From the Vaults: Floods and Tides
The recent floods that sometimes plague Ewen and Chassell are a reminder that we are not immune to weather related problems here in the Upper Peninsula. Annual flooding of the South Branch of the Ontonagon River at the M28 bridge in Ewen and the Sturgeon River Slough area crossed by US41 near Chassell seem to be our version of the swallows returning to San Capistrano, California. The proliferation of 24 hour news sites and streaming platforms puts us in the middle of the action during disasters of this type, but I am not so sure watching these events from afar gives us a true sense of how devastating flooding can be.
Personally, I have only been involved with one flooding event that threatened my family directly. It happened on Huron Bay when I was around nine or ten years of age. We had built our one room camp on the site of a former sawmill at the mouth of the Silver River. Looking over the water, right led upstream toward Silver Falls and to the left was the mouth where the river opened into the foot of Huron Bay. There were a half dozen grass islands and one larger wooded one that dotted the sandbars lining the two main river channels. We were accustomed to seeing the water level in the river rise and fall with the tides (more on them a bit later), but nothing that resembled a flood. Watching the chunks of ice race out into the bay in the spring was always kind of exciting, but again, one expected the river to run higher and faster during the spring melt.
One particular year was different. The snow melt coupled with rain had swollen the river to a level we had never seen before. The afternoon we were getting ready to head home, the tide came in and we watched as the river kept rising. The old camp was built on posts with a foot of clearance under the beams. The area where we built it was formerly a sandbar laid down back when the post glacial lake and river levels were higher. Right in front of the camp, there was a five foot bank that dipped to a cattail filled swamp that in turn ended at the river’s edge. My mother actually got angry when the water began flowing under the camp and out into the yard between the main building and our storage shed. Fortunately, the tide began to recede and left no more damage than a few large puddles that quickly sank into the sandy soil. This, however, wasn’t the scary part of the whole incident.
We packed up and headed the half mile down Papin Road (now known as Collins Road). When we hit the Townline Road and turned toward the Silver River bridge, we were in for a surprise. The road dipped toward the river and before us all we could see was water flowing out of the forest across the road from right to left. Twenty yards past all of this churning water, there stood the Silver River bridge, high and dry. The county crew had a couple of trucks and a small crane standing by to clear any debris that might put the bridge in danger and fifty yards beyond the bridge, there were a bunch of cars parked as people took in the spectacle unfolding at the bridge.
Mom and dad discussed the alternatives and it was not hard to tell which one mom favored. The Townline Road was still gravel then. During the spring break up, it was a minefield of potholes all the way to Aura and then back toward L’Anse. That is the direction mom wanted us to go. Dad had it in his head that if the roadbed was still solid, we should be able to navigate the water to the bridge and get on the paved road back to L’Anse without jarring our fillings loose going the other way. Dad put on his hip waders, grabbed a stout branch from the woods and felt his way along toward the country guys hanging out on the bridge. The water never got more than thigh deep but we were still concerned what would happen if dad did find a hole in the roadbed.
We watched him confer with the country guys for a bit and then he made his way back to the car. Dad reported, “They said the water between us and the bridge isn’t moving nearly as fast as the water going under the bridge. They said they have a cable and winch on their truck and if we stall out, they can grab hold of our bumper and pull us through.” Mom wasn’t convinced and we could tell she wasn’t keen on the idea of driving through a flooding river. I cast my vote for the potholed run toward Aura, but the matter was settled. We eased our Chevy sedan into the water and we (kids in the back seat) watched the water climb up the door toward the window.
Knowing what I know now, I would have been more concerned about what we were doing. The current wisdom says, “Never drive your car into a flood – even a few inches of fast moving water can sweep you downstream.” Thinking back, I am sure dad figured our 1952 Chevy had enough body weight to keep us on the road and, as the county crew pointed out, the water we were driving through was a lot more placid than the stuff flowing through the main channel and under the bridge. I was pretty calm until we drove out of the water and onto the bridge, only to see a very large log tumbling toward us in the main channel. The guy on the crane was just swinging into action when the log disappeared under the bridge and then popped up on the downstream side. ‘Popped up’ is probably too mild a description. When it cleared the bridge, this log shot up kind of like the missles you see being launched from a submarine. It resembled a killer whale leaping from the ocean as it flopped back down on the water with a tremendous splash. Mom remained quite calm and collected during the whole deal, but she did put an exclamation point on it when we turned on the Skanee Road toward L’Anse: “We are NEVER doing that again!” A little older and wiser as I like to think I am, I agree with her statement.
As mentioned earlier, we watched the tides come and go from our location at the foot of Huron Bay. Most people who spend time along the Lake Superior beaches probably aren’t even aware there are tides on the big lake. As the Earth turns, it rotates into and then out of tidal bulges caused by the gravitational pull of the Sun and the Moon. This causes a regular six hour cycle of high tides – low tide – high tide – low tide along the coastal areas. Ships carry tables so they can chart when to sail in or out of some harbors to take advantage of the deeper water caused by the high tides. It happens as regular as clockwork and twice a month, when the Sun and Moon are pulling together, slightly higher than normal high tides (called spring tides) will occur. When the Sun and Moon are at right angles to each other twice a month, lower than normal tides happen (called neap tides). Weather systems pushing water toward shore can also cause fluctuations in the tide levels and in hurricane season, we have all seen the devastation caused by these so-called ‘storm surges’.
