Lake Michigan and Lake Huron have been at record, or near record lows in water level for the past 14 years and there may be a solution to turn things around.
At a special meeting on Thursday at the Harmony Centre in Owen Sound, “Restore Our Water International” outlined possible ways to reverse the low water levels.
Roger Gauthier — the Chair of the not-for-profit organization — says perhaps the most plausible way to turn things around is by designing and installing an underwater sill system.
Gauthier says the system would act like “speed bumps” — essentially providing resistance at the bottom of the lake to hold the water back.
He compares them to driving your car through a field full of speed bumps.
Gauthier says the “speed bumps” would be two to three metres tall and about 200 metres long, and 20 to 25 of them would be located at the upper stretch of the St.Clair River where Lake Huron flows out.
The design is from 1965.
Gauthier wants the federal governments in both the U-S and Canada to start engineering designs.
He says these “speed bumps” could cost anywhere between 50 million to 200 million dollars. The preliminary numbers in terms of the losses because of the low lake levels are in the tens of billions of dollars per year, according to Gauthier.
It could take multiple years for this to come to fruition.
Restore Our Water International is working on getting a consensus from shoreline property owners and commercial business from both the US and Canada.
The group is pushing the federal governments to act now and put forth the money to help with the low water levels.
Bruce-Grey Owen Sound Conservative MPP Bill Walker believes it critical to our area for the federal governments to look into a possible underwater sill system.
Walker says we have to raise the profile in all levels of government to get some work done, find a solution and put some money forward to create this sill system.
