ENVIRO MENTALITY

WATER LEVELS GOING UP, AT LEAST A BIT
MARCH 7, 2008 -- Yes, the snows have come. And come and come. Records and near records are being set all over the Great Lakes region.
And the snows have been the heavy kind, laden with water from from the Gulf of Mexico.
And as might be expected, water levels in the Upper Lakes are expected to go up for this coming warm season.
Lake Superior, which hit all-time lows last year, is expected to have risen seven to 13 inches by August.
Lakes Huron and Michigan, geologicially the same lake, are expected to rise by six to 12 inches after hitting near record lows in 2007.
Lake Erie is expected to drop two to three inches.
Is this good news? You bet.
Is it the end of low-water problems in the lakes? Well, no.
Docks are still going to be reaching out into the mud. Boaters will be scraping over reefs. And Great Lakes ships will continue to carry lightened loads to avoid crunching along the lake and channel bottoms.
What we need, as one shipper said, is not added inches but added feet.
About three extra feet would be helpful.
That will take not only lots of consistent snow and rainfall, but it also cold, cold winters -- the kind that can freeze over the lake surfaces to prevent evaporation.
The freeze overs did not happen this winter.

According the Detroit Free Press story today,
BUSH TO GREAT LAKES: DROP DEAD
FEBRUARY 14, 2008 -- President George Bush, never a great fan of things environmental, has passed along his proposed 2009 budget to Congress for a looksee.
What the legislators will find is that Bush has sliced and diced virtually all of the budgets for the Great Lakes, according to recent AP story.
Among the budget cuts are:
* Great Lakes cleanup measures,
* Efforts to stop sewerage overflows,
* Programs to stop the invasion of alien species and
* Dredging to help shipping during this period of low lake levels.
For the year 2009, Bush requested $297.6 million for Great Lakes programs. It sounds like a lot, but it is down from this year's budget of $353.8 million. That'a drop of 16 percent.
Mind you, we are talking about the world's fifth largest supply of fresh water.
It would seem like a good idea to cut sewage from entering the lakes. But not to the president.
He proposed to hack back the budget of the region's share of the Clean Water State Revolving Fund by almost 20 percent -- down from this year's $250 million to $201.5 million. This program helps communities upgrade their wastewater treatment plants.
Sea lampreys showed up in the big lakes in the late 1940s, multiplied like crazy and were never entirely erradicated. These blood suckers apparently are no big deal to the Texan.
He cut 20 percent out of the funding for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission which leads the fight to control the lamprey.
A big problem for the lakes is all the stuff washed into the water from the land, including pesticides, herbicides, oil scum and whathaveyou. This year, the Great Lakes Commission has a budget of $430,000 to coordinate a program to help stop this erosion.
Not much, but something.
For next year, Bush recommends zero.
As most people know, water levels are down in the Great Lakes. And they've been dropping for years. Many sand beaches now are a hundred yards inland, docks reach out into dry land, boatspeople are busy dodging rocks they never knew existed.
What's more, these low levels are a huge deal for Great Lakes shipping, ports and industries along the water fronts.
They need, they must have dredging, in order for the ships to carry the important products to and from the Great Lakes region with scraping bottom.
For this year, the Army Corps has a budget of $140 million for dredging. Despite the problems and the economic impact, Bush's proposed budgets includes just $89.3 million for dredging -- down a mind-boggling 35 percent.
As we know, good guys are not always good and bad guys not always perfectly bad.
So the president's proposed budget does offer a few glimmerings of sanity.
It includes $6.3 million to do work on an electric barrier designed to keep Asian carp from getting into Lake Michigan (and ultimately all the Great Lakes) through the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.
If these carp, which are hungrier than post hiberation grizzlies and big enough, when they leap, to knock a man from a boat, would likely decimate the fish population in the lakes. Here we are talking about a $4.5 billion (that's with a b) commercial and sports fishery. (See story below)
Finally, Bush has proposed a minuscule increase -- from $34.5 million to $35 million -- for the Great Lakes Legacy Act, which cleans up toxic sediment from the lakes' most polluted harbors.
Write your congressman? Maybe it's a good idea.

