The Heart of the Lakes: Freshwater in the Past, Present and Future of Southeast Michigan
166
The Heart of the Lakes: Freshwater in the Past, Present and Future of Southeast Michigan
166eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781948314060 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2019 |
| Series: | Greenstone Books |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 166 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Where the Water Came From
The Laurentian Great Lakes were formed nearly 20,000 years ago when the earth's climate warmed and the last glacial continental ice sheet retreated. The glacier, up to 2 miles thick, was so heavy and powerful it gouged out the earth's surface to create the lake basins. Meltwater from the retreating glacier filled the newly created basins. Approximately 3,500–4,000 years ago, the Great Lakes attained their modern levels and area.
— National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory
Measured by the span of a human lifetime, the heart of the lakes is ancient. In geological terms, it is an infant. Perhaps five hundred generations have passed since people resettled the Great Lakes watershed following the end of the last glaciations. That translates to approximately 10,000 years, about 0.000002222 percent of the earth's age of approximately 4.5 billion years. Geologically, the glaciers didn't leave yesterday, they left this morning.
The Great Lakes visible from space and maps looked much different when a smothering blanket of ice finally withdrew ten millennia ago. First exposed were Lake Chicago (now southern Lake Michigan) and Lake Erie. Both drained southwest to the Mississippi River. A thousand years after, the young Lake Superior, termed Lake Duluth by scientists, also drained into the Mississippi watershed.
Another two thousand years passed. The land southwest of Lake Erie rebounded from the weight of the departed glacier, blocking the lake's outflow, directing it over what became Niagara Falls, and creating Lake Ontario. The glacier withdrew into Canada, pooling Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior into giant Lake Nippissing. Water levels then fell, creating the three water bodies whose borders closely resemble those we know. Lake Huron continued to drain out via the Ottawa River to the St. Lawrence River until between five and six thousand years ago. Then the fateful happened. As the land to the north and northeast rose, the old outlet of Lake Huron through North Bay was closed off, and the pressure of Lake Huron forced its drainage through what is now the St. Clair River.
Today the St. Clair spills a peak flow of around 230,000 cubic feet per second from a drainage area of 224,000 square miles. At the river's origin its peak velocity can approach four miles per hour, eight times faster than the Ohio River at Pittsburgh. The St. Clair also links with its namesake lake and the Detroit River, placing southeast Michigan at the center of the world's largest freshwater system.
Who were the first Great Lakes explorers and settlers? The first peoples are thought to have arrived from the west a little more than ten thousand years ago. Archaeological evidence demonstrates that a group of aboriginals established a seasonal camp near what is now Traverse City around 8300 BCE. Six thousand years ago they had settled throughout the Great Lakes region. They hunted, fished, grew staples such as corn and squash, and harvested wild rice. Tobacco assumed prominence in tribal cultures, leading by 1000 BCE to tubular smoking pipes.
Water was the neighborhood in which many indigenous villages located. Rivers provided transportation and an abundant food supply. These first peoples mined copper from the Keweenaw Peninsula and Isle Royale. They established sophisticated trading networks reaching hundreds or thousands of miles in all directions.
When Europeans arrived, the heart of the lakes included visible traces of human heritage in mounds built by the indigenous peoples. These mounds were often found along watercourses. Mounds flanked the St. Clair River at what is now Port Huron, and a cluster of four mounds stood along the Detroit River at present-day Fort Wayne. But the largest was the Great Mound of the River Rouge, not far from the Rouge's mouth at the Detroit River. Estimated at two hundred feet long, three hundred feet wide, and twenty feet tall, it was a landmark for the early Europeans. Like almost all of the mounds in the region, it was pillaged and flattened by the new arrivals. Although this mound contained human bones as well as artifacts like arrowheads, not all of the mounds were burial sites. Some contained only pottery, utensils, and weapons.
At the time of European contact in 1620, the population of what is now Michigan totaled about fifteen thousand. The southern half of the Lower Peninsula accounted for about twelve thousand. Both cultures venerated the vast freshwater seas. Containing six quadrillion gallons of water, 18 percent of the available surface fresh water on earth, the Great Lakes are indeed a gift of the glaciers. Annual rainfall and snowmelt supply only 1 percent of the volume of the Great Lakes. The remaining 99 percent of the volume is the legacy of the Ice Age. The small fraction associated with current-day events means the Great Lakes are vulnerable to changes in climate as well as the vagaries of human uses of their water.
Fed by the waters of three of the largest lakes in the world, southeast Michigan's most dramatic natural feature is the water passage constituted by the Detroit and St. Clair Rivers and the lake between them, a natural highway connecting the upper and lower Great Lakes. The hundred-mile adjacent stretch of lake plain from Port Huron to Monroe is intersected by six tributary rivers that all flow eastward into this passage. The sources of these six great inland-originating rivers — the Black, the Belle, the Clinton, the Rouge, the Huron, and the Raisin — shape an "emerald arc" at the fringe of southeast Michigan, with the Detroit River forming the diagonal of the mighty bow.
