That picture is giant and really neat (for me at least). It makes the lake look small, but I never knew how many islands were up north. I'm going to ignore all the wikipedia type stuff and talk about some of the more interesting stuff. My favorite being the Chicago Tidal Wave of 1954. It's so strange that some of this monumental local history is so hard to find on the internet, but it is.
Al that I can find now is something that says a rogue wave 3-10 feet high hit the coast (not very freakish event really) and the worst hit was Montrose Harbor. There was a ton of damage, a few people killed, and lot of people were washed into the lake. The way it is described makes it sound like a tsunami. ""IT DIDN'T come in like a wall," Keating said."The water just started to rise and kept going until it was maybe 6 feet higher than usual."It stayed up there for a couple of minutes and then receded."
Click here to read more about it with original photos and stuff. I had definitely seen a documentary on this but I have no luck in finding the video on the internet, but from both that and stuff I've heard just from living here, it was epic. I'm sure you have your own local legends that are so inflated you'd think the world was about to end at the time. That's what this was.
"But does La Niña explain another odd incident that came about at 3:52 p.m. Sunday? At that moment, the National Weather Service issued a seiche warning for Lake Michigan, near Chicago: "Public reports of a drop in Lake Michigan water level at Chicago by 2 feet in the last hour indicates that a seiche is affecting the water levels of Lake Michigan." Time Magazine 2008
There was a warning in 2008 for Chicago-proper again because the lake dropped 2 feet in a matter of hours. They compare it to a bath tub, in that the lake is completely enclosed and pressure pushes the water away from the shore during an epic storm and then it rushes back and slams the coast. Here's what Time Magazine said about it 2 years ago.
Is this super boring to you? It's strange when you have a relationship with the lake and you hear these stories about how violent she is, but you've never seen it. I mean I've seen 6-10 foot waves crashing into seawalls and stuff here, but some really freaky shit happens that most people think it's harmless because it isn't an ocean.
I'm going to break the rest of this up into segments. I think I'm going to approach the weather and the reputation the lake has next. For example where I live is an official meteological anomaly, well about 10 miles east of here and then some of the shipwrecks.
