The bodies of a 15-year-old Chicago boy and a 25-year-old Chicago man were pulled from Lake Michigan on Sunday after a series of drownings that provided a grim demonstration of the deadly currents caused by summer storms.
In all, six bodies had been recovered by Sunday night, and one person still was missing and presumed drowned. The quaint beach towns along a popular stretch of southwest Michigan shoreline–just a two-hour drive from Chicago–attract hordes of city visitors to their wide sandy beaches and towering dunes. All the victims had Chicago ties.
Keith W. Bedford, a professor of civil engineering at Ohio State University who studies Great Lakes climate and hazards, called the drownings, which took place in Berrien County on Friday on four beaches, “pretty stunning.”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of anything like that. … You rarely see that many people in that small a space lose their lives,” he said.
County officials said they’d never had a single day like that before, with a death toll that could be more typical for a year. “This lake is beautiful, but very dangerous,” Sheriff Paul Bailey said.
The Sheriff’s Department said a late-morning storm that barreled through Friday likely spawned strong currents and undertows that made swimming treacherous. The drownings all occurred in the three hours after the 20-minute thunderstorm, which caused gusts of wind up to 50 m.p.h., stirring up choppy waves of 3 to 4 feet and producing dangerous rip currents.
That wind speed and wave size is not particularly unusual for the Great Lakes, said Petty Officer 2nd Class Kenneth Christian of the Coast Guard station in St. Joseph, Mich., who led the local search and rescue parties Friday, when there was hope of finding the victims alive. After the storm passed through, the sun came out, the temperature warmed up and huge 4th of July crowds took to the water. Those sizable crowds alone increased the likelihood that someone might drown, Christian said.
Rip currents, which can last a few minutes or a few hours, result when underwater sandbars formed through natural wave action break down, often under the pressure of a storm. The result is a narrow rush of water that can knock waders off their feet and suck swimmers out to the deep water at a velocity as high as 5 m.p.h.–faster than an Olympic swimmer.
The number of drownings that occurred Friday surprised old-timers in Chikaming Township. Mike Wright, who was originally from Naperville and vacationed in Harbert Beach for 40 years before moving there in 1997, said the lake was not particularly rough Friday.
“Everybody’s mystified,” he said. “Everyone’s just shaking their heads why this occurred.”
