New federal grant will help Lake Superior communities ward off costly flooding

A $1.45 million federal project will help communities across Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan prepare for floods by building up resilience along the Lake Superior coast and reestablishing the land’s ability to store water and release it slowly.

The project, which is funded by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act , is one of 19 to receive funding across the country under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Resilience Regional Challenge.

Lake Superior communities have been hit hard by disastrous flooding in recent years due to climate change. Between 2012 and 2022 there were six federal disaster declarations due to flooding, erosion and damage to infrastructure.

Three of these flood events – in 2012, 2016 and 2018 – were considered 500- to 1,000-year flood events, somewhat misleading terms that are based on probability, not history. A 500-year flood event means that there is a 1 in 500 chance that a flood of that magnitude would occur in a given year.

The 2016 flood, for instance, was caused by 10 inches of rain falling in 24 hours, causing more than $41 million in damage and several deaths.

Communities are stuck in a cycle of disaster followed by rebuilding, but they don’t see improvements when the next flood comes along, said Kyle Magyera, local government outreach specialist at the Wisconsin Wetland Association.

The project will help communities find the root cause of flooding and fix it for good, Magyera said.

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Building climate resilience along Lake Superior’s shores

The landscape around Lake Superior’s shoreline is one that easily erodes, thanks to steep terrain and clay-filled soils.

Communities in this area are also generally spread out, so flood events are crippling, cutting off communities from each other and closing out economies, said Jason Laumann, deputy director of the Northwest Regional Planning Commission.

The main goal of the project is to get out and work with community leadership to figure out what nature-based solutions would best work for them, Laumann said.

There are four main watersheds that this project will focus on: the Nemadji River watershed that spans Minnesota and Wisconsin; the Fish Creek and White River watersheds that empty near Ashland, Wisconsin; and the Montreal River watershed, which spans Wisconsin and Michigan’s upper peninsula.

Many communities don’t know the root cause of flooding and what is going on upstream in the headwaters above where the flood damage is happening, Magyera said. The project will help repair eroded land around the headwaters as well as restore and connecting wetlands back to these waterways, Magyera said.

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Caitlin Looby is a Report for America corps member who writes about the environment and the Great Lakes. Reach her at clooby@gannett.com or follow her on X @caitlooby .

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: New federal grant will help Lake Superior communities ward off costly flooding