DULUTH – Currents racing at up to 8 feet per second created dangerous waves at the mouth of the Duluth canal during a June 21 storm, as extreme weather phenomena whipped up Lake Superior.
An air pressure-driven meteotsunami and wind-driven seiche made water fluctuate across the massive lake, receding from some shores by several feet and flooding others, as it sloshed back and forth like a bathtub.
It was the most powerful seiche to reach Minnesota Point since 2012, said long-time resident Paul Treuer, with the water level suddenly rising by more than a foot.
For him and other residents of Minnesota Point, home to the Park Point neighborhood reached by the Aerial Lift Bridge, the storm served as another reminder of Lake Superior’s might as extreme weather increases across the globe.
“This place is in trouble,” Treuer said. “It’s just a sandbar that we live on ... it’s not permanent.”
Park Point residents Paul Treuer, left, Dawn Buck and Pat Sterner, right, are working to save their home. (Aaron Lavinsky/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
That nearly seven-mile sandspit protects the ships and terminals inside the busy international Duluth-Superior port, where more than 700 vessels move 30 million tons of cargo each year. It is also home to 1,300 people, a U.S. Coast Guard station, an airport, marina and hotels, and it sees hundreds of thousands of annual visitors to its miles of public beach. And it is part of a delicate ecosystem, with an old-growth red and white pine forest, unmarked Indigenous burial grounds and rare coastal dunes found nowhere else in Minnesota.
Fierce storms create huge waves that slam into the barrier island’s famous shores, washing sand away, shearing off large sections of dunes and uprooting trees. When water levels are low, high winds push piles of sand into yards and the main road. When water levels rise, lower-lying parts of the island, especially on the bay and harbor side, are flooded.
A trifecta of storms between 2017 and 2019 brought days of battering waves and caused millions in damage to Duluth shores. In 2019, storm surge from waves as high as 15 feet swamped parts of Park Point, and the Lift Bridge — the only way off the island — was temporarily shut down.