DNR BACKS YELLOW DOG MINE
FEBRUARY 14, 2008 -- Kennecott Eage Minerals Co. wants to mine for copper and nickel near the hamlet of Big Bay (just outside Marquette in the Upper Peninsula)in an area known as the Yellow Dog Plains.
Environmentalists, including the Sierra Club, hate the idea. And they have fought it. They envision severe environmental damage(See story below).
But too bad.
The Michigan Department of Natural Resources gave the go-ahead last week for the company to lease the land, saying it is the safest location for the mine entrance and tunnel.
But the fat lady has yet to sing.
More permits are still required for the company, including one from the Environmental Protection Agency.
Granted the EPA has done precious little actual protecting under the Bush administration, but still there's hope.
Isn't there?

TIP: GOOD WEB SITE
JANUARY 28, 2008 ---If you are interested in keeping up with the latest goings on on the Great Lakes as well as some pretty fine discussions of the issues, check out Great Lakes Town Hall.

SOLUTION TO BALLAST TANKS: SALINE
JANUARY 18, 2008 --As we know, for decades the ballast tanks of oceangoing ships entering the Great Lakes have been holding more than water.
The tanks also carried fingernail-sized environmental marauders that were dumped into the big lakes including zebra mussels, round gobies and quagga mussels.
These stowaways, mostly natives of the Black Sea, have created havoc in the lakes.
While clearing the water, they have clogged municipal drain and intake pipes, made barefoot beach walking akin to strolling on broken glass, killed off marine life and thousands of birds including loons, cormorants, ducks and so on.
(See story below)
The economic damage alone is estimated at $5 billion a year.
Now the St. Lawrence Seaway Corporation has proposed new rule to stem the influx of any more nasty hitchhikers.
The Seaway Corporation is a part of the U.S. Department of Transportation
Under the rule which requires more inspections, oceangoing vessels coming into the lakes must slosh salt water through their holding tanks while the ship still at least 200 miles off shore.
Violators of the rule can be fined up to $36,625 per incident.
The rule is set to go into effect in late March when oceangoing ships return to the lakes.
Flushing the ballast tanks with saltwater kills off 95 to 99 percent of foreign organisms, Hugh McIsaac, a University of Windsor researcher told the Detroit Free Press.
McIsaac bases this cleaning result on a study conducted last year by himself and other researchers.
The same salt-water flushing rule has been applied in Canada since 2006.
The shipping industry, while complaining that it is too expensive, has agreed to accept the new rule.
Is this a perfect solution? No.
Even with the saltwater washings, some invasive species can probably sneak in. It's a good first step, but no perfect.

LOONS DYING
JANUARY, 2008 -- Loons, the eerie almost magical icons of the north, are being killed off not just by the hundreds, but by the thousands.
Downed by a deadly bacterium, some 9,000 loons have died in northern Lake Michigan in just the past year.
Other fish-eating birds are being killed too -- bald eagles, seagulls, mergansers, the federally endangered piping plovers.
The estimated total kill for 2007 is an astounding 10,000 Great Lakes birds of 52 different species, according to a report by Jeff Alexander of Newhouse News Service.
The cause: avian botulism, more specifically Type E botulism. In everyday terms, food poisoning.
Where does it come from: Sadly it is one additional problem caused by those outside invaders -- zebra mussels, quaga mussels and round gobies.
The botulism first made its appearance in the 1980s in Lake Erie and then moved into Lakes Ontario and Huron.
In 2007, 1,000 birds were found dead at Sleeping Bear National Seashore west of Traverse City and about 8,500 more when the count included an area that went up and around the northern tip of Lake Michigan.
"This year (2007) the dead birds in Lake Michigan were found from Ludington to the Mackinac Bridge and all along the Upper Peninsula shoreline, Ken Hyde, a wildlife biologist with Sleeping Bear Dunes was quoted as saying.
"It just exploded," Hyde said.
"It went from a 14-mile patch of dead birds (in 2006) to affecting most of the northern section of Lake Michigan."
The botulism also has killed dozens of sturgeon in the lakes and thousands of salamanders which are known as mud puppies in Lakes Ontario and Erie.
The only lake not touched by the bacterium is Superior.
The toxin the bacterium, which grows when into a vegetative state in areas of low oxygen, kills by paralyzing the muscles and respiratory systems.
Loons, a threatened specie in Michigan, are in no immediate danger of being wiped out, say experts. But the key word here is immediate.
Approximately 545,000 loons nest in Canada each year and another 32,000 in the United States. Michigan, at present, has fewer than 500 nesting pairs.
The problem is more serious for loons than other birds such as cormorants and gulls.
The other birds have larger populations and reproduce more quickly.
But the loons, while they are long lived, are relatively few in number and each pair typically does not produce more than one chick a year.
Other pressures also are hitting the notoriously shy loons too. Continuing shoreline development, more powerboats, mercury in fish and lead fishing gear.

