Lake Michigan towns struggle with eroding beaches and shrinking shorelines

Reporting from chicago —  If a more permanent solution isn’t found to address Lake Michigan’s eroding shoreline and shrinking beaches, the leaders of coastal communities fear their economies and tourism may suffer — particularly in towns along the North Shore, the affluent suburbs north of Chicago.

Cities in the region have traditionally relied on a piecemeal approach, from trucking in sand to building erosion prevention structures in the lake on a beach-by-beach basis. But experts say those methods have had mixed results, and that if suburbs are left to manage the lakefront on their own, they’ll drain their finances or have to stop providing residents and visitors the sand-filled summers they have come to expect.

While Chicago has for decades armored its lakefront with artificial structures to minimize sand loss, some North Shore towns say they don’t have the same financial resources.

Terrance Young fishes at Illinois Breach State Park, where the Lake Michigan shoreline has been hit hard by erosion.

(Anthony Souffle/Chicago Tribune )

“It may not have hit us now. However, if we continue to experience significant erosion it will 100% impact us,” said Ron Salski, executive director of the Lake Bluff Park District. “If we keep spending $20,000 on sand a year, the impact is on other capital projects, which are not being completed.”

The sand loss is mostly a result of manmade structures that jut into the lake, such as breakwaters that trap sediment from moving along the coast. The structures have been built over two centuries and have been effective at safeguarding certain beaches. But they have also disturbed the natural southward drift of sand and have starved other beaches.

A similar pattern of erosion is mirrored on the east side of the lake, along the coast of some Michigan towns, where tourists flock for vacation, experts say.

Record-high lake levels compound the issue as they eat away at the shoreline, submerging beaches and blunting the effectiveness of breakwaters. In Evanston, Ill., the summer’s high lake levels wiped out its dog beach and reduced other beaches, park officials said. Lake Michigan has risen about 4 feet since January 2013, when it hit a record low.

Of the five Great Lakes, Lake Michigan has the sandiest shores, and therefore draws the most visitors, experts say.

Tourists are at times startled to discover the dozens of miles of beaches along the coast. German visitors Saskia Nembach and Ines Hoffmann, both 24, said their trip to Chicago’s Ohio Street Beach on a recent afternoon was spontaneous.

“The weather’s beautiful, and our feet are hurting,” Nembach said. The women’s ankles were sunk deep into the warm sand, and a Chicago map was stretched across their laps. “It’s beautiful. It’s a nice place to calm down after walking so much and after sightseeing.”

The Illinois coast is also home to some of the highest-valued real estate in the Great Lakes region, so any loss of coastal land by erosion comes at a high cost. Illinois is one of the most intensely engineered coastlines across the Great Lakes, experts say.

After completing a $14.5-million renovation project in 2015, Highland Park’s park district may no longer have to replenish sand at Rosewood Beach, said Joel Brammeier, president and chief executive of the nonprofit Alliance for the Great Lakes. The park district in collaboration with the Army Corps of Engineers implemented a five-year sand-monitoring program to detect future erosion and make necessary adjustments.

The ecological portion of the project helped restore the shoreline, bluffs and ravine and included the installation of breakwaters offshore to keep the sand in place, park district officials said. The park district was responsible for 35% of the cost of those improvements, or about $2.5 million.

“These are very expensive projects. They can help an individual place or individual community but are not designed as a system for the entire Lake Michigan shoreline,” Brammeier said.

Over the last year and a half, public officials have joined together to develop a regional plan to manage the 32-mile stretch of lakefront from Evanston north to the Wisconsin state line, home to more than two dozen beaches. The initiative, called the Illinois North Shore Sand Management Strategy, formed through the Alliance for the Great Lakes and funded through a grant from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, aims to use more cost-effective strategies to manage shorelines.

The northern beach at Illinois State Beach Park in Zion has lost more than 100 acres of coastal habitat over the last century and is expected to continue to erode by an acre each year, according to Army Corps reports. And in Waukegan, a breakwater offshore unintentionally created sand dunes at the local North Beach Park and starved the beaches to its south.

Through the sand-management initiative, one town’s problem could be another town’s solution. The buildup of sand in Waukegan’s harbors that requires annual dredging, for example, could perhaps be cleaned, decontaminated and used for beach nourishment in other areas, Brammeier said.

“These are the kinds of conversations we’re starting to have. Communities looking at their problem and thinking, ‘Can my problem be someone else’s solution?’” he said.

The group last met in July. Members planned to outline specific solutions to long-term erosion, but decided they needed to gather more data before they could draft concrete plans, and will readdress those issues this fall.

Members also hope that a master plan could protect natural areas, like Illinois Beach State Park, which are vulnerable.

“It’s a tremendous resource,” Brammeier said, “but if we don’t restore the sand flow, we’re going to lose it.”

Eltagouri writes for the Chicago Tribune.

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