Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

SPEAKER 1: Winds gusting over 60 miles an hour, waves reaching nearly 20 feet high on Lake Superior, all of that battered Duluth today, causing flooding and closing roads. Despite the damage, lots of people have braved the weather to see the lake's fury firsthand, including our Dan Kraker.

DAN KRAKER: The wind is whipping off of Lake Superior into Canal Park here in Duluth. I've got my rubber boots on, sloshing through a parking lot that's flooded with water. Waves are up to 20-feet high. You have to lean into the wind to stand up straight.

[RAIN PATTERING]

The water is surging over my boots. I had to go home and change out of my sopping clothes after a wave ambushed me and drenched me from the waist down. And I wasn't the only one who got soaked out there.

[? LINDA WHITEHOUSE: ?] Oh, wow. I haven't ever seen it like this. I was down here last spring when it was-- it wasn't as wild as it is today. I've never seen it like this. That's crazy.

DAN KRAKER: Linda Whitehouse drove down from Hoyt Lakes to check out the spectacle.

LINDA WHITEHOUSE: Because my son came up from Minneapolis. Look at that! Wow! So I said, I want to go and see the waves. They're going to be big today. Unbelievable.

DAN KRAKER: A Canadian freighter along the Minnesota North Shore near Two Harbors measured a wind gust early this morning of 86 miles per hour. Wind from the northeast causes the biggest waves in Duluth, because it blows over the length of the lake for hundreds of miles.

Surfers call that distance fetch. The bigger the fetch, the bigger the waves. Sam Kelly is a physicist at the Large Lakes Observatory at the University of Minnesota, Duluth who studies waves.

[? SAM KELLY: ?] The wind creates little ripples in the water, and then as those waves start to build, they have more area for the wind to blow on. And so they are reinforced by the wind, and they keep getting larger and larger.

DAN KRAKER: And then, says Kelly, the longer the wind blows across the lake, the more of the surface water that it pushes downwind.

SAM KELLY: And so that water starts to pile up, in this case, in Duluth. And that can raise the lake level on our end by a couple of feet.

DAN KRAKER: And that storm surge together with the huge waves that crash onto shore is what's caused the flooding of roads and parking lots and trails in Duluth. It's reminiscent of a storm last October when huge winds and waves cost $10 million worth of damage to the Duluth, Lakewalk in Brighton Beach Park. The city just started rebuilding the Lakewalk this week, and now Mike [? LeBeau ?] says there's already new damage.

[? MIKE LEBEAU: ?] More land loss behind Fitger's. The asphalt path is caving in. Boardwalk panels are flipped up and moving around in the waves and wind.

DAN KRAKER: Lake Superior is famous for its gales of November, but physicist Sam Kelly says data from buoys in the lake dating back to 1996 actually show that waves in October are slightly larger.

SAM KELLY: But both October and November have the largest waves.

SPEAKER 2: So do we need to rebranding the gales of October maybe.

SAM KELLY: Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I don't think either month is particularly nice to be out there in a storm.

DAN KRAKER: But it can be pretty amazing to watch from shore, especially in Canal Park.

GARY LUNDSTROM: I think this is the most incredible thing I've ever seen. And I knock coming down to the canal during a storm off my bucket list.

DAN KRAKER: Gary Lundstrom is a graphic artist who grew up in Duluth and moved back 20 years ago from Denver. It's just awesome in the truest form of the word.

DAN KRAKER: And he doesn't even mind that he got drenched. Dan Kraker, Minnesota Public Radio news, Duluth.