Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Cicero president Larry Dominick’s disaster declaration enabled Cicero to request assistance for affected families from FEMA. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s declaration enabled the request for assistance.

The day before Independence Day, the summer sun beat down on dozens of clothes and shoes strewn across the backyard and fence of the Cicero, Illinois, home where Delia and Ramon Vasquez have lived for over 20 years. 

A nearly nine-inch deluge that fell on Chicago and its suburbs the night before had flooded their basement where the items were stored in plastic bins. Among the casualties of the flood were their washer, dryer, water heater and basement cable setup. The rain left them with a basement’s worth of things to dry, appliances and keepsakes to trash, and mounting bills. 

The July flood was one of the worst storms the Chicago region has seen in recent years and over a month later many families like the Vasquezes are still scrambling for solutions.

Without immediate access to flood insurance, the couple was left on their own to deal with the costs of repairing the damage and subsequent mold, Delia said. The costs of the recent flood come as the Vasquez family is still repaying an $8,000 loan they got to cover damages to their house from a flood in 2009.

Aggravated by climate change, flooding problems are intensifying in the Chicago region because of aging infrastructure, increased rainfall and rising lake levels. An analysis by Borderless Magazine found that in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs, extreme weather events and heavy rainfall disproportionately affect people of color and those from immigrant backgrounds.

These same communities often face barriers to receiving funding for flood damage or prevention due to their immigration status – many undocumented people cannot get FEMA assistance – as well as language or political barriers.

“You feel hopeless because you think the government is going to help you, and they don’t,” Delia said. “You’re on your own.”

The lack of a political voice and access to public services has been a common complaint in Cicero, a western suburb of Chicago where Latinos account for more than four out of five residents, the highest such percentage among Illinois communities.

RainReady program a potential solution  

One potential solution for communities like Cicero could come from Cook County and the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) in the form of their RainReady program, which links community input with funding for flood prevention. The program has already been tried out in a handful of suburbs and is now being implemented in the Calumet region, a historically industrial area connected by the Little Calumet River on the southern end of Cook County.

The RainReady Calumet Corridor project would provide towns with customized programs and resources to avoid flooding. Like previous RainReady projects, it relies on nature-based solutions, such as planting flora and using soil to hold water better.

CNT received $6 million from Cook County as part of the county’s $100 million investment in sustainability efforts and climate change mitigation. Once launched, six Illinois communities — Blue Island, Calumet City, Calumet Park, Dolton, Riverdale and Robbins — would establish the RainReady Calumet Corridor.

At least three of the six communities are holding steering committee meetings as part of the ongoing RainReady Calumet process that will continue through 2026. Some participants hope it could be a solution for residents experiencing chronic flooding issues who have been left out of past discussions about flooding.

“We really need this stuff done and the infrastructure is crumbling,” longtime Dolton resident Sherry Hatcher-Britton said after the town’s first RainReady steering committee meeting.

“It’s almost like our village will be going underwater because nobody is even thinking about it. They might say it in a campaign but nobody is putting any effort into it. So I feel anything to slow (the flooding) — when you’re working with very limited funds — that’s just what you have to do.”

Low-income neighborhoods lack flood prevention resources

In Cicero and other low-income and minority communities in the Chicago region where floods prevail, the key problem is a lack of flood prevention resources, experts and community activists say.

Amalia Nieto-Gomez, executive director of Alliance of the Southeast, a multicultural activist coalition that serves Chicago’s Southeast Side — another area with flooding woes — laments the disparity between the places where flooding is most devastating and the funds the communities receive to deal with it.

“Looking at this with a racial equity lens … the solutions to climate change have not been located in minority communities,” Nieto-Gomez said.

CNT’s Flood Equity Map, which shows racial disparities in flooding by Chicago ZIP codes, found that 87% of flood damage insurance claims were paid in communities of color from 2007 to 2016. Additionally, three-fourths of flood damage claims in Chicago during that time came from only 13 ZIP codes, areas where more than nine out of 10 residents are people of color. 

Despite the money flowing to these communities through insurance payouts, community members living in impacted regions say they are not seeing enough of that funding. Flood insurance may be in the name of landlords who may not pass payouts on to tenants, for example, explains Debra Kutska of the Cook County Department of Environment and Sustainability, which is partnering with CNT on the RainReady effort.

Those who do receive money often get it in the form of loans that require repayment and don’t always cover the total damages, aggravating their post-flood financial difficulties. More than half of the households in flood-impacted communities had an income of less than $50,000 and more than a quarter were below the poverty line, according to CNT. 

Engaging overlooked communities 

CNT and Cook County are looking at ways to make the region’s flooding mitigation efforts more targeted by using demographic and flood data on the communities to understand what projects would be most accessible and suitable for them. At the same time, they are trying to engage often-overlooked community voices in creating plans to address the flooding, by using community input to inform the building of rain gardens, bioswales, natural detention basins, green alleys and permeable pavers.

Midlothian, a southwestern suburb of Chicago whose Hispanic and Latino residents make up a third of its population, adopted the country’s first RainReady plan in 2016. The plan became the precursor to Midlothian’s Stormwater Management Capital Plan that the town is now using to address its flooding issues.

One improvement that came out of the RainReady plan was the town’s Natalie Creek Flood Control Project to reduce overbank flooding by widening the channel and creating a new stormwater storage basin. Midlothian also installed a rain garden and parking lot with permeable pavers not far from its Veterans of Foreign Wars building, and is working to address drainage issues at Kostner Park.

Kathy Caveney, a Midlothian village trustee, said the RainReady project is important to the town’s ongoing efforts to manage its flood-prone creeks and waterways. Such management, she says, helps “people to stop losing personal effects, and furnaces, and water heaters and freezers full of food every time it rains.”

Like in the Midlothian project, CNT is working with residents in the Calumet region through steering committees that collect information on the flood solutions community members prefer, said Brandon Evans, an outreach and engagement associate at CNT. As a result, much of the green infrastructure CNT hopes to establish throughout the Calumet Corridor was recommended by its own community members, he said.

“We’ve got recommendations from the plans, and a part of the conversation with those residents and committee members is input on what are the issues that you guys see, and then how does that, in turn, turn into what you guys want in the community,” Evans said.

The progress of the RainReady Calumet Corridor project varies across the six communities involved, but final implementation for each area is expected to begin between fall 2023 and spring 2025, Evans said. If the plan is successful, CNT hopes to replicate it in other parts of Cook County and nationwide, he said.

Despite efforts like these, Kevin Fitzpatrick of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District argues that the scale of the flooding problem in the Chicago region is so large that a foolproof solution would be “prohibitively expensive.”

Instead, communities should work toward flood mitigation with the understanding that the region will continue to flood for years to come with climate change. And because mitigation efforts will need to be different in each community, community members should be the ones who decide what’s best for them, says Fitzpatrick.

In communities like Cicero, which has yet to see a RainReady project, local groups have often filled in the gaps left by the government. Cicero community groups like the Cicero Community Collaborative, for example, have started their own flood relief fund for residents impacted by the early July storm, through a gift from the Healthy Communities Foundation. 

Meanwhile, the Vasquez family will seek financial assistance from the town of Cicero, which was declared a disaster area by town president Larry Dominick and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker after the July storm. The governor’s declaration enables Cicero to request assistance for affected families from FEMA.

But the flooding dangers persist.

The day after her home flooded, a neighbor suggested to Delia Vasquez that she move to a flood-free area. Despite loving her house, she has had such a thought. But like many neighbors, she also knows she can’t afford to move. She worries about where she can go.

“If water comes in here,” Vasquez said, “what tells me that if I move somewhere else, it’s not going to be the same, right?”

Efrain Soriano contributed reporting to this story.

Low-income Chicago suburbs eye ‘RainReady’ investments to limit flooding is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Todd Moilanen paddles gently through wild rice beds on Ogechie Lake, trying not to disturb a loon sleeping on its back on a nest of reeds a few feet away. 

Moilanen, an enrolled member of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe and the Band’s cultural resources director, delights in seeing resurgence of life on Ogechie Lake. For years, the small, shallow lake about 100 miles north of the Twin Cities was too deep for wild rice, or manoomin, as wild rice is called in the Ojibwe language. 

Logging companies around the Rum River built the Buck More Dam in the 1930s, which kept water levels consistently over four feet — too high for manoomin. 

Low water levels are critical for manoomin, a sacred crop for the Ojibwe people of the Great Lakes region. But climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels is bringing more rain and flooding to Minnesota and the Upper Midwest, making harvests of wild rice less reliable. 

For more than 70 years there was virtually no rice, and very little waterfowl and wildlife on Ogechie Lake. But the Mille Lacs Band worked with an engineering firm and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to modify the dam, and in 2015, they implemented a project to restore the lower level historically experienced on the lake, part of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Reservation and Minnesota’s Kathio State Park. 

Eight years later, the effect is dramatic. The shallow lake brims with wild rice, which, as Moilanen paddles through in late June, is in its “floating-leaf” stage, where most stalks lie flat against the water’s surface and others are beginning to emerge above the waterline. Now, wildlife that feed on the wild rice are regular visitors. 

Moilanen points out a wood duck skimming across the glassy surface and a large osprey swooping overhead. His canoe quietly passes the loon; the large black bird with a distinctive white band around its neck stirs awake and dives into the water. 

“That’s the ecosystem that’s coming back,” Moilanen says. 

Wild rice is a fickle aquatic grass that can be washed out by rising water levels, a growing trend in Minnesota, according to 128 years of state precipitation data. The grass seed, or grain, has been consumed by the Ojibwe and other Tribal Nations for centuries, and has garnered widespread appeal in the ubiquitous wild rice soup found on menus across Minnesota and the Upper Midwest.

Tribal, state, and federal governments are working to adapt to the changing environment to ensure manoomin lives on in Minnesota, which is home to more acres of natural wild rice than any other state in the country. 

“We see the extremes more often now,” said Kelly Applegate, director of natural resources for the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. “We see water levels that are really high at critical points when the rice is developing.”

For Tribal Nations of northern Minnesota, wild rice’s survival is not just about protecting the environment—it’s also about preserving a core part of their identity. 

The Ojibwe of Minnesota and Wisconsin are Anishinabe people who originated in the woodlands of the northeast. According to traditional beliefs, the Ojibwe were told to move west until they found food growing on the water. They found it in the shallow lakes and rivers of northern Minnesota and Wisconsin, and it became a staple of their diet. 

“The reason that we’re here is because of manoomin,” Moilanen says. 

Minnesota’s climate getting warmer and wetter

Minnesota’s climate is getting warmer and wetter. The 10 warmest and wettest years in recorded state history have all occurred in the past 25 years, according to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. 

That change has brought a massive increase in large rainfall events. Since 2000, storms that produce more than six inches of rain have been occurring four times more often than in the 20th century, DNR data shows.

Record snowfall in Minnesota this winter, a sudden warmup in early spring, and a few heavy storms led to widespread flooding across the state earlier this year, prompting the capital city, St. Paul, to declare a flood emergency. In response, Governor Tim Walz signed a disaster assistance bill in April that moved $40 million, the largest amount ever, to an emergency account to help Minnesotans recover from flood damage.

Even small changes can meaningfully alter the environment. Since 2000, there has been a 65 percent increase in the number of rainfalls over three inches and a 20 percent increase in storms with more than one inch of rain. 

The state is getting wetter as the climate warms, according to Minnesota Senior Climatologist Kenny Blumenfeld. The 2010s were a historically wet decade. The early 2020s have brought drought, but it is likely still the wettest among the state’s other bouts with drought, Blumenfeld said.

“When we get the heavy rains, it’s coming as hard as it ever has,” he said. 

The current trend is dry periods between June and October, and really wet periods from November to April. But that can and likely will change, Blumenfeld said, adding that the warming atmosphere only promises more moisture, but it won’t necessarily be clear when that moisture will come. 

