Taming Water, A Diverting Story of Ebbs & Flows

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Did you know that since the early 1940s, Lake Superior has gotten a “boost” of water meant for Hudson Bay? That reflow, it turns out, is something about which even many Big Lake residents do not know.

It is 1925, and, finally, we have some solutions to fix “for all time” the problem of variable Great Lakes water levels. The answer lies just beyond the Great Divide, north of Lake Superior and its great feeder, Lake Nipigon.

That divide, the Laurentian in specifics, but better known in Ontario simply as the “height of land,” marks where freshwater diverges south into Lake Superior and the vast Great Lakes system or north to the saline Hudson Bay.

Dam it all, the engineers say, referring to the rivers that braid north of the divide and empty into James Bay, below the Hudson. The hydro-electricity produced and the improved navigation on deep water in the Great Lakes should quickly offset the immense costs, the men insist.

“Every cubic foot of water diverted from the relatively useless basin of Hudson Bay into the lakes will prove liquid gold,” says one pundit from the Chicago Tribune, known only by his column name “The Scrutator.” In a piece written in November 1925, this writer praises a plan from Windy City engineer H.P. Ramey to create a vast reservoir, more than twice the size of Lake Ontario, by damming the river system and raising water levels up to the height of land. A tunnel would then be driven through the divide, allowing water to spill into the Nipigon system and on to Lake Superior. It would cost $50 million, Ramey thinks, or maybe even double that. (That’s $724 million to $1.4 billion in 2018 dollars.)

Ramey’s plan is merely a riff on a one introduced in 1921 by a Canadian engineer, Ralph Keemle. He has been visiting the Nipigon region for years and says he hatched his plan not long after Chicago reversed the direction of its eponymous river in 1900, taking even more water out of Lake Michigan for a thirsty metropolis and dumping its waste toward the Mississippi River system.

Water watchers often cite Chicago grievously. Its diversions, which began drawing water out of Lake Michigan in 1848, are blamed (culpable or not) for all low lake levels of the past 50 years.

Keemle’s plan to counter that by adding water into the Great Lakes is simple: three dams and three diversion channels on the Albany, Ogoki and Kenogami.

Each river, all historic for their role in the region’s 200 years of fur trade, would create backup reservoirs the size of Lake Erie with a water volume equal to that of Lake Ontario. Another option would be to combine all the reservoirs, creating one big lake that could drive navigation to Lake Winnipeg and beyond.

For just $5 million ($72 million today), “ocean liners may reach the heart of the wheat belt,” Pennsylvania’s New Castle Herald exclaimed in 1924 when word of Keemle’s scheme eventually spread.

The plan will “more than pay for itself in a short time,” Keemle explains, citing the massive hydro-electric power to be generated. He surmises that Ontario would bear no cost as the provider of this liquid manna, but retain all the rights to the water. Chicago should have a stake, he says, since the inflow of water would balance what it was taking out. And all the U.S. and Canadian agencies using the water power down the Great Lakes should share the cost burden.

A year after Keemle’s plan flashed across the two countries, another engineer suggested a “New Great Lake,” touted by newspapers in mid-1925. C. Lorne Campbell plans a “water barrel” 2.5 times the size of Lake Ontario to hover at the height of land and spill into the Great Lakes. He said damming on a massive scale would “restore the levels of the great inland seas for all time” and resupply the lakes from the Chicago diversion and other “drainage schemes.”

Campbell has a pamphlet to help explain his plan. It says the diversion in Chicago can’t be helped, that the city would be overrun by the plague without its sewage system using the Chicago River.

Campbell, like the others, is optimistic that good old 1920s technology and a can-do spirit can start “sending from the wastelands of the great north a flow of water that for all time will restore the levels of the Great Lakes.”

Interesting to note, perhaps, that none of these three engineers were hydrologists. Campbell and Keemle worked as Canadian Railway engineers, and Ramey as chief engineer for Chicago’s sanitary district.

Back here in 2018, we can sigh with some relief that these massive follies never got off the ground. But parts of the Nipigon plans did become reality less than 20 years later.

