intakes in 2014, or the red tides that are lingering longer off Florida nowadays. But Lafrancois said it appears the blooms are associated with warmer years in general, and are driven in large part by the nutrient- and sediment-laden runoffs that follow unusually heavy rainfalls (which seem to be growing more usual). This is not good news for tourism in a region whose top asset is water so clear, typically, that you can paddle a boat over the shipwrecks off Bayfield and count the vessels’ blackened ribs.
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https://www.minnpost.com/earth-journal/2019/11/what-the-climates-new-normal-is-doing-to-lake-superior/