Blumenfeld earned a PhD studying major storms in Minnesota, and said the frequency of such storms keeps growing. 

More water in ricing country

The Rum River watershed of central Minnesota, home to the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, received an average of 28 inches of rain a year from 1895 to 2022, according to precipitation records the state began keeping in 1895. The rate has been rising by about half an inch per decade since 1980, according to state climate trend data. 

But for the past 20 years, annual precipitation in the watershed has risen to an average of around 31 inches. 

“It’s a huge deal because that water has to go somewhere,” Blumenfeld said. 

The Little Fork River watershed, home to the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa, one of the seven sovereign Ojibwe nations in the state, is also getting wetter. The watershed has an average annual precipitation of 26 inches, which has been growing two inches per decade in the past 20 years. Last year was particularly wet, with nearly 35 inches of precipitation, which contributed to historic flooding. 

Spring flooding in 2022 practically wiped out the entire wild rice crop on Nett Lake, said Chris Holm, ecological resources director for the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa. The shallow lake about 220 miles north of the Twin Cities near the Canadian border is a traditional ricing hub for the Bois Forte Band.

While cultivated wild rice that has been bred for specific qualities is farmed commercially in Minnesota, Tribal Nations often prefer its original form that grows naturally with little or no intervention in the lakes and rivers of northern Minnesota. Tribal members harvest the rice for personal use and for sale to the general public.

Wild rice is sensitive to water levels, particularly in June. Too much spring rain can wipe out beds before they can take root. 

“If you have higher water levels, it takes more energy for the plant to grow up into the surface and leaf out where it can photosynthesize. So with high water levels, you have less plant growth, less manoomin harvest,” said Madeline Nyblade, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota pursuing a doctorate in hydrology. 

Nyblade is part of Kawe Gidaa-naanaagadawendaamin Manoomin, or First We Must Consider Manoomin, a university research group that focuses on tribally driven questions around wild rice. Many of the questions the researchers received about climate change focus on water levels, she said. 

The bigger storms Minnesota is now experiencing on a more regular basis also challenge the rice, especially late in the season. A violent storm with heavy rain and wind can knock rice off the stalks before it can be harvested in late August. 

Applegate recalled a recent year where high water took out 90 percent of the rice beds for the Mille Lacs Band. Then in 2021, the opposite happened — a late summer drought prevented the harvest. The rice around Mille Lacs was tall and thriving, Applegate recalled, but with too little water, ricers couldn’t reach the patches by canoe to harvest the manoomin. 

Climate change shifts plant growth

Applegate, an enrolled Mille Lacs Band member who grew up in the area, has seen shifts from climate change. The moose have moved further north. The white birch trees are receding. And beds of manoomin that served his people for generations are more regularly being wiped out by high waters. 

“As Anishinabe and tribal people, we depend on these wild plants for our food, medicines, craft materials — cultural objects made from plants. They’re a very integral part of our culture,” Applegate said. 

Climate change is rapidly shifting where and how plants grow in Minnesota, and the pace is concerning to the Mille Lacs Band, he said. 

Historically, Native people in the Great Lakes region could expect bountiful wild rice, according to Mike Dockry, an assistant professor with the University of Minnesota and a member of the First We Must Consider Manoomin Research Group. Dockty is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a traditional ricing people of the Great Lakes region. 

“It was growing on many, many more lakes than it is now, and tribes were free to move,” Dockry said. 

Any one lake might have a bad harvest, but people could find another that was booming, he said. Settler-driven land use and large scale water system management geared toward agriculture has contributed to fewer bodies of water with wild rice. 

Wild rice itself is well adapted for variability as an annual plant with seeds that can lie dormant for years if conditions aren’t right, and has genetically benefited from variability over time, Nyblade said. But land use systems like dams that created stagnant conditions prevented that in many water bodies, and now climate change is bringing variations such as warmer winters. 

Disconnected from the traditional seasonal migration pattern by the United States’ reservation system that limits them to specific plots of land, Native people are left to focus on preservation and protection of traditional resources. 

“How are we going to harvest these traditional plants if they move out of our area?” Applegate asked.

Bois Forte Band: ‘We need a break’ 

Up on Nett Lake, members of the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa are due for a good year. Flooding largely wiped out the wild rice crop in 2022. 

“We need a break,” said Chris Holm, ecological resources director for the Bois Forte Band. 

Historic flooding hit the Rainy River Basin in 2022. The area, straddling the U.S.-Canadian border, experienced heavy snow melt combined with large spring storms. 

Holm has worked with the tribal natural resources department for 30 years. Most of the total crop losses for the Bois Forte Band have come in the past decade, he said. The Tribal Nation takes the rare step of insuring its wild rice crop through the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Claims are rare, but all three that have been filed in his tenure have come in the last decade, including in 2022. 

This season, conditions looked poor again with a snowy winter, a late ice out — when winter ice melts on frozen lakes — and high water levels through May. 

“We thought we were in trouble,” Holm said. 

But the Bois Forte Band may get the break they need this year. An early summer dry spell appears to have salvaged the rice crop for now. The rice has good germination this season, Holm said.

But the increase in heavy thunderstorms makes Holm nervous. A big August storm can knock even the most promising rice off its stalks. 

Less predictability to wild rice harvests

Ann Geisen, a lake wildlife specialist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, specializes in shallow lakes where wild rice thrives. Based in Aitkin, north of Lake Mille Lacs, she covers seven wild rice-rich counties in Minnesota. 

She’s noticed an increase in extremes in recent years that has brought less predictability and greater variability to wild rice harvests. 

Geisen began working for the DNR in 2001, the same year the agency started managing lakes to help improve wild rice growth. That effort is mostly done by removing beavers and their dams to clear outlets — running water connecting lakes to other water bodies — for lakes with wild rice. Free of dams and other natural debris, water will spread across more lakes, lowering their levels. 

Beaver dams are very effective at holding back water, to the point where removing a dam can lower lake levels by a foot. Good rice lakes are very shallow, so an extra foot of water on a four-foot lake is a huge percentage, Geisen said. 

“We cannot control the weather, but we try to set the stage so that when there is a weather event the impact is reduced,” Geisen said. 

The DNR and the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe are working together on improving conditions at Swamp Lake, located about 100 miles north of the Twin Cities. Manoomin once thrived there, but largely disappeared in the 1990s, when water levels got too high for rice. 

Through historical records provided by locals and site visits, Band and Minnesota natural resources staff found the lake’s overgrown outlet channel. They hired a contractor to clear the channel in 2021. Thirty-five beaver dam removals later, the 6.5 mile channel was flowing without obstructions. 

Suddenly the water had a place to go. Water levels on Swamp Lake dropped, and in August 2021, 10 wild rice plants were observed in the middle of the lake. While water levels were too high last season, Geisen said they’re hoping more rice will come this year.

If there’s not ample rice this year, the DNR and Mille Lacs Band plan to seed the lake with wild rice. They decided to try seeds sourced from a single nearby lake if Swamp Lake doesn’t replenish naturally, Geisen said. 

Geisen is encouraged by these intervention success stories, but she knows the fight is lopsided. If the big storms that are becoming more common late in the season continue, it won’t matter if all the beaver dams were pulled — the rice will be mostly lost. 

“I’m getting concerned that with climate change, it’s not enough,” she said.

Geisen is keeping her fingers crossed for this year, as conditions so far are favorable. That’s a sentiment echoed by the Bois Forte and Mille Lacs bands. The relatively dry summer has stabilized water levels after a major spring melt, and the rice is looking good in many parts of the state. 

The most sacred mashkiki

Paddling through the rice on Ogechie Lake, Moilanen is optimistic about this year’s harvest. As the Mille Lacs Band’s cultural resources director, he works to connect enrolled members with traditional practices, and takes out young ricers for their first harvest each year. 

He loves passing on the traditions and teaching others how to gather mashkiki, the word for medicine in the Ojibwe language. Manoomin is considered the most sacred mashkiki, with its use as a staple crop that sustained people during lean times and its connection to the Ojibwe origin story. 

While Ogechie Lake’s water issues were mostly the result of a dam instead of rainfall, its management is a success story for manoomin, and proof of nature’s resiliency. For more than 70 years, high water levels caused by a dam aimed at boosting profits for loggers and farmers meant that just one percent of the lake had rice. 

But the manoomin wasn’t gone — it was just dormant, waiting to rise again under the right conditions. 

This year, manoomin covers 70 percent of the lake, and the stalks are beginning to break the surface as they reach towards the sun. With the rice comes all the life it can sustain — the lives of waterfowl and of the Anishinabe people. 

“It goes so far beyond restoring wild rice,” Moilanen says. “It’s a whole lifecycle, a whole world is restored.”

Climate change, more rainfall threatens wild rice in northern Minnesota is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

In 2019, Blake Grannum experienced a catastrophic flood in her home in Detroit’s Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood. Water overtopped nearby canals and rushed into her basement, destroying a washer and dryer and forcing her and her mother to go to the laundromat during the pandemic. 

It was one of several floods the neighborhood experienced in recent years; heavy rains overwhelmed sewer systems and flooded basements five times between 2011 and 2021. During that last major flood on July 21, 2022, six inches of rain fell on the region, inundating freeways, stranding hundreds of people in vehicles, and filling basements with sewage backup.

Jefferson Chalmers has been called the “Venice of Detroit.” It’s a unique, historic neighborhood, oriented around a canal system and waterfront parks, and built on one of the vast swamps that once lined the Detroit River and Great Lakes.

Neither the overbank flooding from the canals nor the sewer backups have put Grannum off the neighborhood.  She now lives with her fiancé in a house that sits a few feet beneath the flood wall, next door to her childhood home.

And it’s clear why she might want to stay. From the dock in Grannum’s backyard, you can watch boats idle past and look out on the many ramshackle boathouses on Harbor Island in a neighborhood surrounded by water.

“It’s just a vibe here,” Grannum said. “You have different income groups, different cultures, different types of people living in this area.”

But some worry the costs that come with flooding could potentially create a process of “climate gentrification” here. In cities like New Orleans and Miami, this process has seen wealthier and whiter residents displace low-income residents and people of color in less flood-prone areas. 

But in Jefferson Chalmers, climate gentrification could mean that those with the resources to manage the risks and expense of living in a floodplain may replace those without them.

The neighborhood is already changing; it’s become more white in recent years. In 2016, 88% of the neighborhood residents were Black, and just 8.5% were white. In 2021, 74% of residents were Black, lower than the citywide average of 78%. Whites now account for 18%  of residents here.

Incomes are also rising. In 3 of 7 census block groups within the neighborhood, median income increased by between 13% and 80% since 2020. The median household income in 2021 was $56,395, higher than the city’s median of $34,762.

And home renovations are increasingly common while housing prices are rising. Meanwhile, a redevelopment plan for the neighborhood calls for $640 million in new investments – mostly new housing and retail. A streetscape renovation and several new businesses and developments have brightened up a stretch of Jefferson Ave. that hadn’t seen much love in decades.

Still, Jefferson Chalmers remains among the city’s lowest-income neighborhoods, with 39%  of residents living below the poverty line, higher than the citywide average of 32%. 

And now, the forces of climate change threaten to make the area increasingly unaffordable for those low-income residents.

In 2021, the Federal Emergency Management Agency placed the neighborhood in a designated flood zone, requiring homeowners with federally insured mortgages to carry flood insurance. Only about 35% of units in the neighborhoods have mortgages. Those that do could pay thousands of dollars more a year for flood insurance if they’re federally insured. The designation has also paused some affordable housing developments in the neighborhood that rely on state and federal financing.

Meanwhile, the city of Detroit  has signaled it will fine or litigate against those with defective or missing seawalls if they don’t bring them into compliance. Seawalls can cost tens of thousands of dollars to replace or rehab.

