High lake level worries some

Water watchers are casting a wary eye toward Lake Ontario, where the level is nearly a foot above normal and two feet higher than a year ago.

“It’s getting to be the spring period and that’s when we get the storms out of the northeast that push the lake another foot higher,” said Dan Barletta, a Greece dentist who lives along the shore on Edgemere Drive. “And then we get the storm surge and waves on top of it.”

Waves like the 20-foot breakers a week or so ago that were crashing into the foundation of Cheryl and Bob Stevens’ home on Shore Acres Road in Hamlin, throwing sand and stones against their living room windows.

“It was unbelievable,” said Cheryl Stevens. “We haven’t had waves breaking against the house since back in 2012.”

The water levels in Lake Ontario and the four other Great Lakes are all well above normal this spring due to unusually moist conditions this winter throughout the Great Lakes basin. As of Friday, Lake Erie was about 14 inches above the long-term normal for that date; lakes Huron and Michigan were about 13 inches above the daily norm, Lake Ontario was about 10 inches above and Superior was eight inches above.

Alone among the five lakes, Ontario’s level can be adjusted somewhat by manipulation of the amount of water that’s allowed through a gigantic hydroelectric dam on the St. Lawrence River, into which the lake flows.

But there are limits to what the regulatory effort can accomplish. Eighty percent of the water in Lake Ontario comes via the uncontrolled flow from the four other Great Lakes. When water in those lakes is high, it will inevitably be high here as well.

When the lake is this high, it does a lot of things,” said Cheryl Stevens. “It causes a lot of erosion and then it inundates all of our septic systems. We have done so much to make our lake quite clean and then this high water comes up and takes all that effluent ...”

For people along the shoreline, high water brings to mind the proposed change in the water-level regulatory plan for Lake Ontario. Plan 2014, as it is called, has been approved by the U.S.-Canada treaty organization that oversees border-related issues and is now awaiting a thumbs-up or thumbs-down from federal officials in Washington, D.C., and Ottawa, Canada.

The plan would allow the water level to get somewhat higher and somewhat lower than the current regulation scheme calls for, to more accurately mirror the natural cycle of the lake. Environmentalists back the plan, saying it would help restore wetlands that have been damaged by the current regulations. But many shoreline dwellers oppose it, saying it would worsen erosion and flooding.

If Plan 2014 were in effect now, the lake level would be about 7 1/2 inches higher than it is, a spokesman for the treaty organization, the International Joint Commission, said on Wednesday.

“If we really were 7 1/2 inches higher than we are now, we’d really have a problem,” said Barletta. “If we did get a storm with levels like that the implications would be that we’d get street flooding, issues with our sewers, damages to unprotected properties — which the IJC study never looked at — damages to the public infrastructures and to sea walls.”

Two words help explain the high water: Moisture and warmth.

The western part of the Great Lakes basin — Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota — had very heavy precipitation in December. The eastern portion, including Ohio and upstate New York, had heavy precipitation in February. Nearly everyone experienced heavy precipitation in March.

That pushed levels upward in all five Great Lakes.

Moreover, it pushed them up more quickly than would normally be the case because so much of the precipitation fell as rain, not snow. That’s because the entire basin experienced a very mild winter, due largely to the influence of the powerful El Niño in the Pacific Ocean.

Normally, much of the basin is draped in snow as spring begins. The snow melts slowly, meaning its moisture is fed into the lakes over a period of many weeks.

But this year, the snow that did fall melted quickly and much more of the precipitation came in the form of rain, which went unchecked into waterways.

“It was getting into the lakes quicker. It’s more of a change of timing,” said Lauren Fry, a hydraulic engineer and lead water-level forecaster for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Detroit.

Evaporation from the lakes, which is one mechanism that lessens water levels somewhat, also was below-normal this winter, said Gail R. Faveri, secretary of the Canadian section of the International St. Lawrence River Board of Control, the entity that administers the regulatory plan for Lake Ontario. Faveri said the warm air temperatures may have been responsible for reduced evaporation.

Along the Lake Ontario shoreline, the concern is that a wet spring could drive levels higher.

“The lake is ferocious on the south shore,” said Cheryl Stevens. “I don’t think the IJC gets that. Our waves, they just churn, and they’re really unforgiving. Huge, strong powerful waves and it’s not that way on the north shore.”

Without question, the levels will rise this spring. That’s in accord with a pattern that holds true almost every year: The water level bottoms out in late fall and rises until an early summer peak. That’s a natural pattern, not one dictated by regulators.

Given the amount of water in the upper lakes, it’s also natural that the Lake Ontario level is forecast to continue to be above average through the summer, though Fry expects the level to inch closer to normal as time goes by. That forecast, though, is not set in stone. Heavy rain, or lack of rain, could influence the outcome.

SORR@Gannett.com

MCDERMOT@Gannett.com