For southeast Michiganders, water is an integral part of the character of home. Often forgotten because they are embedded in the everyday, water's geography, hydrology, scenery, and history are central to the heart of the lakes and a key to community life. The feel of southeast Michigan is inextricably linked with these waterways. The region's inhabitants would not know where they are without the familiar freshwater landmarks all around them.
CHAPTER 2The Headwaters
She stood on the piazza in the almost paralyzing bitterness, looking down at Blue River. Under that ice it flowed — endomed yet living, breathing; a core of beauty, an indispensable link in these great waterways. Blue River, the one changeless thing in her life ... It was not just a stream marking a boundary line and connecting the Great Lakes waterways. It was a friend who shared the happenings of her days. In the light of the rising sun its awesome wonder could almost still the beat of her heart, and with evening its proud gray face withdrew into a friendly eternity and made of darkness a promise rather than a mystery.
— Mary Frances Doner, Blue River, 1946
The waterways were for the aboriginal peoples a common property — or, perhaps more accurately, the subject of no one's ownership. Instead, the beneficence of creation made it possible for Native Americans to survive, to thrive, and to pass their wisdom on.
When the United States was still newly independent, before millions of people descended on the region in search of a bountiful life, lawmakers made an important policy statement in some ways comparable in values to those of the aboriginal inhabitants. Recognizing the preciousness of the watercourses in the Great Lakes, Congress declared:
The navigable waters leading into the ... St. Lawrence, and the carrying places between the same, shall be common highways and forever free, as well to the inhabitants of the said territory as to the citizens of the United States, and those of any other States that may be admitted into the confederacy, without any tax, impost, or duty therefor.
The waters of southeast Michigan, as of the Great Lakes system, have lived up to the pronouncement of "forever free." As a commons, these waters are for all to use — and for all to guard. Few kayakers, canoeists, or passengers or pilots of motorized pleasure craft are likely aware of the Northwest Ordinance or the public trust doctrine — an element of common law that obligates government to protect the public value of resources such as water that are shared by all — but these legal protections support their freedom to use the St. Clair River. And that is where this narrative begins its journey.
Traveling downstream from the mouth of Lake Huron makes sense not only because this is the direction of the swift current, but also because the early European explorers typically arrived in what is now southeast Michigan not from the south but from the north. The earliest, the French, canoed from Montreal up the Ottawa River, into the Mattawa River, across Lake Nipissing, and into the French River, which empties into Georgian Bay.
Once the voyageurs made their reports, it became obvious to the French government that there was great strategic advantage in controlling the water route from Lake Huron to Lake Erie. In summer 1701, a one-hundred-man party under Sieur Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac found passage through the St. Clair River. Departing the French River and moving along the shore of Georgian Bay, they made their way steadily southward, "over to Lake Huron, down through the St. Clair River and lake, and on to the lower river, where [Cadillac] built Fort Pontchartrain and founded the city of Detroit," more properly "La Ville d'Etroit" — city of the strait. Cadillac came for advantage and wealth. He became enraptured with the locale and its "sweet water." He appreciated not just the site of the new city, but the entire Huron-to-Erie corridor:
Detroit is a river lying north-north-east towards Lake Huron and south-southwest to the entrance of Lake Erie. According to my reckoning it will be about 25 or 26 leagues in length and it is navigable throughout so that a vessel of 100 guns could pass through it safely.
Towards the middle there is a lake which has been called St. Claire, which is about 30 leagues in circumference and 10 leagues in length. This lake is scarcely noticed, on account of several large and fine islands which form various passages or channels which are no wider than the river. It is only for about four leagues that the channel is wider ...
At the entrance to Lake Huron the lands are brown and well wooded; a vast and grand prairie is seen there which extends to the interior of the lands on both sides of the river up to Lake St. Claire, there are fewer prairies than elsewhere.
All the surroundings of this lake are extensive pasture lands, and the grass on them is so high that a man can scarcely be seen in it.
This river or strait of the seas is scattered over, from one lake to the other, both on the mainland and on the islands there, in its plains and on its banks, with large clusters of trees surrounded by charming meadows; but these same trees are marvelously lofty, without nodes and almost without branches until near the top, except the great oak.
On the banks and round about the clusters of timber there is an infinite number of fruit trees, chiefly plums and apples. They are so well laid out that they might be taken for orchards planted by the hand of a gardener.
The bounty and the beauty and the waters would distinguish what is now southeast Michigan from all other places on Earth.
