“Giant tidal wave hits local town lake.” April Fool’s joke? Probably. “Giant tsunami hits Chicago”. Joke, right? No. This was the headline in the evening edition of the Chicago Daily News on June 26, 1954.
I left the house in my Chevy clap around 9:00 am on a warm Saturday morning in June 1954 and drove uptown to Lake Michigan’s Montrose Beach and Harbor to meet my father and some friends. at the Wilson Rocks bait shop, where he hung out with his fellow fishermen. We were going to do some perch fishing……which is a chewy white meat fish that is a taste of heaven when fried and served with lemon, tartar sauce and accordion fries. Preparing for my senior year in high school, I had been hard at work on construction and needed some sun and relaxation. Perch was the answer this Saturday morning, but soon he would find something very different…something he would never forget.
When I pulled into the parking area, I noticed that it was filled with water even though it was a sunny day. The lake was unusually choppy. I also noticed people running towards the pier. There was a sense of something very serious and very wrong and I immediately and instinctively headed to the bait shop to connect with my father. He saw me coming and he told me “let’s go to the dock, they need help down there”, and we left at full speed along with many others. A Seiche (pronounced sayh) had hit Montrose Harbor without warning on this June morning. It was 8 feet tall and 25 miles wide and hit the entire Chicago lakefront…from Michigan City, Indiana to the North Shore. Eight people died, most of whom were fishing right there in the port of Montrose, where about 15 or 20 fishermen were dragged from the narrow 175 -foot concrete spring. And we knew many of them.
When we arrived, bathers and fishermen were running for shelter. Men, women and children ran and fell. Yachts rocked widely in the water. The wave at some points had run 150 feet of shoreline before falling within minutes, which explained why I saw so much water when I pulled into the parking lot. There were rescues, panic, desperation and narrow escapes. Unfortunately, we arrived too late to be of any real help and then stood helplessly as rescue teams began the grim work of pulling every body out of the lake. Apparently the fishermen who had been lying face down, idly guiding lines in the water, were simply swept off the dock as the water swelled and washed over them. Fishermen at the North Avenue Pier, several miles to the south, were also washed into the lake, and the same grim work was being done there. Among those thrown into the water was Ted Stempinski, who had been fishing with his 16-year-old son Ralph. Ralph left the scene for a moment shortly before he hit the wave. When he returned, his father was gone. The same happened with John Jaworski who was also fishing with his son. Those tragic events hardly went unnoticed and stayed with me for a long time afterwards.
The Park Police quickly spread the news of the wave that was approaching and took fishermen from a spring at 61st St. in Jackson Park minutes before the water immersed that area. At Loyola Beach, just to the north, waves broke over a 9-foot seawall. All the piers in the Belmont Harbor yacht dock were flooded when the wave raised the water level about 6 feet.
Before June 26, no one had heard of the word “Seiche”. After June 26, most of us were experts on the phenomena.
Específicamente, “una sepia tiene que ocurrir en un cuerpo de agua cerrado, como un lago, una bahía o un golfo. Una sepia, una palabra francesa que significa” balancearse hacia atrás y fuerte “, es una onda estacionaria que oscila en un lago as a result of seismic or atmospheric disturbances that create large fluctuations in water levels at just the right times Standing waves crash back and forth between the shorelines of the lake basin, often referred to as tidal changes of the lakes Grandes Lagos, por muchos. La mayoría de los Seiches en los Grandes Lagos son el resultado de las perturbaciones atmosféricas y el cese del viento, no de la actividad sísmica ni de las enormes fuerzas de las mareas” (Heidorn 2004; Wittman 2005).
This particular cuttlefish, which was the most dangerous of the three classes, was propelled by a severe squall line with strong winds and rapid changes in atmospheric pressure that pushed the surface of the lake across southern Lake Michigan a few hours earlier, passing from northwest to southeast. It’s like throwing a stone into the middle of a bucket of water and watching the ripples move from the center. The atmospheric pressure caused by the storm was the stone and the waves were the Seiche. Like water spiking back and forth in a bathtub, the fast-moving screw lines with intense atmospheric pressure caused the lake to collapse back and forth and water levels to rise in the coast and house up to 10 feet in a matter of minutes and with no warning.
Unlike a tsunami, which can travel across the open ocean at extremely high speeds, a seiche moves much more slowly. The Cuttlefish took 80 minutes to travel 40 miles from Michigan City to the Chicago lakefront on North Avenue. That’s about 30 MPH. The Siche hit the entire Illinois coast with a wave of approximately 2 to 4 feet, but reached a maximum height of 10 feet when it approved the spring of North Avenue.
As an eyewitness to the immediate aftermath, I was struck by the way the Chicago newspapers over-dramatized the tragedy. The now-defunct Chicago Daily News carried headlines that read in two-inch black letters: “HUGE TSUNAMI HERE! Many washed into lake; 10 feared dead. Mother of 11 among victims. 3 divers, boats hunt others.” Three people drowned and several more were feared missing Saturday when a 25-mile-wide tide broke the shore of Lake Michigan here.The freak wave, estimated to be 3 to 10 feet high, hit at 9 a.m. from Jackson Park North to Wilmette. An unknown number of people were swept into the lake. Estimates of the death toll were as high as 10…” There had been no “big tidal wave”; there had been a monstrous and deadly cuttlefish. Since then, there have been numerous scares and reports of smaller seiches, but none causing similar damage or deaths.
Interestingly, however, one of the greatest disasters in the city of Buffalo, in the recorded history of New York, occurred at 11:00 p.m. on October 18, 1844, when a wall of water rapidly inundated the business and residential districts. Along the coast. The disaster struck without warning, breaching the 14-foot seawall and flooding the boardwalk. The newspaper accounts indicate that 78 people drowned. This tragedy was also caused by a Seiche, as prolonged high winds produced a Seiche by pushing water toward one end of Lake Erie. When the winds died down, or turned in the opposite direction, the water receded in the direction it came from and the Seiched did the rest. Buffalo is estimated to have two or three ouiches a year, but the threat was largely eliminated with the construction of a breakwater on Lake Erie, a project that began in the 1860s.
Unlike devastating tsunamis caused by undersea earthquakes, seiches have never caused much damage in the Great Lakes, and most go unnoticed as they are relatively subtle and unnoticeable, causing water levels on beaches to rise. only a foot or less.
But this one was very notorious and it happened on a quiet, warm Saturday morning in Chicago. What started as a day of peaceful fishing turned out to be an experience that has remained indelibly in my mind and, I believe, worthy of sharing. One thing is for sure, we will never experience a cuttlefish here… at least I don’t think so.
“It didn’t come in like a wall… the water just started rising and kept rising until it was maybe 6 feet higher than normal.” Dick Keating, foreman of the port of Belmont and face -to -face witness.