LAKE SUPERIOR'S WATER HAS INCHED UP
JANUARY, 2008 -- Lake Superior's water level in December was 6 inches above its level from a year before.
This is not to say it's great. But while water levels seem to be dropping in the other lakes, Superior -- with a boost from some heavy rain and snow -- seems to be holding strongly.
The reason was exceptionally heavy rains in October and lots of snow in December.
The level of Superior is still 11 inches below the long-term average, but it only lost 2 inches in December rather than the usual 3, according to the International Lake Superior Board of Control in a story by the Associated Press.
Lake Superior will continue to lose through the winter, which is normal, and start to add some height again in April.
As for Lakes Michigan and Huron, as usual they dropped 2 inches in December. And their levels are the stuff of mud flats. Michigan is down 26 inches in the last year; and Huron down 13.

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ISLE ROYALE'S MOOSE AND WOLVES
SPRING, 2007 -- Moose numbers on the 45-mile island group have dropped this past year to the lowest point in the islands' recorded history which dates back almost six decades.
They now number 450 or so. By and large, those remaining are a hard core. Tough survivors. Mostly strong, young adults that can weather harsh winters, ticks, an increasingly poor food supply and wolf attacks.
The number of island wolves, on the other hand, is pretty stable -- 30 grey wolves in three packs.
But they're getting hungrier and hungrier, since the moose provide their major source of protein.
For the most part wolves feed on young wobbly moose, the slow oldsters and the infirm -- those that are least likely to put up a fight. But at this point, most of the weak ones are gone.
In more normal times, according to an AP report, the islands have about 40 to 50 moose for every wolf. This year, its down to 15.
As a result, the wolf packs are trying to get more moose by expanding their territories. This turf issue has led to some battles among the packs.
John Vucetich, a researcher for Michigan Tech University, suggests one of the three packs of wolves might even disintegrate.
The Chippewa Harbor pack has lost its alpha male, the leader, along with an important chunk of its territory.
If it cannot find another strong leader and something happens to its alpha female, it's likely the members will disperse or perhaps starve to death, Vucetich told the AP.

Since 1958 when Michigan Tech University began its studies on Isle Royale, the numbers of wolves and gone up and down several times.
Veteran MTU researcher Rolf Peterson says it's unlikely the moose herd will die off completely, but it has suffered from some long-term problems.
One is that the moose have been weakened by tick infestations making them easier prey for the wolves. The numbers of ticks has grown dramatically, Peterson has said, as a result of global warming. Tick eggs survive better if they land on dry earth rather than snow.
A second long-term problem is the food supply for the moose. In the past, their primary food has been the leaves and branches of birch and aspen trees But steadily these trees are being replaced by spruce and balsam fir which are less nutritious.
Also this changing tree cover has reduced the numbers of beaver on the island, a secondary source of food for the wolves.

ARMED TO THE TEETH
While environmentalists often are concerned with saving waters, critters and lands, the Coast Guard is out on the lakes for our safety.
And now, for the first time since 1817, Coast Guard cutters will be carrying big guns to do it.
The U.S. cutters are being mounted with 7.62 mm machine guns. This is about the same caliber as a deer rifle. But the Coast Guard shooters can fire up to 600 rounds a minute.
Until now in the spring of 2006, the Coast Guardspeople have carried only handguns and rifles.
The United States has boosted its Coast Guard armaments due to concerns about international terrorism, the smuggling of people across the border and customs violations.
Following the War of 1812, the United States and Britain -- and later Canada -- agreed to demilitarize the Great Lakes with the Rush-Bagot Treaty of 1817.
Under the agreement, each country could have four vessels in the lakes, each equipped with an 18-pound cannon.
Cannons, it seems, don't come in pounds anymore. So with the national anxiety following the Sept. 11 attacks, both countries agreed to a new reading of the treaty. Under this reading, the new guns are considered weapons of law enforcement, rather than weapons of war.
Under the reinterpretation, official vessels on both sides of the border may carry machine guns ranging in size up to 50 caliber -- big enough to shoot down a helicopter.
The U.S. machine guns will largely remain out of sight, until a need arises. And then, a fleeing vessel refuses to stop, warning shots will be fired first.