The Great Lakes are called ‘inland seas’ but they are not as big as the oceans. There are tides, but the combination of the size of the lakes and weather patterns affect their regularity. Rather than an oceanic six hour tide change, the pattern on the lakes is more irregular. On Huron Bay, we noticed the tides more than someone observing on a long beach because the narrowing of the bay toward the mouth of the Silver River amplified the effects. We observed the tides there usually came in two parts – kind of like the water was sloshing back and forth rather than coming in and going out. The tide would come in for a while, perhaps far enough to cover the sandbar at the mouth of the river. It would then go out for a time before reversing direction and coming back upstream for a longer period of time. The second ‘slosh’ would cover the sandbar with one or two feet of water before it reversed itself again. We had great fun running around on the sandbars waiting for the tide to turn.
My cousin Wally put his engineering skills to work one summer and set up markers at camp and up the bay. He had his wife measure the water depth at camp every five minutes while he took a boat toward the end of the bay that opened into the big lake. At one point we had a copy of his records, but they have since disappeared. I do remember Wally’s investigation mirrored the ‘sloshing’ effect of the tides on the bay we had been watching for years.
If there was heavy weather on Lake Superior beyond the mouth of the bay, we found the tides were more extreme when the northerly winds pushed more water into Huron Bay. The water would come in faster and higher than normal, sometimes covering the sandbar with five or more feet of water. When that much water changed course and flowed back out into the bay, it would often lower the water level far enough that we could not take the boat out of the channel in front of the camp. My mother-in-law Ruth found out how quickly the tide could change when she spent a few days with us during our summer vacation.
We were experiencing higher than normal tides but not the ripping tide that happened on some occasions. Ruth was a very good swimmer and was on the sandbar in front of the dock. The sandbar was covered with enough water that she was neck deep standing on the tips of her toes. When the tide reversed course, it caught her off guard and she said, “Well, the current is taking me around the point.” We hustled the kids back to the dock and I jumped in our ever present row boat and chased after her. Forty yards past the point (which is actually an old slab dock from the sawmill days now overgrown with trees), I caught up to her and had her grab a hold of the back of the row boat. By the time I reached the point, the tide was running so fast I couldn’t gain any headway so I grabbed the branch of a spruce tree and held us in one place. Ruth said, “I am fine,” and worked her way around the side of the boat until she could grab a branch on the same tree. “I will just sit here until the tide slows down,” she said.
The neighbor upstream was a retired Chicago fireman and apparently he saw us struggling to get back to the dock. He donned his chest waders, grabbed a pike pole and came to give us a hand. When he got close enough I told him, “We are fine. If you come across the channel, you will be walking on slippery slabs of wood and if you slip, your waders are going to drag you into the big hole just around the point.” It took a little convincing, but he eventually stood his ground until the tide slowed down and we were able to get back to the dock. Ruth said, “I was fine. I could have just swam over to the grass island over there.” No doubt that would have worked but she would also have been out of our line of sight so I am just as glad I was able to get her back to the point before the tide really started ripping. She was no worse for wear, but she took a nice nap on the recliner on the dock as we watched the tides run faster and faster for the rest of the day. Swimming would have to wait until things calmed down.
Bruce Johanson and I made a trip to Marquette to pick up some furniture with his truck and we stopped to see his son-in-law at a car dealership in L’Anse. We got talking about Keweenaw Bay and I related the story of my mother-in-law being swept away by the tide. He told us that when he was growing up in L’Anse, it was a common practice for them to build rafts they would launch out into the bay. He said they would let the tide take them out and bring them back and the only paddling they had to do was to get back to shore.
One of the more interesting phenomenons we witness once in a while is called a ‘seiche’. These occur when one of these more extreme tides reverse and come back up the bay faster than normal. At camp, we could always hear the seiche coming before we saw it. When it rounded the bend, it would be a wave between six inches and a foot high that would signal the beginning of a very strong upstream flow. Those were the days we stayed out of the river because the current pushing this wave upriver would be very strong. The largest one we saw on Huron Bay was accompanied by an even larger one that happened on Keweenaw Bay at the same time. The next time you drive on the highway between Baraga and L’Anse, picture a foot high wave coming up the bay followed by a rising tide that actually topped the highway. We heard about it when we came to town for groceries so we drove around the bay to have a look. Sure enough, there were still chunks of driftwood on either side of the road that had to be removed from the highway once the tide had receded.
The Village of Ontonagon has known its share of flooding adventures. The most memorable was the April Fool’s Day downtown flood of 1963 that was caused by an ice jam at the mouth of the Ontonagon River. Pictures of people navigating River Street in boats are enough of an explanation why the Rose Island berm was created. The flood gate installed at the upper end of the slough when the berm was raised would have blocked that channel to protect the downtown area. It was never used for that purpose and was recently removed and replaced with a new bridge. With the old swing bridge removed, we can only hope the slough flood gate that wasn’t used in over forty years will (still) not be needed in the future.
Interestingly enough, one of the worst floods on the Ontonagon River system took place in the middle of the summer. A heavy downpour on the Ontonagon River watershed put so much water in the branches above Victoria Dam that the river overflowed the old bridge at the bottom of the Military Hill. If you drive over the newer Military Hill bridge, stop at the tourist pullout and walk to the lookout that was part of the old bridge. It boggles my mind to think of that river channel carrying enough water to overflow this bridge in the summer, but it happened. It does not take a degree in engineering to figure out why the new bridge was built much higher. This was considered a ‘100 year flood’, but it made sense to be prepared. After all, there is no rule that says 100 year flooding events only happen once.
Top Piece Video: From 2018, the Derek Trucks Band performs Bob Dylan’s Down in the Flood