Residents see an existential threat from both the high costs and high water. These frustrations, coupled with climate change uncertainty, have left some questioning the neighborhood’s future.

“Is it time to turn the page in the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood?” longtime Jefferson Chalmers resident Frank Bach wrote on the website Nextdoor. He pointed to the extreme fluctuations in water levels and the neighborhood’s location on a former wetland as challenges that might be difficult to overcome.

“What was made here in the 1800s isn’t working anymore,” he wrote.

Plans to save a neighborhood

Getting the neighborhood out of the designated flood zone is a high priority for those who want to see redevelopment continue.

In 2022, city officials held a meeting to present a $161 million U.S Army Corps of Engineers plan that would have built berms along the riverfront, closed off the connection of two canals to the river, and installed a removable stop-log dam – a barrier to keep out high water – on the deepest channel connecting the canal system with the Detroit River. They planned to pay for it with federal funding.

But residents blocked the proposal, fearing it could disconnect the neighborhood from the river, destroying its character and leading to stagnant, bug-infested canals, where a Great Lakes Water Authority outfall also periodically dumps combined sewage and stormwater. Residents said there was a level of distrust that the city would effectively manage the stop-log dam, considering Detroit’s history of financial problems and poor city services.

Following the rejection, the city said it would proceed with fining and litigating against the owners of 107 homes it determined to have missing or deficient seawalls. But city spokesperson Georgette Johnson said the city will wait until it has repaired seawalls on 17 city-owned parcels before going after other property owners. They’re targeting this fall for completion. 

Several residents who spoke with Planet Detroit supported another proposal spearheaded by resident Jay Juergensen, a Jefferson Chalmers resident and lead organizer for the Jefferson Chalmers Water Project community group. 

Along with large investments in regional stormwater infrastructure, the plan seeks $40 million to create wetlands and levees on the Detroit River, make topographical changes, and fund seawalls on the canals. Juergensen estimates that the seawalls would cost around $11 million.

It’s unclear if Juergensen’s plan has found any official support. In a segment on Detroit Public Television’s “One Detroit” program, Tyrone Clifton, director of the Detroit Building Authority, referred to it as “ambitious.”

Without financial assistance and coordination, the process of hardening Jefferson Chalmers’s shoreline will likely be lengthy and expensive – and may still fail to remove the neighborhood’s floodplain designation.

FEMA previously told Planet Detroit that seawalls may be recognized as part of an effective flood mitigation plan. But Ken Hinterlong, senior engineer for FEMA, said any reevaluation would also need to ensure that there is adequate “interior drainage” in the neighborhood once levees and seawalls are built, something that could continue to be a challenge for an area that was previously a wetland and has experienced frequent sewer backups.

John Myers, who lives on the Fox Creek canal, said the city can’t treat the problem as the responsibility of individual property owners because a continuous barrier is needed. He said residents would get a better deal if these improvements were solicited in bulk.

“We wouldn’t all try to pave our little section of the street in front of our house,” he said.

How to get out of a flood zone

One of the residents with resources to deal with flooding is Nicole de Beaufort, who lives on Jefferson Chalmers’ Fox Creek canal. She and her partner, who own their home outright,  invested their savings in raising and hardening the seawall to protect the property against future floods. 

“All told, we spent about $50,000, which feels like an incredibly large sum of money,” she told Planet Detroit. “So it makes me feel extremely fortunate that we could (do that), but I recognize that that opportunity is not available to my neighbors. It feels unfair that we have individual solutions instead of systemic solutions.”

Michelle Lee, a Jefferson Chalmers resident who was previously director of housing and neighborhood stabilization for the nonprofit community development corporation Jefferson East, Inc., believes some amount of public funding will be needed to help residents repair seawalls, noting that many people in the neighborhood still struggle to afford things like furnaces after the widespread basement flooding in 2021 destroyed many appliances.

Citations for missing or poorly maintained seawalls point to the difficulties of addressing the issue. According to records obtained by Planet Detroit, the city ticketed 23 properties for inadequate seawalls in early 2021. Johnson from BSEED said just four properties have since been brought into compliance.

Meanwhile, the development of affordable housing in the neighborhood is on hold.

“Every project going up in Detroit has to use some type of federal money,” Lee said. Community Development Block Grants and Home Investment Partnership funds offered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development contribute to many such projects. However, an executive order previously directed federally funded development to avoid floodplains.

A special assessment district, a levy to pay for improvements that benefit a specific area, is another option for generating funds for seawall repairs that several residents expressed support for. In 2022, officials in Midland and Gladwin counties approved a SAD for certain properties to repair dams that were damaged in the 2020 flood. Although such a plan in Jefferson Chalmers would compel some residents to pay for improvements to someone else’s property, it could be a net benefit for everyone who lives in the floodplain. 

 Johnson said the city would neither advocate for nor oppose a special assessment district.

An uncertain future

One shortcoming of FEMA’s flood maps is that they’re based on past data. Richard Rood, a climate scientist at the University of Michigan, said that the practice of using historical averages to calculate risk is no longer working.

“How quickly things are changing is something that we don’t appreciate,” he said. “Right now, each 10-year period is exhibiting a statistically different climate than the previous 10-year period.”

And while climatic extremes could produce both exceptionally wet and dry periods, Rood predicts the “next few decades are very wet.” This aligns with data from the last few decades showing most of the eastern U.S. getting more precipitation as the West gets drier.

If enforcing seawall requirements proves unworkable, city and state leaders could ask FEMA for assistance in relocating residents away from the floodplain. 

Voluntary buyout programs as part of a “managed retreat” process for moving people away from areas likely to be impacted by climate-fueled disasters have reduced the flood risk for many in other regions. 

But the FEMA buyout program has also been criticized for facilitating “white flight” on account of its tendency to move white residents away from racially diverse neighborhoods to majority-white areas. For now, Johnston said the city of Detroit is not considering asking for such a buyout.

“You can’t put a price tag on this neighborhood,” Grannum said. “You come here, you’re still in the city, and it’s quiet. You can experience nature, and it’s on the water in the city of Detroit.”

Lee worries about the neighborhood’s older residents getting pushed out due to expenses associated with flood insurance, seawalls, and cleaning up from floods and basement backups. They may be able to sell their homes for high prices, but Lee said that still won’t offset the costs of moving and studies show the financial benefits of aging in place. 

She added that her older neighbors could also lose a sense of community and means of finding support if needed.

“People want to stay here,” she said. “They raised their kids here; they know their neighbors…you need those types of connective tissues.”

Meanwhile, de Beaufort is questioning her decision to invest in the neighborhood. 

“The public will in our community is to have a beautiful neighborhood that enjoys this amenity of the water,” she said. “But I don’t know if the political will is there to address this systemically, and that’s disappointing.” 

Climate costs imperil Detroit’s Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

At the junction of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa, there’s a place called Reno Bottoms, where the Mississippi River spreads out from its main channel into thousands of acres of tranquil backwaters and wetland habitat.

For all its beauty, there’s something unsettling about the landscape, something hard to ignore: hundreds of the trees growing along the water are dead.

Billy Reiter-Marolf, a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, calls it the boneyard. It’s a popular spot for hunting, fishing and paddling, so people have begun to take notice of the abundance of tall, leafless stumps pointing to the sky.

“Visitors ask me, ‘What’s going on, what’s happening here?’” Reiter-Marolf said. “It just looks so bad.”

Floodplain forests play a pivotal role in the river ecosystem – creating wildlife habitat, improving water quality, storing carbon and slowing flooding.

But they’re disappearing.

As their name indicates, these forests generally withstand flooding, which happens on the Mississippi every year. In the last few decades, though, they’ve been swamped with high water from long-lasting floods, soaking the trees more than they can stand and causing mass die-offs. And once those taller trees die, sun-loving grasses take over the understory in thick mats that make it nearly impossible for new trees to grow.

Even before high water began to take its toll, the Upper Mississippi River floodplain had lost nearly half of its historical forest cover due to urban and agricultural land use, as well as changes to the way the water flowed after locks and dams were installed in the 1930s. A similar tale is true along the lower Mississippi.

The recent losses are worrying to scientists and land managers – especially since climate change will make extreme flooding a more frequent threat.

There’s money available to make a dent in the problem. The challenge is finding the right solution before things get much worse.

“It’s really difficult to say, ‘Why here? What caused this?’” said Andy Meier, a forester with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “How do you restore it, being confident you won’t just have the same thing happen again?”

High waters hit floodplain forests

The forests on the upper river were historically made up of maple, ash and elm trees. That began to change with the onset of Dutch elm disease, first discovered in the U.S. in the 1930s. Several decades later, the emerald ash borer began to kill ash trees.

“All you’re left with is the maple,” said Bruce Henry, a forest ecologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service. “The maple gets hit with a flood, and you know, boom chicka. You’ve got a big dead forest.”

Most places on the river don’t look as bad as Reno Bottoms. There are still many trees in the floodplain, and the average person may not notice that much is wrong.

But losses can add up quickly. According to a 2022 report on ecological trends on the upper Mississippi, forest cover along the stretch of the river from Minnesota down to Clinton, Iowa had decreased by roughly 6% between 1989 and 2010. Its next segment, which bottoms out before St. Louis, had lost about 4% of forest in that time.

In some spots, those losses have escalated. Along the river between Bellevue and Clinton, Iowa, for example, forest cover dropped nearly 18% between 2010 and 2020, said Nathan De Jager, who researches the upper river’s floodplain forests for the U.S. Geological Survey.

Though it was a wet decade overall, a massive flood in 2019 caused the majority of damage, particularly in areas where the river forms the border between Wisconsin and northern Iowa, De Jager said. That flood was unusual not just for its intensity but for its duration – some trees were partly submerged for 100 days or more.

In 2020, when Reiter-Marolf was conducting a forest inventory in a stretch of floodplain near Harpers Ferry, Iowa, 35% of the trees there were dead.

It’s pretty clear that excess water is causing forest loss, De Jager said. What exactly is driving the high water isn’t as well sorted out.

But climate change, as well as changes in agricultural and urban land use, are likely factors. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, which can produce more intense rainfall. And that water is running off the landscape faster than it used to. One example De Jager gave is the use of drainage tiles – networks of underground pipes that suck excess water out of soil. The practice can increase crop yields for farmers, but it also sends water more quickly to the nearest river or stream. 

High water is hurting forests at both ends of the life cycle, killing adult trees as well as the seedlings struggling to grow up in the understory. And it’s triggered some other unexpected consequences, too – when the water is high, beavers can reach parts of trees they weren’t tall enough to gnaw off before.

Add to that the threats of tree diseases and invasive plants, and the distress signals are clear.

“It’s hard to pinpoint which of these stressors are the most important ones,” said Lyle Guyon, a terrestrial ecologist at the National Great Rivers Research and Education Center. “But the fact that we’ve got so many of them piled on top of each other, all happening at the same time, is certainly not helping.”

Forest loss degrades habitat, water quality, flood control

Unlike the wildfires that burn through forests and homes out west, forest loss in the Mississippi River floodplain doesn’t impact very many people’s day-to-day lives, Meier said.

But it is impacting the many creatures that call that floodplain home.

In the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley – the historic floodplain of the lower river – a 2020 study estimated that about 30% of today’s land cover is forest, which used to be continuous across the valley. Loretta Battaglia, director of the Center for Coastal Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, said wildlife species loss illustrates the damage.

Battaglia, a Louisiana native who has studied forest restoration in the river valley, pointed to the ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird that once lived in the valley’s floodplain forests but is now considered by many to be extinct.

“The loss of this forest played a huge role in the extinction of that bird that needed a lot of area to fly around and do its thing,” Battaglia said.

The once-endangered Louisiana black bear faced the same hardship, she said, after deforestation fragmented the long stretches of floodplain forest it preferred to roam in.