SALTIES AND THEIR MONEY
Environmentalists and a lot of others are sick to death with all those outside creatures sneaking into the Great Lakes -- Zebra mussels, spiny water fleas and 160 other such aliens.
Their solution: Simply slam the door on salt water ships getting into the lakes. Close the Welland Canal. Hang out a sign: No Salties Wanted.
Heck, they say, it won't be that much of a financial loss. And they point to a recent study by John Taylor, a Grand Valley State University prof.
By his accounting, trade from ocean vessels amounts to $55 million a year. This compares, he says, with $200 to $500 million spent each year by the U.S. and Canadian governments to contain these fish and organisms.
Hmmm, 55 versus 200. This does not seem like brain surgery.

However, here are a few other, different numbers that are likely to confuse things.
The St. Lawrence Seaway (or bringing in salties) is responsible, either directly or indirectly, some 36,000 jobs in Canada and 150,000 jobs in the United States.
Each year, maritime commerce on the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway $4.3 billion in personal income, $3.4 billion in transportation-related business and $1.3 billion in federal, state and local taxes.
How many of those jobs and dollars are east of the Welland Canal is not clear. But now you can play that statistician's game. Pick your favorite numbers.

Which reminds me of the hoary numbers crunchers joke.

Old statisticians never die. They are just broken down by age and sex.


DIVORE OF BIG MUDDY AND GREAT LAKES
Originally, no connection existed between the Mississippi River and Lake Michigan (and the rest of the Great Lakes, for that matter).
Then about 100 years ago, they dug a huge, 28-mile trench that connected the Great Lakes to the Illinois River and then to the Mississippi. It was the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. An engineering triumph, they said. What's more it allowed Chicagoans to keep their sewage out of Lake Michigan.
Now problems are running both ways, both into and out of the Great Lakes. Invasive species have been working their way up the Mississippi to threaten the big lakes. Most unnerving are the huge, acrobatic Asian carp (particularly zealous overeaters who could wipe out much of the $4.5 billion sport and commercial fishing in the Great Lakes). The carp have been heading up the Big Muddy and then into the Illinois River headed youknowwhere. A stort of electric fence has been put up to the stop them. So far it seems to be working. (See story below.
At the same time, zebra mussels hitch hiked into the lakes on ships coming in from the Atlantic. Every year, more and more of every underwater thing in the lakes is being covered by their spiny coatings. They filter water to clarity, but also take out the nutrients that are so important to every lake-living thing. The costs are running about $1 billion a year in damage and control costs.
Well now, they have sneaked down through the canal and are working their way down the Mississippi River.
In the meantime, a year-long study has begun regarding the re-separation of the Mississippi and Great Lakes watersheds.
The study -- to be conducted by the Chicago-based Alliance for the Great Lakes --is being funded with $125,000 (which in terms of salaries does not seem like much) by the Great Lakes Fishery Trust, Great Lakes Fishery Commission and the U..S.- Canada International Joint Commission.
Will the study recommend divorce between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. Unclear. But if it does, the separation is likely to cost tens of billions of dollars, according tro Dick Lanyon of the Metropolitan Reclamation District.

UNNERVING MYSTERY
The saying goes that everyone loves a mystery. OK, maybe.
But this mystery, especially for anyone who gives a rap about the Great Lakes, is truly unsettling.
At the port of Duluth, at the far end of the Great Lakes cleanest lake, scientists and engineers are trying to figure out how to slow down excessively rapid corrosion.
Any steel that touches the harbor waters is rusting at a rate that ranges from two to 10 faster than it normally should, the Chicago Tribune reports.
The rust is attacking some 13 miles of steel plates that line the harbor and metal that supports bridges, iron ore docks and other structures.
Why?
That's the unsettling part. No one seems quite sure.
Theories include stray electrical currents, road salt runoff and that alien nemesis of the big five lakes, zebra mussels.
To give a bit of perspective, Great Lakes scuba divers historically have been able to dive down on 100 or 150-year-old ships and find them virtually intact. The oak frames are unfazed. Ropes and lines hang where they were when the ship went down. And metals show very little corrosion. This varies dramatically from ships sunk in the ocean which deteriorate comparatively quickly.
The corrosion at Duluth is "severe,`` says Rudolph Buchheit, a material science and engineering professor at Ohio State University who has been studying the problem.
Buchheit told the Tribune that some half-inch-thick steel plates have been perforated in less than 10 years.
Replacing all this harbor metal could run to more than $100 million, according to a U.S. Corps of Engineers report.
The metal damage at the harbor generally runs from the surface level to about a 10-foot depth.
Leading theories, according to a expert panel report to the Corps, include environmentally influenced changes in water chemistry, microbe activity, dissolved chlorides from de-icing salts, rising levels of dissolved oxygen and zebra mussels.
While its tempting to blame the zebra mussels for many of the lakes' woes, they do not appear to be a leading suspect.
The mussel colonies did not show up until the late 1990s, while after this high-speed corrosion began.
The U.S. House has approved $300,000 for the Corps to study the problem. The Senate has yet to sign off on it. Also the state of Minnesota has pledged $100,000 to match some of the federal dough.
So we'll have to wait and see how this mystery turns out.
In the meantime, other Great Lakes ports do not seem affected by this sort of high-speed rust attack.




