- [Dan] Coming up on "Great Lakes Now."

When 1000-year storm comes to your town, where do you put all that water?

- You have to consider what are you gonna be doing to that river versus water in people's basements?

- [Dan] What's behind false spring?

- It'll be quite dramatic compared to what you've just recently experienced.

- [Dan] And are climate migrants already arriving in our region?

- Is that the big, big question that people in communities around Great Lakes want to know.

(upbeat music) - [Voice With Clean Tone] This program was brought to you by the Fred and Barbara Erb Family Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Richard C. Devereaux Foundation for Energy and Environmental Programs at Detroit PBS, Polk Family Fund, DTE Foundation, and Contributions to your PBS Station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

- Welcome to Great Lakes Now, I'm Mila Murry.

What do you do with the rain from 1000-year storm?

In Milwaukee, the decision is in the hands of one man, Dan Wanschura of Interlochen Public Radio and the Points North Podcast brings us the story.

(gentle music) - If you live in Milwaukee, every time you flush a toilet or put something down your drain, it becomes Kevin Shafer's problem.

He's the executive director of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewage District, MMSD, which serves the city of Milwaukee and the surrounding area.

423 square miles total.

- People think it smells, but I don't really notice it that much.

Maybe 'cause I'm around it a lot.

- Inside that area, the gross stuff in the sewer, Kevin decides where it goes.

- You know, what are you gonna be doing to that river versus water in people's basements?

- [Dan] And that means his natural enemy is rain.

(raining loudly) So on Saturday, August 9th, 2025, he checked the weather forecast just like he does every morning.

It looked okay.

It'd be rain, but not much less than half an inch.

Sunday looked similar.

- See, Saturday morning on the ninth, they were predicting 0.4 inches with a worst case of 1.1.

And I thought, "Okay, we're fine.

You know, that's not much rain."

If we're less than two inches, I don't worry about it too much.

- [Dan] He has a pretty normal Saturday, he takes his family out for pizza.

(loud thunderstorm happening) That's when he looks outside and sees it's raining hard like buckets of rain.

- It was a kind of a shock because based on the forecast we'd received that morning, we would've been fine.

So I was a little surprised.

- Hang on, Kevin's got a classic Midwest vibe, pretty understated.

So when he says he was a little surprised, what he really means is?

- Scared, shocked, mad.

- [Dan] This is way more rain than the forecast called for, way, way, more.

Kevin heads home.

- So I go in, I turn the computer on, I get on the phone, I start, I call our outreach person and say, "Okay, I think we're gonna have a problem tonight.

Just be ready for it."

- Let's talk about that problem.

In Milwaukee, when something goes down a drain, it should flow through the sewer network into bigger and bigger pipes until it reaches a wastewater treatment plant.

There, the nasty things are removed and clean treated water is released into Lake Michigan, but it doesn't always happen like that.

Like a lot of the great lake cities, Milwaukee has a combined sewer system.

Stormwater and waste go into the same pipes and mix, and it all has to be treated as sewage.

In most of MMSD's service area though, the systems are separate.

Stormwater is directed to rivers and waste from homes and businesses goes into a sanitary sewer system that takes it to the wastewater treatment plant.

In theory, rainwater doesn't get into the sanitary sewer system, but in real-life, everything leaks, rainwater saturates the ground and pushes into the sewer pipes greatly increasing the amount of sewage that needs treating.

That's why rain is Kevin's enemy.

Alright, back to August 9th.

- [Voice With Deep Tone] This is a severe weather update.

- Good evening, meteorologist, Gino Recchia.

We do have a new flash flood warning that has been issued for Milwaukee County.

This shows how heavy the rain is coming down and where you do have those purple colors, that's between about four to as much as six-inch per hour, right?

- [Voice With Clear Tone] Multiple cars stuck inside feet of water, severe flash flooding, ripping through the southeast Wisconsin area for hours.

- [Dan] The storm is putting way more into the sewer system than the treatment plants can handle, and it all has to go somewhere.

It's Kevin's job to decide where.

Luckily, Kevin has an ace up his sleeve, the deep tunnel, (gentle music) (people chattering loudly) we get in an elevator and go 300 feet underground.

The deep tunnel is basically this giant holding tank underneath the normal sewer system.

- We're at the downstream end of the deep tunnel, so all the water flows to this point, and then we pump it up.

- [Dan] When there's a big rainstorm.

Kevin can take pressure off the regular sewer system by routing storm water and sewage here where it can be held until the rain stops and the treatment plants catch up.

- This is a pump unit, and so when the pumps come on, they'll take that water and they'll pump it up 330 feet and it goes right into the primary treatment system.

So then it's all treated before it goes to the lake.

- The deep tunnel can hold 521 million gallons of sewage.

The whole system is over 28 miles long.

And it's not too smelly.

- No.

See, I told you.

(laughs loudly) Everyone goes, oh my stink I go.

I don't smell it.

- [Dan] But sometimes the deep tunnel fills all the way up and when that happens, Kevin's stuck.

If he does nothing, the water will back up into thousands of basements.

That's really not an option.

- See people walking around in their basements that are full of sewage.