Beyond providing habitat, trees in the floodplain also capture pollutants that would otherwise run into the river – a critical role along the Mississippi, which suffers from excess nitrogen and phosphorus that collects in the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

The forests along the uppermost parts of the river usually don’t act as flood buffers because there isn’t much private property that abuts them, but that changes downriver in Iowa and Illinois, where big levees protect profitable farmland and towns from the river’s whims.

A study in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association found that the ability of forests to slow water played a big role in reducing levee damage on the lower Missouri River, which feeds into the Mississippi, during the river’s historic 1993 flood. More than 40% of levee failures during the flood occurred in segments of the floodplain with no “woody corridor,” as the study describes it, and nearly 75% occurred in segments where the woody corridor was less than 300 feet wide.

“The federal government could potentially save millions of dollars through management of floodplain forests,” the study’s authors wrote in their conclusion.

It’s unlikely that forest cover along the river will ever return to its original levels, Meier said. For all the usefulness it provides, though, he said “we need to do everything we can” to maintain what’s there now.

How to do that, though, can be a hard question to answer.

Restoration efforts are a learning process

On a hot day in early June, Meier and fellow Army Corps foresters Sara Rother and Lewis Wiechmann planted small trees on Goose Island in La Crosse County. Mud squelched under their feet – a reminder that the river had flooded to near-record levels a month earlier – and cottonwood seeds fell from above like snowflakes.

By Meier’s estimate, none of the falling seeds would successfully grow to be adult trees. The site had too much competing vegetation, much of it reed canary grass, an aggressive species with a thick root layer that prevents trees from being able to establish in the soil.

The young trees they planted, honey locust and river birch, can handle more flooding than some other tree species. Deciding what to plant at each site is a careful calculation of how much water could pool there, how much sun it gets and which animals could potentially come through and chomp away their hard work.

Much of the time, Meier said, it’s trial and error.

A U.S. Geological Survey effort could help eliminate some of that uncertainty. Scientists have modeled flood inundation decades into the future to see which swathes of floodplain forest could thrive, and conversely, which ones will get too wet to survive.

De Jager’s team recently completed modeling for Reno Bottoms. Next year, the Army Corps and other agencies will begin a $37 million habitat restoration project to rehabilitate forests in the area.

The project, funded with federal dollars from the Upper Mississippi River Restoration program, includes close to 550 acres of forest restoration, clearing away aggressive vegetation from the understory and planting new trees. It also includes more than 50 acres where agency staff will raise the elevation of an island to give trees a fighting chance at withstanding future floods.

A little boost in elevation makes a huge difference in the floodplain, Henry said. That’s what they’re betting on.

Now seems to be a good time to do the work. Interest is growing in forest restoration, Meier said, and along with it, funding. In addition to the Reno Bottoms project, the Army Corps and the Fish and Wildlife Service have their own budgets to spend on tree planting, including millions from the Inflation Reduction Act passed last year.

The hard part, of course, is that working with trees is a long game. It could be 20, 50 or 100 years before the seedlings growing today become the mature forests of tomorrow – and in that time, the river could change, too.

It means that foresters will have to work with precision, but also with a little hope that they’re on the right track.

“You don’t really know what the result’s going to be,” Henry said. “You’re setting things in action that you’re not going to see the fruit of.”

The Mississippi River’s floodplain forests are dying. The race is on to bring them back. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Janet Haas two decades ago saw potential in a field of thistle, grass and bushes that Milwaukee County had neglected: Valley Park, nestled between the Menomonee River to the west and homes in one of Milwaukee’s most racially diverse neighborhoods to the east. 

“The county doesn’t have any money, and they haven’t had any money for years,” said Haas, 65, who has lived most of her life in the Near West Side neighborhood, called The Valley or Piggsville. “One day I just decided that the thistles were as tall as I was, and I wasn’t going to take it anymore.”

That meant persuading her mom and a friend to join her in pulling weeds and planting bushes and flowers in the park. The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District built the park as part of a multi-million dollar project to protect the neighborhood from flooding – but, Haas said, it fell into disrepair after its completion in 2001.

Valley Park is now a meticulously maintained community gathering spot — complete with walking and biking trails, a play structure and shade trees. Residents take pride in the tidy park — evidenced by their weekly cleanup events, such as a June 22nd gathering of about a dozen neighbors.  

“We all know each other, we look out for each other,” said Moses Mcknight, a resident of 17 years, as children and adults moved mulch and watered flowers in the park. “We like to fix things up, and keep it that way.” 

But neighbors at the Thursday evening cleanup worry that a $1.2 billion plan to widen the Interstate 94 East-West Freeway corridor will disrupt their gatherings and undo progress.

I-94’s six lanes stretch above the Menomonee River and run south of Valley Park — carrying commuters between downtown Milwaukee and the city’s western suburbs in Waukesha County. Backed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, the Wisconsin Department of Transportation plans to add two lanes to a 3.5-mile segment of the highway. 

Valley Park sits in the middle of the planned expansion. Aside from increasing noise and air  pollution as more cars zip down a wider highway, residents worry the addition of about 29 acres of asphalt — the equivalent of more than twenty football fields — will increase flows of stormwater into The Valley and surrounding flood-vulnerable neighborhoods. 

The state transportation department acknowledges the extra pavement will increase stormwater runoff, but it says it won’t analyze precise effects on runoff until the final design phases of a project expected to break ground in 2025. 

“Who’s going to benefit? Because it’s not going to be us,” Haas said. “The soil is going to be crummier and more polluted. We worked on this park, why should we give it back?”

The transportation department declined to be interviewed for this story. In an unsigned statement emailed by a spokesperson, the department wrote, in part: “We work to avoid or minimize the impacts of infrastructure improvements to the natural and human environment while delivering projects efficiently.”

Flood-prone neighborhoods at center of I-94 expansion

Evers and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation want to expand the interstate to decrease traffic congestion and high crash rates, and repair aging infrastructure in what Evers has called one of the state’s “most congested and dangerous roads.” 

Menomonee Valley Partners, a nonprofit dedicated to redeveloping the Menomonee River Valley, has praised the state’s decision to proceed with the project.

But more than 20% of households near the corridor lack a car, and expansion opponents point to volumes of research showing that widening highways can actually increase traffic volume. They say the expansion will disproportionately disrupt Milwaukee’s Near West Side neighborhoods that the highway shaped six decades ago.  

The expansion cuts through some of Milwaukee’s most flood-vulnerable areas. 

The Valley, Merrill Park and other neighborhoods north of I-94 face “high” vulnerability to flooding, according to recent mapping by the environmental advocacy nonprofit Groundwork Milwaukee, The New School Urban Systems Lab and other partners. Neighborhoods just south of the highway — including parts of the Mitchell Park, National Park and Clarke Square neighborhoods — face “very high” flood vulnerabilities, the research shows. 

The analysis indexes flood vulnerability according to impacts on health, such as how many people lack health insurance and face certain chronic diseases; socioeconomics, including age, income and racial demographics; and housing, including the age of housing stock and portion of households lacking a car.

According to the report, The Valley faces a “medium” flood exposure level, or how likely it is to flood during heavy rainfall. But many surrounding neighborhoods — including Merrill Park to the east and parts of neighborhoods along the Menomonee south of I-94 —  face a “high” risk. The analysis doesn’t consider how the I-94 expansion might affect flooding.

With roughly as many white residents as people of color — mainly Black, Latino and Asian Americans, The Valley is among Milwaukee’s most diverse neighborhoods. Residents of color make up larger majorities in other flood-vulnerable neighborhoods touched by the expansion. Those include Merrill Park (54% Black, 19% Hispanic or Latino) and National Park (7% Black, 73% Hispanic or Latino), according to an analysis of 2020 census data by Marquette Law School research fellow John Johnson. 

Institute for Nonprofit News collaboration partners report that cities throughout the Great Lakes region are experiencing crises resulting from intense rainfall, archaic wastewater systems, crumbling infrastructure and segregated housing, creating a perfect storm of flooding vulnerability and environmental injustice. Rural areas, Indigenous communities and ecosystems in the Great Lakes also face great risk from flooding, endangering hard-fought gains in environmental restoration and community development.

Runoff analysis to come late in project

Understanding precisely how much the I-94 expansion will affect those neighborhoods requires a detailed runoff analysis, said Lawrence Hoffman, senior manager of GIS and Data Services for Groundwork USA, who helped lead the vulnerability mapping project. 

In its Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement published in 2022, the state transportation department acknowledged that adding acres of impermeable pavement will increase stormwater runoff, but said “the water that would be collected from I-94 would be treated better than it is today.” 

The department said it won’t calculate the “quality and quantity” of the runoff — and finalize solutions to address it, such as retention basins or grass-lined ditches — until the project’s final design phase. 

That’s too late to offer such critical information — and long after the project’s public comment period, which closed in January, said Cheryl Nenn, a riverkeeper for Milwaukee Riverkeeper, a self-described “science-based advocacy organization working for swimmable, fishable rivers” around Milwaukee. The state transportation department plans to include feedback from the public comment period in a final Environmental Impact Statement, expected to be released this year.

“It is frustrating, because they acknowledge there’s pollution, they acknowledge that there’s a litany of different things they can do to minimize that — or ameliorate those impacts, but they don’t commit to anything,” she said. 

Milwaukee has strict local rules for minimizing runoff from new projects and redevelopments, but the I-94 expansion, as a state project, isn’t bound by them, Nenn added. That includes a rule that developments above a certain size can’t generate additional runoff. 

“There’s been a lot of really serious work to deal with flood management in the watershed, and that work continues,” Nenn said. “This type of a project is going to make it harder for us to achieve our goals for clean rivers.”

Milwaukee seeks to address stormwater runoff 

The sewerage district has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into flood control along  watersheds, with a goal of reducing sewage overflows and basement backups to zero by 2035. That includes along the Menomonee River, which runs parallel to I-94 before turning south and crossing beneath the highway at Valley Park. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources lists the river as “impaired” due to its high levels of phosphorus, E. coli, polychlorinated biphenyls and other issues. 

The district saw more than 2.1 billion gallons of wastewater discharged in 2020 alone, data show. And a single overflow in 2022 released 750 million gallons of untreated wastewater into local waters. But those volumes remain far below the billions of annual gallons discharged in past decades, including when residents of The Valley and surrounding neighborhoods faced disastrous flooding.   

Peggy Falsetti, 75, has lived in The Valley for 48 years and recalls a time when children would play in standing water as the Menomonee River surged over its banks. 

“I remember waking up one morning and the water was all the way up to 39th Street,” she said.

After flooding in 1997 and 1998 damaged about 130 homes around The Valley, the sewerage district spent $12 million to build Valley Park. The department constructed a levee and floodwall where the park meets the Menomonee to protect local homes — one of several projects to curb the Menomonee’s flooding. 

Residents say the Valley Park project has worked to limit runoff. But they worry that widening the highway that looms overhead will reverse some of that progress. No one in the neighborhood will lose their home to the I-94 widening, but the roadway will grow closer to where residents live and play.

Neighborhood concerns about the project stretch beyond flooding. 

While taking a break from guiding neighborhood children through their park upkeep duties, Valley Park’s volunteer master naturalist, Ann Bowe, worried about how the expansion will affect the health of local children. Living near highways — and pollution from cars — can worsen heart and lung disease in kids and teens, according to the American Lung Association. 

“It’s bad enough that we have the freeways that we have here,” Bowe said, gesturing to the road. “But why are we going to spend, what, five years probably building more?”

Milwaukee residents fear more flooding due to planned I-94 expansion   is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Jera Slaughter looks at her backyard with pride, pointing out every feature and explaining how it came to be. The landscaping committee in her apartment building takes such things seriously. But unlike homeowners who might discuss their prized plants or custom decking, Slaughter is describing a beach, one covered in large concrete blocks, gravel, and a small sliver of sandy shoreline that overlooks Lake Michigan. It’s a view worthy of a grand apartment building built on Chicago’s South Side in the 1920s and deemed a national historic landmark.