A potential northern put-in point for a kayaker or canoeist seeking to travel the St. Clair River corridor is a small, lakeshore park about five miles north of Port Huron. Coincidentally, offshore from this public space, a disaster associated with the fresh water of southeast Michigan took place. On the afternoon of Saturday, December 11, 1971, a powerful explosion reverberated through a tunnel excavated six miles out beneath Lake Huron. The blast scattered a crew of forty-three men working one mile from the head of the tunnel, 250 feet below the surface.
A volunteer firefighter from a nearby department who arrived early on the scene said, "It looked like an H-Bomb hit that tunnel." One of the workers, twenty-four-year-old Larry Verner, told a reporter that the explosion's shock wave "picked me up and threw me about 10 feet through the air." He was one of the fortunate. Verner's father and brother were not. Working farther down the tunnel and closer to the source of the blast, both were killed. The explosion hurled a fifteen-ton piece of equipment one-third of a mile. In all, twenty-two men, ranging in age from twenty to sixty-three, perished. It was one of the worst workplace disasters in Michigan's history.
What killed these men, and what had they been doing?
They were constructing an intake tunnel to serve metropolitan Detroit and northern suburbs with a new source of clean, fresh drinking water. In the 1950s, envisioning expansion of the population into the foreseeable future, planners concluded that an intake supplementing the existing one in the Detroit River could support the northern zone of the Detroit Water and Sewerage District service area, including Flint. The waters of Huron were tantamount to gold, said the head of the district, because they were so clean.
Detailed planning began in 1962 for a sixteen-foot-diameter intake tunnel, more than two hundred feet below the lakebed, and drawing up to 1.2 billion gallons of raw water per day from the lake. Construction began in 1968. It proceeded smoothly, for the most part, until the day of the accident in December 1971. A communication error left workers inside the shore end of the tunnel while a crew drilled through sediment at the other end. When a drill bit was dropped into methane gas released by the operation, it touched off a monstrous explosion, killing men more than four miles away.
Investigations and lawsuits followed. Laws strengthening workplace safety monitoring and enforcement took effect. Construction temporarily halted, then resumed, and the treatment plant receiving the intake water opened in 1974. In 2011, the plant pumped an average of 270 million gallons of water per day.
A visitor to Fort Gratiot County Park will find the two faces of the project on the two sides of a state historical marker. One side stresses the tragic human losses and the terrible power of the explosion: "[A] shotgun-like blast claimed the lives of twenty-two men working on a water intake tunnel beneath the bed of Lake Huron. A pocket of methane trapped within a layer of ancient Antrim shale fueled the explosion. An exhaustive inquiry determined that drilling for a vertical ventilation shaft from the lake's surface had released the trapped gas. ... The blast created a shock wave with a speed of 4,000 miles an hour and a force of 15,000 pounds per square inch. Witnesses reported seeing debris fly 200 feet in the air from the tunnel's entrance."
The other side emphasizes the project itself: "In 1968, to serve the water needs of a growing population, the Detroit Metro Water Department began work on the Lake Huron Water Supply Project. This massive feat involved erecting a submerged intake crib connected to a six-mile intake tunnel beneath Lake Huron. The mechanical mole that dug the 16-foot wide tunnel bored through the bedrock beneath the lake at a rate of 150 feet a day. The project excavated more than one billion pounds of rock. The water treatment plant pumped clean water into an 82-mile system of water mains supplying Detroit and Flint. When finished in 1973, the $123 million system boasted a capacity of 400 million gallons a day."
Nearby, the nearly life-size bronze statue of a tunnel worker, and the names of the victims engraved in stone, inspire somber contemplation. On summer days, the happy cries of children playing in the park's Lake Huron surf are easily audible from beside the statue.
As the 1971 tunnel disaster proves, sometimes the cost of clean water is priced in human lives. Especially in light of the sacrifice made by twenty-two men, the value of southeast Michigan's public water supply should never be taken for granted.
Beginning just south of Fort Gratiot County Park, paddlers are making use of a system of water trails that ultimately lace the corridor from St. Clair River to the Detroit River corridor together. The Blueways of St. Clair, one of eight clusters of water trails in southeast Michigan, offers sixteen routes, supported by the St. Clair County Metropolitan Planning Commission and the St. Clair County Parks and Recreation Commission. Paddlers choosing the Blue Water Bridges Excursion are encouraged to put in upstream of the Blue Water Bridges, where lake ends and river begins. "The shoreline is developed, but the water is clean and blue," the Blueways website advises. But it also has a warning: "Use extreme caution when paddling under the Blue Water Bridges! The current is very strong and there can be substantial wave action." It also advises against paddling near the bridges on a weekend after noon, thanks to the mass of powerboat traffic.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Heart of the Lakes"
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