A set of two control dams redirect some of the Ogoki River into Lake Nipigon and ultimately into Lake Superior while other dams reverse the Kenogami River flow through Long Lac (or Long Lake) toward Lake Superior. The two diversions remain the only artificial water diversions into the Great Lakes system.

The driver of the enacted diversions was the economy leading up to World War II, one climbing out of the Depression. Both diversions would be used for needed hydro-electric power, in the region and down the Great Lakes. The Long Lac reversal, with work begun in 1937, was first intended to aid the sending of logs to a new lumber operation in Terrace Bay – a consortium of four U.S. companies.

Both generated hydropower, and both had impacts on the environment and displaced First Nations people.

“The idea in the past was to just dam everything,” says Chuck Sidick of the Great Lakes Hydraulics & Hydrology Office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Detroit.

As to the Ontario diversions into the system, he says, they basically cancel losses from the diversion out at Chicago.

The diversions into Lake Superior more than make up for the lost Great Lakes waters at Chicago. According to the Graham Sustainability Institute at the University of Michigan, the average amount of water from the Ogoki and Long Lac diversion from 1953 to 2010 was nearly double the outflow from the Lake Michigan-Huron diversion out of the system. The Ontario input is equivalent to four Olympic swimming pools per minute, the institute noted in its 2015 report. The Chicago outflow is about two pools per minute.

They are by no means small, agrees Peter Annin, co-director of the Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin, He wrote about the Ogoki and Long Lac diversions in his 2006 book, The Great Lakes Water Wars. Peter notes in his book that they are the equivalent of adding a “large new river” to Lake Superior’s ecosystem.

Little controversy has been caused by the diversion, Peter speculates, because it contributes to the Lake instead of taking water out. It’s also a largely forgotten enterprise, occurring 75 years ago. Over the years, as those studying the Lake have surveyed residents and asked about the diversion, many didn’t even know that the water had been reversed.

The diversions are well remembered by the First Nations that were flooded and lost reserve lands to them. The long-term environmental effects on the land and water resources also continue to be studied.

The flow of the Nipigon River increased by up to 50 percent when the Ogoki diversion began in 1943. For years, the river that connects Lake Nipigon and Lake Superior was considered the continent’s best brook trout river. Today, trout trophy hunting remains, but the population of fish suffered a significant decrease, a fact first discovered in an environmental evaluation finished in 1980 for the Canadian Water Resources Conference by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. The reason may be constant flow changes from the diversions and from natural causes, as well as past hydro-damming and logging practices. Erosion and turbidity have increased, also a problem for the fish population.

Ontario Power Generation runs the Ogoki and Long Lac diversions. Just last year, OPG lauded a shore remediation project in partnership with the Long Lake #58 First Nation.

The Long Lac diversion eroded the small tract of land held by Long Lake #58 since 1905. It flooded 142 acres of the reserve, leaving about a square mile for the 1,200 members. Even the cemetery is a painful reminder of the diversion’s effects. What remains of the hill that once held it is now an island and many of the graves washed away before the OPG placed barriers to stop erosion.

In 2006, the province-owned company took full responsibility for injury caused by the diversion and made a multi-million-dollar payment to address longheld First Nations grievances. Long Lake #58 was given full control over a shoreline remediation project.

“That was a huge leap forward in terms of building trust and working with the First Nation,” OPG’s senior engineer Karl Piirik said in a January 2017 press release.

The Ogoki diversion caused similar loss of shoreland on Lake Nipigon. Whitesand First Nation was located on the northwest side of the lake and lost its entire reserve. Whitesand members were without a permanent home until a new reserve allotment was agreed upon in 1977, some 40 years after the diversion flooding began. In 2009, OPG agreed to about $12.5 million in compensation for the displacement damages.

Harry Achneepineskum, a member of the Ogoki band in northern Ontario, was a vocal advocate for bringing the region’s First Nations people together to fight a renewed interest in building more Ontario dams in the early 1970s. He wrote a widely circulated 1973 report discussing how the proposed dams might affect Native residents who relied on hunting, fishing, trapping, and guiding.