But repeated flooding has over the years radically remade the private beach. Slaughter has lived in the Windy City long enough to remember when it extended 300 feet. Now it barely reaches 50. Her neighborhood might not be the first place anyone would think of when it comes to climate-related flooding, but Slaughter and her neighbors have been witnesses to a rapid erosion of their beloved shoreline.

“Out there where that pillar is,” she said, pointing to a post about 500 feet away, “that was our sandy beach. The erosion has eaten it away and left us with this. We tried one year to re-sand it. We bought sand and flew it in. But by the end of the season, there was no sand left.”

Recent years have seen high lake levels flood parking garages and apartments, wash out beaches, and even cause massive sinkholes. It’s a growing hazard, one that Slaughter has been desperately fighting for years.

“All things considered, this is our home,” she said.

Lake Michigan has long tried to take back the land on its shores. But climate change has increased the amount of ground lost to increasingly variable lake levels and ever more intense storms. What was once a tedious but manageable issue is now a crisis. The problem became particularly acute in early 2020 when a storm wreaked havoc on the neighborhood, severely damaging homes, flooding streets, and spurring neighbors to demand that City Hall support a $5 million plan to hold back the water.

“We need to be prepared for higher lake levels,” said Charles Shabica, a geologist and professor emeritus at Northeastern Illinois University.

Though Shabica says the erosion in the Great Lakes region won’t be on par with what rising seas will bring to coastal regions, he still notes it’s an issue that Chicago must prepare for.

“We’ll see climate impacts, but I think we can accommodate them,” said Shabica.

Beyond flooding homes, that epic storm opened sinkholes and washed out certain beaches, leaving them eroded and largely unusable. But the people of South Shore refused to give in easily. In the wake of Lake Michigan’s encroaching water, residents have organized their neighbors and prompted solutions by creating a voice so loud that politicians, engineers, and bureaucrats took heed. In 2022, State Representative Curtis Tarver II helped secure $5 million from the state of Illinois to solve the issue.

“For some odd reason, and I tend to believe it is the demographics of the individuals who live in that area, it has not been a priority, for the city, the state, or the [federal government],” Tarver said.

After years of tireless work, folks in this community have convinced the city to study the problem of lakeside erosion to see how bad this damage from climate change will be — and how fast they can fix it.

Slaughter founded the South Side Lakefront Erosion Task Force alongside Juliet Dervin and Sharon Louis in 2019 after a few particularly harsh fall storms caused heavy flooding in the area.

Chicagoans in the predominantly Black and middle-class South Shore had noticed the inequitable treatment of city shoreline restoration projects. Beaches in the overwhelmingly white and affluent North Side neighborhoods received more media coverage of the problem, faster fixes, and better upkeep, according to the group. This disparity occurred despite the fact that South Side beaches have no natural barriers to the lake’s waves and tides, placing them at greater risk of erosion.

“We were watching the news coverage [and] what was happening up north as if we weren’t getting hit with water on the south end of the city,” said Louis.

The threat is undeniable to Leroy Newsom, who has lived in his South Side apartment for 12 years. Despite the fact that another building stands between his home and the lake, he and his neighbors often experience flooding. The white paint in the lobby is mottled with spackle from earlier repairs. During particularly intense deluges, the entryway can become unnavigable. A large storm hit the city on the first weekend in July, inundating several parts of the city and suburbs.

“When we get a rainstorm like we did before, it floods,” he said.

Newsom lives on an upper floor and has not had to deal with the particulars of cleaning up after flooding, but he has noticed it is a persistent issue in the neighborhood.

Louis, Dervin, and Slaughter have spent countless hours tirelessly knocking on doors and even setting up shop near the local grocery store to teach their neighbors about lake-related flooding. They wanted to mobilize people so they could direct attention and money toward solving the issue. They also researched the slew of solutions available to stem the tide of the lake.

“People were making disaster plans, like, ‘What if something happens, this is what we’re gonna do’. And we were looking for mitigation plans, you know. Let’s get out in front of this,” said Louis.

Solutions can look different depending upon the area, but most on the South Side mirror the tools engineers have used for years to keep the lake at bay elsewhere. What makes these approaches a challenge is how exposed the community is to Lake Michigan in contrast to other neighborhoods.

“South Shore is uniquely vulnerable,” said Malcolm Mossman of the Delta Institute, a nonprofit focusing on environmental issues in the Midwest. “It’s had a lot of impacts over the last century, plus, certain sections of it have even been washed out.”

The shoreline throughout the city is dotted with concrete steps, or revetements, and piers that extend into the lake to prevent waves from slamming into beaches. It also has breakwaters, which run parallel to the shoreline and are considered one of the best defenses against an increasingly active Lake Michigan.

“The best solution that we’ve learned are the shore parallel breakwaters,” said Shabica. “And we make them out of rocks large enough that the waves can’t throw them around. And the really cool part is it makes wonderful fish habitat and wildlife habitat. So we’re really improving the ecosystem, as well as making the shoreline inland a lot less vulnerable.”

Shabica also mentions that this isn’t a new solution. The Museum Campus portion of the city, which extends into the lake and includes the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Adler Planetarium, used to be an island before engineers decided to connect it to the shoreline in 1938.

The main component of the plan to help reduce repeated flooding in the neighborhood is to install a breakwater around 73rd Street using the funding Tarver helped earmark for the issue, according to Task Force co-founder Juliet Dervin. This solution would help prevent the types of waves and flooding that damage streets, most notably South Shore Drive, which is the extension of DuSable Lake Shore Drive. Past damage to the streets has rerouted city buses that run along South Shore Drive and interrupted the flow of traffic.

One local resident installed a private breakwater at her own expense following the 2020 storm, just a few blocks from Slaughter’s house, and it has tempered some effects of intense storms and flooding. But since this breakwater is smaller, surrounding areas are still vulnerable. Breakwaters can range from a few hundred thousand dollars to millions of dollars, depending on size and other factors.

Despite funding now being allocated to fix the issue and government attention squarely focused on lakefront-related flooding there are still hurdles to overcome.

Both the Army Corps of Engineers and the Chicago Park District are in the middle of a three-year assessment of the shoreline to determine appropriate fixes for each area. The study will finish in 2025, decades after the last study of this kind was conducted in the early 1990s. This gives Slaughter pause.

“If I tell you this continuous erosion has been going on for such a long time, then you would have to know, they have looked into it and studied it from A to Z,” she said. “What do you mean, you don’t have enough statistics? We’ve done flyovers and all kinds of things. People who’ve been here filming it, when the water jumps up to the top of the building, they’ve seen it slam into things.”

For her, the damage has been clear but the prolonged period of inaction and lack of attention from outside groups means a shorter window to implement fixes. Slaughter sees this as a fundamental flaw in how we approach issues stemming from the climate crisis.

“The philosophy,” she said, “is repair, not prevent.”

South Side Chicago neighbors fight Lake Michigan’s erosion and flooding is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This summer’s Independence Day weekend was meant to be a historic moment for Chicago, featuring the first-ever NASCAR street race with cars speeding through the city’s downtown. But these plans were partially derailed as history was made for another reason.

Record rainfall inundated city streets, flooded underpasses and swamped more than 2,000 basements including many with sewage. Like many climate disasters, the flooding disproportionately impacted the city’s most vulnerable, such as immigrants and communities of color.

The swollen Chicago River’s flow was reversed, allowing stormwater and untreated sewage to pour into Lake Michigan, the drinking water source for millions. Mayor Brandon Johnson, who lives on the city’s West Side, which was hit hard by the flooding, described the disaster as a sign of climate change and a harbinger of things to come.

As this six-part collaboration will highlight, cities throughout the Great Lakes region face similar crises, with archaic wastewater systems, crumbling infrastructure and segregated housing creating a perfect storm of flooding vulnerability from sources that range from excessive rain and overflowing rivers to lake storm surges and sewage system flooding. Rural areas, Indigenous communities and ecosystems in the Great Lakes also face severe risk from flooding, endangering hard-fought gains in environmental restoration and community development. In each instance, environmental justice issues go hand in hand with flooding risks, and partnerships with impacted communities are key to finding solutions.

Bipartisan Infrastructure Law brings opportunity

In June, the Biden administration announced sweeping climate resilience initiatives that include reducing flood risk, “supporting and learning from tribal communities” and advancing environmental justice.  

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act include funding to address climate change and bolster resilience in coastal areas including the Great Lakes. The Inflation Reduction Act includes a $575 million National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) project to assist these communities with “natural infrastructure,” carrying out “community-led relocation” and otherwise protecting against extreme climate impacts, in keeping with the administration’s Justice40 Initiative mandating at least 40% of investments go to disadvantaged communities. 

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law also includes $11.7 billion — on top of existing base funds — for the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, which offers below-market-rate loans and some federal grants to upgrade wastewater treatment infrastructure. This is especially important to deal with combined sewer systems that carry both stormwater and sewage and become overwhelmed during heavy rain, causing sewage to bubble up into basements and necessitating sewage releases into rivers and lakes.   

Basement flooding from overburdened sewage systems is not covered by the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which provides affordable flood insurance, produces flood-risk maps and mandates flood-related zoning and building codes for the nearly 23,000 communities covered by the program. 

“It would be unrealistic to expect FEMA to map areas that would be vulnerable to urban (sewer system) flooding because they’d have to have perfect information about (cities’) storm sewage systems, and frankly most cities don’t have that information themselves,” says Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

So residents dealing with devastating basement flooding that plagues Chicago, Detroit and many other Great Lakes cities during heavy rains are left struggling with a patchwork of city programs and private insurance to deal with the health and financial implications.  

Calls to prioritize flooding resilience

Community leaders and other experts say funding and initiatives such as those created by recent federal legislation must be deployed strategically and equitably to prepare the Great Lakes region to better withstand flooding, while all levels of government must prioritize resilience and aid for flooding survivors. This includes revamping the NFIP, reforming city and state policies on flood preparedness and relief, and investing in green infrastructure.

And it is crucial to make sure the communities most affected by flooding have leadership roles in developing and implementing policy.

“Authentic community engagement starts from the ideation stage all the way through to implementation” of policy, says Crystal M.C. Davis, vice president of policy and strategic engagement for the Alliance for the Great Lakes, a nonprofit Great Lakes protection organization. “It’s imperative if we are seeking to be equitable that we invite community representatives to be at the table from the very beginning of these conversations.” 

But Milwaukee residents say state officials have treated community input as an afterthought as they advance a $1.2 billion highway project that could cause more flooding.

As Wisconsin Watch reports, the state is expanding the I-94 highway and the added pavement will likely cause more stormwater runoff. The surrounding neighborhoods that are at risk for flooding are disproportionately home to people of color. The state transportation department acknowledges up to 29 acres of new pavement could cause problems, but the department won’t analyze the precise impacts until the final design stages of the project.

Industrial pollution adds to flood risks

In some ways, the Great Lakes region is well-positioned to withstand climate change, and even reap some benefits. The region has an abundance of available freshwater, and longer growing seasons could have some benefits for agriculture. 

But flooding is among the dire threats that climate change does pose in the region. And the social and economic impacts of flooding could be exacerbated if more people and businesses move to the Great Lakes as a refuge from extreme effects of climate change elsewhere.

The Great Lakes region historically has been home to heavy industry, with countless factories, steel mills and power plants located on lakes and rivers. This legacy poses particular risks, as flooding can spread toxic contamination into communities and drinking water sources.