YELLOW DOG ACID
Here's a case to keep your eye on.
Kennecott Minerals Corp. is looking to mine nickel, zinc and some other metals on the Yellow Dog Plains near Big Bay, Mich.
One Kennecott officials said the company, which has been buying up land on the Yellow Dog Plain for 13 years, hopes to make $1 billion on nickel alone.
Big Bay, you may recall, was the site north of Marquette in the Upper Peninsula and once the home of a Henry Ford getaway home and also the site where the murder took place in the famed "Anatomy of Murder`` book by Robert Traver (John Voelker) and later movie.
Kennecott is proposing to do sulphide mining (metals are drawn from sulphide ore). Typically they pull out zinc, nickel and copper. The scary part is that the risk of creating sulphuric acid (battery acid) during the process. The acid is formed when water and air combine chemically with the sulphide ore.
This acid can seep through the rocks carrying toxic heavy metals into nearby rivers, lakes and streams, and also into the ground water.
Kennecott hopes to put their Eagle Mine on the Yellow Dog Plains near the headwaters of the Salmon Trout River and Yellow Dog River (a wild and scenic river), which -- you guessed it -- drain right into Lake Superior. The mine also could threaten the nearby 16,850-acre McCormick Tract which has 18 lakes, theHuron Mountains, Pinnacle Falls and Lake Independence.
Kennecott, not surprisingly, pooh-poohs any danger. Company officials say 80 percent of the ore has sulphides and they will treat 100 percent as though it was dangerous -- reburying some and trucking off the rest. Unfortunately, sulphide mining has a sour history where it has been attempted elsewhere. And Kennecott's record has some real blemishes too.
For one report, check out the environmental group Northwoods Wilderness Recovery.





Zappo!
The invaders have hit the Great Lakes like Mongols all over the Mideast.
Lamprey eels. Round gobis. Zebra mussels. And now Asian carp are banging at the castle door.
What can stop them? Officials think a giant jolt of electricity
These fish are big. Sixty pounds is not unusual. And they jump like sailfish, going four feet in the air. Where do they get all that energy? Plankton and other microorganisms. They eat up to half their body weight in plankton.
That's bad for other fish species because their food supply is being gobbled up by the Asian invaders and they are left to starve.
The fear now is that the Asian carp will get into the Great Lakes.
Right now, they are in the Mississippi River and have moved within 20 miles of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, a major connection to Lake Michigan.
To stop the invaders, federal engineers are installing what amounts to an electric fence, a $9 million electric fence.
More precisely, they are creating a pulsing electrical over some 500 feet of the canal, running 84 steel belts along the bottom of the 160-foot wide canal. And just in case of a power failure, it has a back-up generator.
Will it stop these Asian jumpers?
"We can't make a 100 percent guarantee, but it certainly seems unlikely any fish could swim through this barrier, Charles Shea, project manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers told the Washington Post.
"This is something that deters fish without killing them,'' he said. He explained that even a human would feel the jolt. "You'd get a hell of a headache,`` Shea said.
The carp were originally brought from China 30 years ago by catfish farmers in the South. However, many escaped when Mississippi River floods ran over the catfish ponds.
They have been heading north ever since. And procreating like crazy. A single female can carry more than 2 million eggs.