“Developers always seem to want to implement their paper studies no matter what the effects on people,” Harry wrote.

He described his ancestral home off the height of land, where the network of rivers was called “mammamattawa” by the locals, Cree for “a place of many rivers coming together” – the unincorporated community where the Kenogami and Kabinakagami rivers merge.

Harry did not live to see how the diverse First Nations would come together for remediation and recognition. While traveling to inspect a dam project in 1976, his plane, with nine others on board, crashed. There were no survivors.

Today, the two diversions continue to redirect water into Lake Superior and are considered contributors to all of the Great Lakes. Such human-created spigots, though, seem unlikely in the future. As Peter Annin writes in The Great Lakes Water Wars, “no one envisions diversions like Long Lac and Ogoki ever happening again.”

One question that arises for many in the Lake Superior region is how these diversion might affect the water levels and whether such artificial structures can control the ups and downs of water.

Chuck Sidick of the U.S. Army Corps, whose job it is to regulate the water level on Lake Superior and, accordingly, those of lakes Michigan and Huron, says people really can’t control the continuing up-and-down cycle of the Great Lakes. “Some control is not total control.”

He estimates that 90 percent of the Great Lakes hydrology is run by nature.

Scientists from the host of agencies that monitor the Great Lakes generally agree that altering the lakes artificially is not a solution to lake levels, especially weighing potential environmental damage. More cooperation and strict compacts between the two border countries also make artificial altering less likely.

Precipitation, runoff and evaporation still rule lake levels. “The amount of control is very small,” says Lauren Fry, a lead forecaster for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Lake Superior’s recent high levels can be attributed to the precipitation from 2013-2014, Lauren says. That’s how long it can take for the drivers of the “net base of supply” to take hold.

In April, the Lake was 8 inches below a record high. In March, it had crept to within 3 inches from the high, she says. By June, though, it was only 2 inches above its average for the month and 4 inches below the same time in 2017.

Outflow from the St. Marys River at Sault Ste. Marie can have an effect, but turning that spigot on or off has to take into account the lakes below Lake Superior. “It’s a knob you can turn,” Lauren says, but the net variability is “only 2 inches every year.”

The goal of regulators is to get ahead of high and low trends and mitigate them as they can, according to Lauren. “It’s a natural cycle, we have to be prepared.” Forecasts for at least six months show Lake Superior remaining above average, but below any record highs.

Chuck says calculations for Lake Superior and lakes Michigan and Huron take into account the Ontario diversions. They get flow information from Ontario Power Generation, which sends roughly 120 to 150 cubic meters per second into the Lake. About 3,000 cms leaves the Lake through the St. Marys, Chuck says. “The diversion isn’t adding to the Lake.”

The diversions into Lake Superior equal the volume of leaving one gate open on the St. Marys River system.

Diversions do continue to add to controversy, however. Peter Annin will soon be releasing a new edition of The Great Lakes Water Wars that covers the latest lower lake water withdrawals out of the system, including two in Wisconsin, for the city of New Berlin and the mega Foxconn Technology Group manufacturing plant under construction.

As he says in the author’s note on the new edition, much has changed since the book first came out, but “what hasn’t changed in the last decade is the visceral nature of the water diversion controversy. This new edition only reinforces the primary take-home message of the last: Water diversion remains one of the most fought-over environmental issues in the Great Lakes.”

Schemes & Dreams

Back in the day, there were big plans for creating a “New Great Lake,” illustrated in this November 6, 1925, issue of the Winnipeg Evening Tribune (top) from Winnipeg, Manitoba, and in a June 30, 1924, issue of the New Castle Herald (bottom) from New Castle, Pennsylvania, which including this description: “Dotted lines show the region of the proposed sixth great lake tht reaches into the Canadian middle west. Ralph Keemie, who conceived the idea, is shown in inset.”

Duluth freelance writer Mike Creger is a frequent contributor and proof reader for this magazine.