“The challenges are especially prevalent along the Great Lakes because industry has long operated on the shoreline in order to have access to water,” says Howard Learner, executive director of the Environmental Law & Policy Center (ELPC). “That’s frankly different than most other regions. If you look at the West Coast or East Coast, shoreline property is largely used for residential activities combined with ports and marinas. In addition, the Great Lakes are freshwater — increasingly a scarce domestic and global resource.” So the stakes are arguably higher if flooding contaminates that water.

In its 2022 report “Rising Waters,” the ELPC notes that while Great Lakes water levels have always fluctuated, climate change is driving more extreme highs and sometimes lows. The six-foot swing between a record low monthly average level in 2013 and a close-to-record high in 2020 is “unprecedented,” the ELPC report says, and new record highs are likely in coming years.

Drew Gronewold, associate professor at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan, notes that warmer temperatures mean increased evaporation from the Great Lakes, which can modulate water levels, but warmer temperatures also increase precipitation. If a climate event like a polar vortex curbs evaporation, then lake water levels can rise drastically. 

“The ocean is getting warmer, the atmosphere is getting warmer, the oceans are evaporating more and the atmosphere can carry more of that water to the Great Lakes” in the form of precipitation, he notes. Meanwhile the Great Lakes can flood surrounding communities even without high water levels, as more intense windstorms create powerful waves. 

“Whether the water levels are high or not, the Great Lakes can be rockin’” during storms, Gronewold says. “You can have 20-foot waves. We have evidence that through climate change, these storms are getting more intense.”

Along miles of Chicago’s lakefront, such storms mean trouble for homes, businesses and roads. Between 1996 and 2014 the Army Corps of Engineers spent more than half a billion dollars bolstering eight miles of Chicago shoreline, the ELPC report notes, yet during 2019–2020’s high water levels, waves caused half a billion dollars in damage. 

As Grist reports, in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, a century-long battle with the lake has worsened with climate change. A catastrophic storm in 2020 had devastating consequences, causing flooding in homes, large sinkholes and washed-out beaches. In the wake of Lake Michigan’s encroaching waters, residents of the lakefront neighborhood have organized to prompt solutions, and created a voice so loud that politicians, engineers and bureaucrats have rallied around the group to carve a path forward.

The RainReady program in Chicago also aims to enlist residents in creating green infrastructure like permeable pavement and rain gardens that can reduce flooding in hard-hit neighborhoods, including by revamping vacant lots. As Borderless Magazine reports, the RainReady program has two facets that are inadequate in many other local-level flood mitigation efforts: community leadership and serious funding.

Meanwhile, in Detroit, flooding has been especially problematic in the Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood, a historic area known as “the Venice of Detroit” for its canals and proximity to the Detroit River, Planet Detroit reports. In 2021, FEMA designated parts of the neighborhood as Special Flood Hazard Areas. The city of Detroit has signaled it will fine or litigate against those with defective or missing seawalls, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars to replace or rehab. The financial stress on lower-income residents in the majority-Black neighborhood could accelerate displacement and gentrification. 

“Hard” infrastructure, such as seawalls, is often not the best approach to flood control. Experts often recommend dispersing river waters with “soft” approaches like creating wetlands and slowing down a river’s flow. 

“The solution can’t be trying to put up concrete and steel barriers to cordon off these places; all that does is push the water on someone else,” says Learner. “This is a matter of modernizing our land-use planning and zoning practices to adjust to today’s climate change realities and using the federal climate resilience funds to help ease the transition.”

Climate change makes FEMA flood maps out of date

There is no shortage of data showing how rainfall has increased and storms have become more intense in recent years, attributed to climate change, in the Great Lakes region. 

In the Great Lakes basin, the annual mean temperature was 1.6°F warmer in 1985–2016 than 1901–1960 and annual precipitation was 10% higher in the second time period, with about 35% more rainfall on the four wettest days of the year, the ELPC found in a 2019 analysis.

But nationwide, government agencies have not done enough to incorporate climate change predictions into policy, experts say.                     

FEMA’s flood maps are out of date, experts charge, and the land use standards that are part of the program have not been updated since the 1970s, Moore says. Additionally, in many states, property sellers are not required to disclose past flooding. All of this perpetuates development without adequate preparation for or protection from flooding, critics say.

“There are homes all over the country being built in full accordance with FEMA’s requirements that we know are probably not safe for the long haul,” says Moore with NRDC. “In the Great Lakes region, you have these crazy swings in lake levels which have caused widespread flooding. And rivers and streams feeding into the Great Lakes are often not big rivers, so they can be very flashy” — quickly swelling and flooding. “If a 5-inch [rain]storm is much more likely to occur today than 30 years ago, you’re building for a world that doesn’t exist anymore” by relying on outdated codes.

In response to advocates’ demands, FEMA has launched reforms of its flood insurance and mapping programs, accepting public comments. Among various reforms, advocates want stricter standards for critical infrastructure like medical centers and water treatment plants.

“Right now if you’re building a hot dog stand or a hospital, they’re built to the same standards of protection,” says Moore. “I’d argue one of those is more critical during a flooding disaster. These are long overdue improvements we desperately need FEMA to adopt.”

Flood risks higher in formerly redlined neighborhoods

The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) mapped Chicago-area flood damage payments from public programs from 2003 to 2015, and found lower-income communities on the South and West sides of the city accounted for the most damage.

“During flooding events, the elderly and residents with disabilities or illnesses are most vulnerable, particularly when power outages and transportation disruptions inhibit them from meeting daily needs, such as climate control and medical treatment,” CMAP reported. “Low-income residents may struggle to pay for flood insurance, the clean-up costs and loss of personal belongings, as well as the repairs that could reduce their flood exposure in the future. Property damage from reoccurring flooding can contribute to larger scale disinvestment that is not fully captured in insurance claim or disaster relief data.”

NRDC’s analyses show that lower-value properties tend to suffer proportionally higher flood damages, reflecting the extra vulnerability of lower-income people. And a 2021 study by the real estate firm Redfin found that in Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit and other cities nationwide, flooding risk is higher in formerly redlined and yellowlined communities — where racist lending policies concentrated Black homebuyers in the 1930s through 1960s.

“Americans living in formerly redlined neighborhoods — many of whom are people of color — are more likely than those living in non-redlined neighborhoods to see their homes jeopardized by water damage,” the study said. “Due to decades of disinvestment, formerly redlined neighborhoods aren’t as financially equipped to prepare for and recover from natural disasters, which are becoming increasingly common.”

While redlining was outlawed in 1968, those same neighborhoods still tend to be disinvested and home to Black residents. 

Monica Lewis-Patrick, president and CEO of the community organization We the People of Detroit, says that she knows of “elders still living in homes where they’ve never been able to clean up the feces and wastewater in their basements” from past flooding. “We can’t bifurcate the issues of climate and environmental justice,” she says.

The environmental injustices posed by flooding also play out in other complicated ways.

Sahan Journal reports that Indigenous communities in Minnesota are seeing their traditional wild rice harvests endangered by flooding and rising water levels. Wild rice grows in shallow lakes and rivers, and Tribal Nations have worked hard to restore and maintain wild rice beds. One successful project modulated a dam to lower water levels and let rice thrive again.  But climate change means Minnesota is getting warmer and wetter. Last year, the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa saw their wild rice harvests largely destroyed by spring flooding. 

In all of these situations, as the stories in this collaboration show, there are ways to mitigate the impacts of flooding and help communities prepare and recover, if the communities are directly involved in the solutions.

“If we want to be equitable, this is the time where we hold ourselves accountable,” says Davis, from the Alliance for the Great Lakes. 

She adds that even though the new federal funding prioritizes environmental justice and community participation, much effort is needed to not only bring local leaders to the table but make sure grassroots organizations actually have the capacity to meaningfully participate.

“We have to acknowledge we’re starting at a deficit for a lot of the community groups — they’ve been doing this on a shoestring budget. This is the opportunity for them to really staff up and get the assistance they need, [and] be an integral part of this fight for the long haul.”

Inundation and injustice: Flooding presents a formidable threat to the Great Lakes region is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

A version of this story was first published by Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, a nonprofit news organization that covers Milwaukee’s diverse neighborhoods.

Although Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson has released a plan that would speed up the replacement of lead service lines in the city, one major question remains: Will the money be there? 

Moreover, critics say his plan to replace the lines in even 20 years is too long, although it improves on an earlier 60-year timeline.

Why the concern? Lead exposure can cause brain damage and other physical problems, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. Children under 6 who are exposed to lead have a higher chance of developing lifelong issues, including developmental delays, slowed growth, difficulty in school and lowered IQ. 

Milwaukee aims to replace 66,000 lead service lines

The mayor’s plan differs from a plan laid out by Milwaukee Water Works just shortly before his announcement.

Back then, Brian Rothgery, the communication manager of the Milwaukee Water Works, laid out his department’s plans to Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service (NNS). The goal is to use new federal infrastructure funding to help accelerate the lead service line replacements.   

 Milwaukee still has more than 66,000 service lines that need to be replaced, with a current replacement rate of about 900 lines per year. Almost all lines getting replaced are those that are failing or leaking. About 5,700 lead service lines have been replaced already, according to Milwaukee Water Works.

Milwaukee Water Works Superintendent Patrick Pauly had decided to increase replacements from 500 to 1,000 in year one, Rothgery said in an email before the mayor’s announcement.   

With other factors, this took the per-year replacement rate to 2,200 lead service lines, which would require 30 years to complete.  

But that’s not 3,300 lines a year, nor would that occur in the 20 years the mayor has suggested.  

How pipeline replacement plans differ 

After the mayor’s announcement, Pauly tackled the difference.  

 “Water Works plans to increase the number of lead service line replacements every year until we arrive at an annual pace that puts us on track to replace all of them by 2044,” he said.  

That roughly fits the mayor’s 20-year timeline. Milwaukee Water Works’ 30-year plan took into account funding. So, what changed?

“Establishing a plan to replace LSLs (lead service lines) creates a pathway to accelerate the pace much more quickly in successive years,” Rothgery said. He also sees the possibility that Milwaukee gets an increase in state funding.   

Who will pay to replace lead service lines? 

And therein lies the rub. Will the money be there? Implicit in the mayor’s plan is a big “if.”  

To make the 20-year timeline happen, Milwaukee Water Works “will need to be able to access a steady and sufficient stream of state and federal funds, eliminate the cost-share for residents, and greatly improve our internal vacancy rate of 25%,” Pauly wrote to NNS. 

The internal vacancy rate includes any administrative and utility staffing positions that need to be filled.   

 Then there’s a potential boon for property owners who are now tasked with a share of the cost for replacing lead laterals.  

 Currently, they are expected to pay one-third of the replacement cost, which is $1,592.   

 But consider: Many of these pipes are in some of the city’s most underserved and impoverished neighborhoods. The current cost, even if it is spread over 10 years, acts as a disincentive.  

 Milwaukee is still waiting to hear how much the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and Department of Administration will grant to the city out of the $139 million dollars put aside for upgrades in Wisconsin’s drinking water infrastructure.

Estimated cost to replace pipelines: $630 million 

 Ultimately, Milwaukee will need an estimated $630 million to replace all the lead service lines, Rothgery said.  The homeowner costs might go away, Rothgery explained, if the federal government forgives the principal in loans provided for the work. The city agency hopes that Milwaukee’s Equity Prioritization Plan, which prioritizes which areas get the replacement work first, will help trigger this.  

The equity plan takes into account three factors: the concentration of lead service lines; elevated blood lead levels in children; and the neighborhood’s socioeconomic index score. The socioeconomic index evaluates 17 criteria, encompassing income/employment, housing, education and household factors.   

 The ZIP codes selected for high priority based on these factors include 53205 and 53206 on the North Side as well as areas on the South Side.  

 If the federal money comes as principal-forgiveness loans, they will not have to be paid back. If that happens, the homeowner cost share will be lowered, if not entirely eliminated.  

 But, again, will this happen?  

