the day has "Tidal wave" hit chicago

“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 beat-up Chevy around 9:00 a.m. on a warm Saturday morning in June 1954 and drove to Montrose Beach and Harbor on Lake Michigan to meet my father and some friends at Wilson Rocks. Bait Shop, where he hung out. hanging 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 feeling that something very serious and very bad was going on 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 were killed, most of whom were fishing right there in Montrose Harbor, where some 15 to 20 fishermen were swept off the narrow 175-foot concrete pier. 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 rushed 150 feet to shore before sinking 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 idly by as the rescue teams began the hard work of pulling each 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 thing 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.

Park police quickly spread word of the approaching wave and pulled fishermen from a pier on 61st St. in Jackson Park minutes before the water submerged 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.
Specifically, “A Seiche has to occur in an enclosed body of water, such as a lake, bay, or gulf. A Seiche, a French word meaning “swing from side to side,” is a standing wave that oscillates in a lake as a result of seismic or atmospheric disturbances that create huge fluctuations in water levels in just moments Standing waves slosh back and forth between the shores of the lake basin, often referred to by many as tidal-like changes Lakes. Most seiches in the Great Lakes are the result of atmospheric disturbances and wind cessation, not seismic activity or enormous tidal forces” (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, going 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 sloshing back and forth in a bathtub, fast-moving squall lines with intense atmospheric pressure caused the lake to sway back and forth and water levels to rise along the shoreline. and ports 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 Seiche lashed the entire Illinois coast with a wave approximately 2 to 4 feet high, but reached a maximum height of 10 feet as she approached the North Avenue Pier.

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 ran 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 tidal wave hit the shoreline of Lake Michigan here.The freak wave, estimated to be between 3 and 10 feet high, hit around 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. 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 seiches a year, but the threat was largely eliminated by 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 began as a day of quiet fishing turned out to be an experience that has remained indelible in my mind and, I think, 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, Belmont Harbor Foreman and eyewitness.