OUR WATER. GET YOUR DIPPER OUT OF IT
Michigan is finally getting more jealous of its water. Action has been slow. But it seems to be coming.
In the last full week of May, Gov. Jennifer Granholm initiated some clamp downs just to hold the fort until the state legislature passed some laws on water withdrawal.
These actions really only involved inland water. But they are a first step. And they have implications for the Great Lakes themselves.
She invoked a moratorium on any new or expanded bottled water operations in the state.
The state Department of Environmental Quality, at almost the same moment, did issue a permit Nestle Waters North America, Inc. to buy water from the city of Evart's municipal system to be used for the bottling of Mountain Spring water in Mecosta County. Evart is a small town north and west of Mount Pleasant.
But -- and this is a big BUT -- the water can only be sold in the Great Lakes basin. Nestle, not surprisingly, called the action unprecedented and unfair.
So what does this clamp down on Nestle have to do with the Great Lakes?
Well in the long view, it presages action by the Great Lakes states to insure that the waters from the five lakes will not end up being piped down to the parched, over populated lands such as Arizona, New Mexico and Texas -- even if the president is from one of those states.
Under federal law, the governor of any Great Lakes state can veto out-of-basin diversions in the lakes. But this veto power may be vulnerable to a court challenge.
In the meantime, the Council of Great Lakes Governors is drafting a plan to regulate diversion as well as any large scale withdrawals for use inside the Great Lakes basin.
The question here, the one that involves Nestle, is: Can sales of Nestle water outside the Great Lakes basin be considered a diversion that would fall under the governor's veto power?
It has long been understood that diverting water from the Great Lakes is a pipe dream only of those who don't comprehend the political complications of it all.
And this does not even take into account, Canada and the province of Ontario which also have big stakes in the lake -- not to mention a lot of political power.
But it is still worthwhile to put put a political stopper in any pipe dreams of those who hope to water lawns in Tucson or Albuquerque.

Also in Michigan, Gov. Granholm has instructed the DEQ ground water withdrawals that would alter the size of an inland lake, stream or river.

All this seems right. Just as politicians are more than willing to try to protect the auto industry, for example. They should be willing to protect our most important resource from whomever might want to sully or steal it.

WATER FOR LAKES, NOT FOR BOTTLES
The Michigan Environmental Council, with nine member groups, promised inj mid-May to redouble its efforts to protect against excessive private use of Great Lakes waters, the Associate Press reports.
We'll see what comes of it.
A major MEC concern is the lack of control over large-scale water withdrawals and the need to put limits on private water sales.
Back in 2002, a lakes protection package was proposed by a task force headed by Michigan State Sen. Ken Sikkema, R-Grandville. Then Last year, Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat, submitted a plan called the Water Legacy Act.
But so far, no real action has been taken by the legislature and various regulatory agencies. They claim more study is needed.
Among other items, the MEC wants a state permit to be required for anyone who wants to suck out more 2 million gallons a day from the lakes or 100 million during a year.
This would blow out of the water, so to speak, most private enterprises, including the Nestle Waters Ice Mountain spring water bottling plant near Big Rapids.
Also, the MEC wants an amendment to the Great Lakes Preservation Act that would require legislative approval of water sales by private parties.
The legislature is expected to take up the plan and the Legacy Act this summer.
For details, go to Clean Water Action.

Waters are up
Up come the Great Lakes water levels. But not as high as might be expected for some lakes, according to reports earlier this year.
Lake levels are up. Higher than in 2004, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reported.
Lake Superior is up seven inches over last year, now just one inch short of its long-term. The amount of water pouring out of Lake Superior, of course, affects all the other lakes.
Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, geologically considered the same lake, are up nine inches over 2004, and about 10 inches below its average. And Lake Erie was pushing up onto the beaches. It is 15 inches above 2004 levels and 13 inches above its long-term average.

One Foot Down, Forever
The not-so-good news is that, while experiencing some recent higher water levels, Lakes Michigan and Huron now have permanently lost one foot of water.The reason: dredging and other human meddling in the St. Clair River has increased the the amount of water flowing out of the lakes.
Some 19 feet were gouged out of the St. Clair River bottom between 1970 and 2000, according to a report earlier this year by W.F. Baird & Associates Coastal Engineers of Toronto. Their study was done for the Georgian Bay Association, a civic group representing 4,200 Canadian families who live on Lake Huron's Georgian Bay islands and shores.
"It's like a drain hole at the bottom of a bathtub, Rob Nairn, a principal with Baird told Free Press reporter Hugh McDiarmid Jr. "The drain hole is getting bigger. The water is going out faster.``
A dredging project in 1962 dropped lake levels 19 inches. That was supposed to be the end of it. Not so, according to the Baird study.
Underwater barriers and other methods to stem the erosion need to be considered quickly, Nairn told the Free Press.
No kidding.