Milwaukee seeks loan forgiveness

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law grants funds to public transportation efforts and other infrastructure and construction projects. Thanks to the law, funds will be distributed across the state via the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund.   

Rebecca Scott, the environmental loans manager of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, told NNS that although Milwaukee may well qualify for 100% principal forgiveness, there is no guarantee it will receive that total.

This is because federal standards say only 49% of these loans can have their principal forgiven, and the Department of Natural Resources has to balance this percentage with other Wisconsin municipalities that applied for these loans.   

As with Milwaukee’s equity plan, the Department of Natural Resources places more weight on communities with higher population density, higher poverty percentages, higher amounts of lead in water and larger concentrations of children.   

Milwaukee may score score higher than other Wisconsin cities in such an analysis. It is the state’s largest city and is near the top for the proportion of residents who live below the poverty line.  

Scott said: “Milwaukee will be able to receive all the funding they requested; the only question is how much will be principal forgiveness and how much will be low-interest loan.”  

Scott said the city has asked for $6.3 million for water main replacements. Water mains are the larger pipes that bring water to the smaller service lines. There are no lead water mains in Milwaukee.  

Milwaukee is expected to find out about its loan awards by late August.   

Critics express frustrations

Critics note that cities like Detroit never expected homeowners to be burdened with lead service line replacement costs for anything but pipes located within the property. Denver has proposed increasing water rates by 3% to 5% to mitigate the cost.    

Exasperation over any decades-long timeline was apparent at the first town hall on the lead issue in May, co-sponsored by Milwaukee Water Works and the Coalition on Lead Emergency. 

This occurred before the mayor’s announcement.  

“I’m frustrated. I knew about the lead issue 30 years ago. The level of urgency is not there. And I get concerned when we dismiss examples of other cities much like (us) … who are doing things at a much more rapid pace,” said a woman at the meeting who identified herself as a lifelong resident of Milwaukee.   

 Also among the critics of how long it is taking the city to act is Robert Miranda, who started the Freshwater for Life Action Coalition, which partners closely with Get The Lead Out, another organization advocating for lead cleanup.  

 “To remove these pipes in even another 20 years continues to condemn our children and another generation to drinking toxic and tainted lead water,” Miranda said after the mayor’s announcement. “Other cities around the country seem to be moving faster and with much more urgency in removing these pipes.”  

 After the lead crisis in Flint, Michigan, children who were tested in Milwaukee had two or more times the lead levels in their blood than the national average.      

Miranda pointed to the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department’s lead service line replacement plans. Detroit plans to replace 5,000 lead water pipes this year, incrementally increasing the rate to finish replacing all 80,000 lead service lines by 2038.   

Others also expressed frustration at the progress of the lead-line replacement at the last Get the Lead Out assembly on July 8.   

“We put you in power, you need to figure it out,” said Stephani Lohman of Get the Lead Out after giving a presentation on the health risks of lead.

She and the coalition expressed the need to continue to apply pressure to city officials to accomplish their goals as well as set new ones to accomplish a Biden-Harris administration goal to remove all lead service lines in the U.S. in the next decade.   

Make your voice heard

Milwaukee residents will have other opportunities to hear updates and share their perspectives. 

Pauly is asking the community to attend future Milwaukee Water Works town hall meetings, which will occur in neighborhoods most affected.     

 To find out more about Milwaukee’s lead service line replacement, dangers of lead, and reducing your risk, visit this page.     

For info on lead-safe kits, visit the City of Milwaukee’s page. Or check out the Coalition on Lead Emergency page.   

To find out if a service line contains lead or has been replaced, visit this page or call Milwaukee Water Works customer service at 414-286-2830.    

Cost questions swirl as Milwaukee aims to replace remaining 66,000 lead pipelines is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is part of the series A Changing Basin from the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk. Take a quick survey and let us know how extreme weather is affecting you.

A hot summer and dry spring have brought drought to a large part of the Midwest.

The lack of moisture has far-reaching implications, including on agriculture and water levels on the country’s largest rivers.

“Rain is essential — it is where drought starts and ends,” said Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford. “As we were going into drought from April through June, we just weren’t getting rain.”

The situation highlights the complexity of exiting drought when a state or region can slip into it relatively easily, Ford said. Rainfall across parts of the Midwest in recent weeks is helpful, but it may not be enough to alleviate the dryness, he said.

Different kinds of rain

One complicating factor is the changing climate, which is causing increasingly sporadic rain events that can drop inches of rain in only a few hours when they do come, said Jason Knouft, a biology professor at St. Louis University who studies the impacts of human activities on freshwater resources.

“Those seem to be more common than these long soaking rains,” he said. “When we get these intense rainfall events, you’ve got a lot of water hitting the landscape really quickly.”

The Northeast — especially Vermont — and parts of western Kentucky both experienced intense rain events this month, which spurred significant flooding. The dry ground cannot absorb all the water that comes in these kinds of storms, Knouft said.

“When you dump a huge amount of water onto a surface, even if you’re dumping it onto soil, there’s only so much the soil can absorb,” he said.

The rest runs off, meaning a local watershed is capturing only a fraction of all of the rain that fell, Ford said. He points to the St. Louis region as an example, which is close to the anniversary of historic rainfall last year.

The nine inches that fell in late July helped propel last summer to rank as the sixth wettest of all time for St. Louis, even though the region was quite dry beforehand, Ford explained.

“The majority runs off. It’s down the Mississippi, down to the Gulf. It’s gone” he said.

What’s in the ground

Soil conditions also play an important role in drought relief. But what’s growing in the ground isn’t always the best at capturing water, Knouft said.

“We’ve got these row crops that don’t have particularly deep roots,” he said. “So when the rain falls, there’s not as much stability in the soil.”

The water just washes the soil away.

Cover crops, when a field isn’t in active agricultural production, can help soils retain more water from rain, Knouft said. Perennial crops aid, too, because their roots are deeper and maintain the soil integrity, which in turn makes it easier to hold onto water, he added.

Various crops also respond to drought differently. Corn and soybeans can bounce back from early season dryness if given some rain, though current forecasts have some worried about severe crop damage.

Other crops aren’t as resilient on an annual basis, Ford said.

“We’ve seen more widespread impacts to pasture and hay conditions,” he said, explaining that grasses often stop producing when they are dry.

Those pasture lands may not return to productivity until next year, Ford added, which highlights how complicated it can be for an area to get out of drought.

He said if rainfall increases to normal amounts, the Midwest will see relief for corn and soybean crops this season. But it takes much longer for groundwater reserves to recover from being drawn down.

Flow on the nation’s biggest rivers

This year’s drought is also raising concern about low flows on rivers like the Mississippi and Missouri.

“It’s really the third summer in a row where we’ve had some sort of classification of drought in the majority of the basin,” said Mike Welvaert, service coordination hydrologist for the North Central River Forecast Center. “Most of the reservoirs, lakes, and some of the smaller rivers and such just don’t have that much water in them.”

Water is trickling out of those resources, but only the minimum to sustain river flows, Welvaert said. That’s been the case already for weeks, he explained.

Already some states have issued water restrictions because of the prolonged dryness, Welvaert added.

“The fact that we’re so low, so early in the year,” Welvaert said, “…that is where our concern lies.”

It comes ahead of the Mississippi River’s natural low point of the year in the fall.

“It’s the lowest time for rivers because it’s the cumulative effect of all the evaporation that happened in the summertime,” Ford said, in addition to surface water being used for irrigation of lawns and agriculture.

The drought conditions are affecting the Mississippi’s levels because there’s less overall water in the ground that contributes to the base flow in the river and its tributaries, Welvaert said.

In more normal springs and summers, precipitation falls frequently and percolates into the ground, sometimes deep into the soil, he explained. It can then return to the surface as a spring or another source of groundwater, Welvaert added.

“That’s how most of the rivers maintain their certain level of water even when it’s dry out,” he said. “They’re getting water from underground sources.”

But the dryness across the upper Midwest and Great Plains means the top layer of soil is soaking up rain when it does fall, Welvaert said.

“We just don’t have any additional water to send downstream even when it does rain,” he said. “The same thing is happening in the Missouri Basin.”

Both Welvaert and Ford stressed that the Mississippi’s fate for this year isn’t sealed yet. The weather patterns can still shift and produce a string of thunderstorms that drop consistent rain across the entire basin, Welvaert said.

“We really need more prolonged rainfall, but we can keep it at bay if we get the right amount of rain in the right places at the right times,” Welvaert said. “We’re still hoping for some of that to happen.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Most of the Midwest is in drought – and there’s no simple way to get out of it is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is co-published in partnership with Door County Knock, an independent, nonprofit news organization covering Door County, Wisconsin. Subscribe to its newsletter here. 

Several months ago, longtime Door County commercial fisherman Charlie Henriksen was at a conference with the secretary of Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources. The secretary ended the event by asking everyone at the table what keeps them up at night.

“I told him PFAS,” said Henriksen, owner of Henriksen Fisheries. (Disclosure: Henriksen also is a Knock donor.)

PFAS are on the minds of many fishermen and fish eaters these days. Short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances and nicknamed “forever chemicals” because of their persistence in the environment, PFAS are a group of thousands of manufactured chemicals that resist water, oil, and heat. Teflon and Scotchguard are among the more famous household products that have used them.

Some common PFAS are associated with health problems including cancer, high cholesterol, and immune, developmental, and reproductive harm, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

They are also just about everywhere — including in rain, remote lakes and rivers, and every fish the DNR has tested for them in Lake Michigan.

“We consider PFAS ubiquitous,” said Sean Strom, a fish contaminant specialist at the DNR.

As new scientific understandings of PFAS emerge, the EPA is ramping up its control of the chemicals. This March, the agency proposed its first-ever nationwide, legally enforceable limits on PFAS in drinking water, including a reduction in the acceptable level of PFAS consumption through any source by a factor of 200.

The EPA’s proposal has not yet been approved, and local fish testing data from the DNR is still limited. But if regional and state regulators were to follow the EPA’s proposal and adjust their recommendations to the same degree, the DNR’s data suggest that most bay of Green Bay fish would be deemed unsafe to eat.

For Henriksen, the worrisome chemicals represent the latest of many environmental threats he’s faced since he started fishing in the county in the 1970s, including PCB and mercury contamination and invasive mussels that devastate the freshwater food chain. 

“I promote our fish as healthy, and I certainly want them to be as healthy as anything else out there,” he said. “I think they are, but when that worm turns, it’s going to be difficult.”

A study published earlier this year in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research found high levels of PFAS in wild freshwater fish across the United States compared to the levels in fish sold at grocery stores, including farm-raised and wild-caught ocean fish. The highest levels were in Great Lakes fish. DNR data obtained by Knock showed levels of PFAS in fish from Lake Michigan and the bay of Green Bay that were generally in line with the national study.

The Environmental Research study concluded that people who regularly eat freshwater fish may have some of the highest PFAS blood levels of anyone in the country. The study received widespread media coverage and raised fears that fish from lakes and rivers might not be safe to eat.

Henriksen and others in Door County’s fishing industry, concerned about the possible effects of PFAS and ways to regulate them on fishing, counter that there’s not yet enough local data to draw conclusions.

“There needs to be a lot more research before we say, don’t eat fish,” Henriksen said.

Carin Stuth, owner of Baileys Harbor Fish Company, said she shares Henriksen’s concern.

“I think it’s too early for us to generalize a national study on what the fish population is in the Great Lakes or the bay of Green Bay,” said Stuth, whose family has been fishing in the area since the mid 1800s.

She emphasized the importance of water quality, but cautioned that the DNR data is not extensive or nuanced enough to base fishery decisions on.

“We’re still in a fact-finding stage,” she said.