It's a severe public health risk, and I will protect the public first choice every time.

- [Dan] To protect public health, Kevin has to call for a sewage overflow.

That means pathogens like bacteria and viruses spilling into rivers and even like Michigan, stuff like E. coli and salmonella.

And if there's one thing Kevin hates, it's that.

- You've got a watershed with 1.1 million people and they're expecting perfection.

They want everything to work.

So you do what you can, but you know that you're limited and you put everything into it.

- [Dan] He chokes up for a minute, which kind of catches me off guard.

- So anyway, you gotta cut all this out.

(laughs jokingly) You gotta cut all this out.

- [Dan] I'm just gonna, I out- like a lot of waterways in the region.

The Milwaukee River was a mess for a long time.

- We had carp and that was about the only fish that would live in our rivers.

Everything else was dead.

It was an open-sewer basically because, you know, 365 days a year and you're having overflows 50 to 60 of those days.

You know, that's not good.

- [Dan] We're talking like eight to 9 billion gallons of sewage and storm water a year.

Residents weren't happy and the sewage district was getting the blame.

Then came the Clean Water Act in 1972.

- Clean Water Act passed, and all of a sudden, you went from, "Okay, it's okay to have as many as you want to whoop, you gotta stop 'em."

- [Dan] Milwaukee's solution was the deep tunnel, which was completed in 1993 at a cost of $3 billion.

It cut the number of combined sewer overflows from 50 or 60 to less than six.

The maximum imposed by the EPA and the deep tunnel captured the worst of the sewage.

So what did overflow was mostly rainwater.

It had a big impact.

- What we saw was almost immediate improvement.

The water quality in the rivers, there was not the stuff floating in the rivers that we had before we saw fish reviving in the waterways.

So it was almost, it was spectacular to see nature respond to this cleaning effort.

- [Dan] But overflows were still happening and the public wanted to know why.

One reason, at that time, the deep tunnel system was controlled by an algorithm and it didn't always make the best decisions.

Sometimes, it allowed overflows when the deep tunnel wasn't even full.

- So we'd have an overflow, the tunnel would be half full and its rain would stop, and then the next day, the media was all over.

It's like he still had half the tunnel.

Why did you have an overflow?

They put all this money into the sanitary sewer system and this is improvements of the treatment plants building the deep tunnel, all kinds of stuff.

They put $3 billion into it and they did not want to see overflows when that that system still had capacity to hold water.

- [Dan] One of the very first things Kevin did when he became executive director in 2002 was to replace the faulty algorithm that controlled the deep tunnel, and he replaced it with himself.

- [Kevin] If we're gonna get blamed for the overflow, I'm gonna be the one making that decision.

I'm not gonna let the algorithm run it because I'm the one that's gonna be in the cameras the next day.

- [Dan] That's why eight or 10 times a year, he sweats it out watching the rain come down, just like he did on the night of August 9th, 2025.

- It's Kevin sitting in his underwear at a computer at home, writing on a pad of paper these numbers and going, okay, what are we gonna do?

(intense music) - [Dan] He's hoping the rain will stop, but it just keeps coming.

Parts of the city will get more than a foot of rain before it's over.

Around 10:00 PM, he closes the gate from the combined sewer system to the deep tunnel initiating a combined sewer overflow.

Again, the EPA only allows Milwaukee six of those a year.

- You just see all the water that was coming in the tunnel.

That water's now going to the lake into the rivers.

- [Dan] At that point, the tunnel isn't totally full.

The separated sanitary sewers are still flowing into it because Kevin isn't supposed to let the sanitary sewers overflow ever, but in the end, there's just too much water.

Around three in the morning, the deep tunnel is filled to the brim, and Kevin is out of options.

(intense music) - [Kevin] At some point, we have to close the other set of gates, which are the separate surrogates.

At that point, you've closed off all flow going into the tunnel because it's full and you're treating it as fast as you can at the treatment plants.

- [Dan] From that point on, anything entering the system is headed for the Milwaukee River in Lake Michigan.

- It was just, it's one of those times where, okay, you've done everything he can.

Everything's still working, but the mother nature just came in with too much.

So at that point, you're just holding on, waiting for the rain to stop.

- [Dan] He knows streets are flooded and basements, people are gonna be upset.

- [Voice With Clear Tone] Backed up basements, raging rivers and cars floating even under water on state highways.

- [Dan] In the morning, there's a press conference, Kevin should be there, but the highway is flooded, so we misses it.

A city engineer speaks instead.

- We had 14 inches of rain in this location right here, which is an intense amount in a short period of time.

So there's no sewer system across the country that can maintain that amount.

- [Dan] The overall response to this overflow is kind of surprising.

- Everyone kind of understood that, you know, this is a big storm.

- [Dan] The storm did more than $33 million in damage.

1500 homes were seriously damaged or destroyed, and over 5 billion gallons of sewage overflowed into rivers and Lake Michigan, but it was mostly rainwater.

So there weren't any fish die offs or other long-term environmental impacts that we know of, and Kevin Shafer and the Sewage district get a lot of the credit for that.