Digging into data

David Andrews, a chemist at the advocacy organization Environmental Working Group, oversaw the Environmental Research study. He said the study’s goal was to understand how much freshwater fish may be contributing to PFAS exposure in those who eat it. To do so, he and his coauthors tapped into a trove of EPA data that had not been previously analyzed. The data set included 1,968 fish from streams, rivers, and lakes across the country that the EPA tested for PFAS between 2013 and 2015. More recent data was not available, Andrews said.

“We were surprised by how incredibly high the levels were,” he said. “Even a few servings of freshwater fish could be a major source of exposure to PFOS, in particular, over the course of a year for someone.”

PFOS is a type of PFAS that has been the focus of many studies and regulatory efforts. It is the chemical that the DNR bases its PFAS fish advisories on, and one of two PFAS chemicals that Wisconsin has set drinking water standards for.

Although PFOS production has been phased out in the U.S., the chemical remains widespread in the environment because it does not break down easily. It also is still present in some imported products and is almost impossible to remove once dispersed. (The entire family of PFAS chemicals has not yet been phased out in the U.S., but prominent manufacturer 3M has said it will stop making and using them by 2025.)

Andrews and his coauthors found a median level of 6.6 parts per billion (ppb) of PFOS in fish from US streams and rivers. The median PFOS level in Great Lakes fish was almost double that, at 12.4 ppb. By contrast, the median PFOS level in an FDA study of 66 fish samples available at grocery stores was below detection. Health advisories that the EPA released in June 2022 suggest that virtually no amount of PFAS is safe for consumption. Andrews’s team did not find that fish higher on the food chain accumulated more of the chemicals, as is true for mercury and PCBs.

“What I’ve seen is that the levels are more an indication of the water and food that the fish has been consuming, but not the species,” he said. Research on the topic is ongoing.

EPA data from waters near Door County is sparse. The EPA sampled burbot and walleye off Jacksonport, with levels clocking in at 11.4 ppb and 11.5 ppb of PFOS respectively. The agency also sampled walleye and white sucker at four locations in the bay of Green Bay, with levels ranging from 9.1 to 18 ppb of PFOS.

An emerging picture of PFAS in the bay of Green Bay

Data collected by the DNR is somewhat more detailed. Strom, the DNR fish toxicologist, said the agency has a regular fish contaminant monitoring program that targets mercury, PCBs, and a range of PFAS in the bay of Green Bay and Lake Michigan. Routine testing for PFAS started in 2017.

The agency has so far tested 162 fish in the bay of Green Bay and its tributaries for PFAS, finding PFOS levels from .45 ppb to 122 ppb. The median level was 9.96 ppb. In Lake Michigan and its tributaries, it has tested 55 fish, with PFOS levels from 1.5 ppb to 81.5 ppb. The median level was 16 ppb.

Stuth, the Baileys Harbor Fish Company owner, pointed out that very few of those fish were whitefish, the region’s most important commercial species. The DNR collected just five whitefish in the bay of Green Bay and another six in the lower reaches of the Peshtigo and Menominee Rivers. The agency did not collect any whitefish in Lake Michigan.

“To test five fish?” she said. “That’s really not a good subset.”

Stuth called for a well-planned independent study, sponsored by both Michigan and Wisconsin with input from the fishing sector, to investigate the issue more deeply.

Scientists including University of Wisconsin-Madison chemist Sarah Balgooyen have already begun investigating PFAS in the bay’s water. In January, she and fellow UW-Madison scientist Christina Remucal published a study that used chemical “fingerprinting” to prove for the first time that an underground plume of contamination from the Tyco Fire Products manufacturing and testing facility in Marinette is flowing into the bay. PFAS are the active ingredient in the firefighting foams the company has made at the site since the 1940s. Tyco stopped testing the products outside in 2017, but the plume remains a major source of PFAS pollution, Balgooyen said.

The study didn’t determine how far the groundwater plume reaches or how much of the bay’s contamination it accounts for. Balgooyen said the plume is significant near Marinette, but by the time it reaches Door County, it is likely quite diluted. Little testing has yet been done on the bay’s open water.

Overall, however, Balgooyen said that levels of PFAS in the waters of the bay and Lake Michigan are low. The reason that levels in fish are nevertheless high is that PFAS has a “sticky” chemical structure, she said. Fish and other organisms can’t excrete it, so it builds up in their bodies.

Unfortunately, current technology can’t remove PFAS from the bay and lake. That’s why “the goal of most environmentalists is to stop the source,” Balgooyen said.

Making sense of the numbers

So is it safe to eat fish caught in waters off Door County? One way to answer that question is by referring to fish consumption advisories issued by the DNR. Currently, the DNR has two PFAS advisories for fish caught in the bay of Green Bay and none in Lake Michigan. Rainbow smelt and rock bass caught in the bay should be limited to one meal per week, the agency says.

In Green Bay, most fish consumption advisories are issued for PCBs because of historic pollution from paper mills in the Fox River Valley (a massive cleanup ended in 2020). The DNR’s Strom said that those advisories are typically “more protective than any suggested by the PFAS data.” In other words, if the PCB advisories didn’t exist, there might be more PFAS advisories.

Fish advisories aren’t static, however; they change as scientific understandings of what is safe to eat evolve. The DNR bases its PFAS advisories on guidance from the Great Lakes Consortium for Fish Consumption Advisories, a group of professionals from all Great Lakes states and Ontario. In 2019, that group reviewed the scientific literature on PFOS to come up with suggested limits, which range from unlimited consumption of fish with up to 10 ppb of PFOS to zero consumption of fish with more than 200 ppb of PFOS.

Most Lake Michigan and bay of Green Bay fish the DNR has tested sit comfortably in the unlimited to one-meal-per-week range. The consortium’s report noted that because PFOS doesn’t concentrate in fat, trimming fish before cooking won’t lower exposure. It also noted that for someone who eats fish with PFOS levels warranting an advisory, that fish will likely be their main source of exposure to the chemical. Specifically, the consortium’s report includes calculations that eating one fish meal per month from a body of water with a one-meal-per-month advisory would, on average, account for 93% of PFOS exposure.

To calculate its limits, the consortium used a figure from the EPA called a “reference dose.” The reference dose is the amount of a given substance that the EPA believes people can consume every day without experiencing negative health effects over their lifetime.

The consortium issued its recommendations in 2019, based on the EPA’s reference dose for PFOS at the time. But in March of this year, when the EPA proposed its first-ever national drinking water regulations for PFAS, it lowered the reference dose for PFOS by a factor of 200, based on new understandings of how the chemicals affect health.

It’s not clear if or how this change will impact the DNR’s fish advisories. The EPA’s proposed regulation has yet to be approved, and there’s no guarantee the consortium will reflect the new reference dose directly in updated guidance. If the group did make its recommendations stricter by a factor of 200, the DNR’s sampling data suggest that most fish in the bay of Green Bay could fall into the “do not eat” category.

Strom declined to comment on these potential changes but said in an email that the consortium has formed a working group to look into the issue. He noted that the DNR also takes the many health benefits of eating fish into consideration.

“You have to weigh the pluses and minuses of any contaminant with the beneficial aspects of consuming fish,” he said. “That’s the balancing act.”

So far, the pluses win out for Hans Koyen, the general manager of KK Fiske Restaurant on Washington Island. KK’s prides itself on selling fresh fish caught by owner Ken Koyen, Hans’s father and the last commercial fisherman on the island. Hans said PFAS isn’t yet a big concern for him or his father—or their customers.

“Business is great,” he said. If new fish advisories were issued, he said, he would note them on the menu in the interest of transparency but let customers decide what to eat.

As for fishing, he said, “It’s a total way of life for us, and an income that helps sustain the whole community, because it’s one of the very few things that’s totally local.”

PFAS may pose the next big threat to fishing in Door County is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

Residents of an island polluted with PFAS chemicals have filed claims demanding more than $40 million from a western Wisconsin city they say is responsible for the contamination.

Municipalities across Wisconsin are grappling with pollution from PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. The man-made chemicals are present in a range of products, including cookware, firefighting foam and stain-resistant clothing. The substances don’t break down naturally and have been linked to a host of health issues in humans.

As of June 2021, more than 500 wells in the town of Campbell on French Island tested positive for the chemicals, with some wells registering levels thousands of times higher than federal recommendations.

Attorneys representing hundreds of Campbell residents filed claims against the city of La Crosse in June demanding a total of $42.4 million to compensate them for diminished property value resulting from the contamination, WKBT-TV reported.

The city lies just across the Black River from French Island. The city’s airport is located on the island; the claims allege that firefighting foam used for training at the airport beginning in the 1970s caused the contamination. The claims also allege that the city learned PFAS levels in island groundwater exceeded federal recommendations as early as 2014 but didn’t inform residents.

If the city denies the claims the residents would be free to file a lawsuit. The city’s attorney, listed on the city’s website as Stephen Matty, didn’t immediately return a voicemail seeking comment Friday.

The city sued nearly two dozen chemical companies in 2021 alleging they knew PFAS were toxic since the 1960s. The case was transferred to federal court in South Carolina were it became part of a sweeping lawsuit against PFAS manufacturers involving thousands of plaintiffs, including state and local governments. Several manufacturers have settled portions of the larger case for billions of dollars.

Residents of PFAS-polluted island file $42.4 million in claims against Wisconsin city is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

Wisconsin regulators can’t legally impose environmental regulations on factory farms before they become operational, two farm advocacy groups allege in a lawsuit that could dramatically loosen protections against manure pollution in state waters.

Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state’s largest business group, quietly filed the action in Calumet County Circuit Court in May on behalf of the Wisconsin Dairy Alliance, which advocates for factory farms, and the Venture Dairy Cooperative, which lobbies for farmers.

Peg Sheaffer, a spokesperson for environmental law firm Midwest Environmental Advocates, called the lawsuit “a reckless attempt to dismantle water quality protections in Wisconsin.”

“As (factory farms) continue to proliferate and expand, the amount of manure they produce — and the potential for spills — will only increase,” Sheaffer said in a statement Thursday. “If this lawsuit is successful, it could virtually eliminate any oversight of how (factory farms) dispose of the massive amount of manure they generate. That would be a disaster for rural communities throughout Wisconsin.”

Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce attorneys Scott Rosenow and Nathan Kane didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The farming industry and environmentalists have been locked in a fierce back-and-forth over the regulation of factory farms, defined as farms with at least 1,000 animal units. According to the state Department of Natural Resources, 262 such farms are currently permitted to operate in Wisconsin.

Conservationists say factory farms produce massive amounts of manure that contaminate groundwater, streams and creeks. Industry advocates counter that regulations are too strict and stifle growth.

The battle came to a head two years ago when the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the DNR can impose conditions on factory farms’ water pollution permits to protect the state’s waters. That decision would still stand if the Wisconsin Dairy Alliance and Venture Dairy Cooperative win the Calumet County lawsuit, but it would have little practical effect.

The DNR currently requires factory farms to obtain wastewater permits within 90 days of becoming a factory farm or expanding. The DNR can impose requirements in the permits to protect water, such as requiring the farms to monitor pollution levels in groundwater and implement manure management plans.

The department also can limit the number of animals on the farm through the permit. Last month, it scaled back S&S Jerseyland Dairy’s request to expand from roughly 5,000 cows to 10,000 cows, allowing the operation to add only about 2,400 animals.

The Wisconsin Dairy Alliance and Venture Dairy Cooperative allege in their lawsuit that federal courts in 2005 and 2011 struck down the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to require factory farms to obtain permits before they actually discharge contaminants into navigable waters. Therefore, the DNR’s requirement that factory farms obtain permits before the fact is also invalid because it now conflicts with federal law, they argue.

DNR spokesperson Dana Porter declined to comment on the lawsuit Thursday, saying the agency doesn’t publicly discuss pending litigation.

Groups argue Wisconsin regulators can’t make factory farms obtain preemptive pollution permits is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.