The sewage district has captured and cleaned over 98% of all the storm water and wastewater that's entered the system since 1994.

The goal nationally is way less, 85%.

Besides building the deep tunnel, Milwaukee also replaced concrete water channels with natural landscapes to soak up storm water before it gets to the sewers.

Green roofs and rain barrels help two.

These days, the sewage district averages just over two overflows a year.

- I think a lot of that is this ethic of do every thing you can to stop an al flow, do everything you can to improve stormwater runoffs, and everything you can to make sure the plants treat the wastewater the way they're supposed to.

- [Dan] But for Kevin, that success comes with a cost.

- I've told folks as a joke, I said, yeah, I'm gonna have to have therapy to have for PTSD to just recover from some of this.

And yeah, and as you saw, it's gonna impact me and I wish I had a control, but 24 years later, I'm still as emotional I always was before.

- [Dan] But your finger on it for me, why?

Why do you care that much?

- [Kevin] My kids are gonna live here.

Everyone else's kids are gonna live here.

I wanted to live in a place that's as clean as it can be, as natural as it can be.

(gentle music) (upbeat music) - Does this sound familiar?

After months of gray snowy days and early nights, things suddenly change.

The temperature goes up, you trade your parka for a light jacket and you think that finally, the long winter is over and then winter returns in full force and we're back to bundling up and bracing ourselves against the cold.

This is false spring, those blasts of warmth around the end of winter.

It's a little practical joke that Mother Nature likes to play on us every year, but what's actually going on here?

- You're just getting a pocket of warmth that's kind of moving over your area, kind of at the end of winter, and that can make it kind of almost feel like kind of the middle of spring.

It'll be quite dramatic compared to what you've kind of just recently experienced.

You know, in the middle of January, in the depth of the coldest time of the year.

- [Adam] That's Matt Rosencrans, a meteorologist with NOOA's National Centers for Environmental Prediction.

He told me that false spring is just a regular part of the transition between the seasons.

- You have your jet stream, your jet stream has ups and down, you know, it's mainly west to east, but then it's got wiggles north and south and wonder when it wiggles northward and lets that warm air from the south come up over top of you, you'll get the warmer temperatures.

- [Adam] The jet streams, narrow currents of air in the atmosphere are created by the temperature differences between the tropics and the poles.

And that difference is strongest in the winter.

So when the jet stream pushes north, the warm air that comes with it can feel like a dramatic change.

- The amplitude of those fluctuations is quite a, is can be stronger in the winter because the jet stream is stronger and further south.

And those things that drive those changes in the temperature hold their energy from the jet stream.

- And this isn't the only time of year that we experience these temperature fluctuations.

We just seem to notice them more in the transition between winter and spring.

Think of it this way, when the temperature shifts from zero degrees Fahrenheit to 20 degrees, you're probably staying inside either way, those both feel really cold, but when the temperature shifts from 20 degrees to 40 degrees, then you might venture outside, that's above freezing.

It's the difference between a heavy coat and a light jacket.

- If that comes around in February, it feels more like April.

You're gonna feel like it's that false spring.

But like a warm pocket in the middle of January might just, it might be warmer, but it will still be below freezing.

So it doesn't quite have that same kind of visceral response in yourself.

- [Adam] Most of the time.

False springs are a nice if temporary break from the depths of winter.

But for ecosystems and agriculture, these warm bursts can have major consequences.

These seasonal changes are really interesting to people like Theresa Crimmins, Director of the USA Phenology Network.

- Phenology refers to when stuff happens seasonally implants of animals.

It really specifically is speaking to things like when do the leaves come out on the trees or the flowers open, and how all of those events are tied to the environmental conditions that drive them.

- [Adam] When we see sustained warmer temperatures early in the year, that can have massive impacts on plant and animal life, especially when these warm temperatures are followed by a return to normal conditions.

- False springs in particular are really defined by when temperatures are extra warm, extra early, and they're so warm that they prompt animals and plants to initiate their springtime activity significantly earlier than they would.

It puts them at much greater risk of being exposed to frost events or freeze events hat are still occurring at times when it's not unreasonable for them to occur.

- [Adam] For example, in 2012, the US and especially the Great Lakes region saw a very early, very warm spring with record high temperatures.

- And then we did get hit by a pretty significant freeze event in April that isn't out of line at all for Michigan weather.

And it had really, really damaging impact on the plants that had started their activity already.

- [Adam] Michigan's agriculture was hit especially hard with fruit crops devastated across the state.

In 2012, apple production fell by about 88% and Tart Cherry production dropped by roughly 93% compared to the previous year.

These are both a very important fruit crops for the state.

Historically, severe false spring events like that are anomalies, but warmer weather and drastic temperature swings due to climate change mean that we could see more of them in the future.

- One of the most dominant patterns that we see, especially when we look at historical records of when plants leafed out and flowered, is that things are happening much earlier now in the spring than they used to.

And there's a pretty straight line between that and the fact that global temperatures are warmer than they used to be decades and centuries ago.

- [Adam] One study suggests that false spring events like the one in 2012 could even become a new normal in just a couple of decades.

- There has been some research that suggests that we're probably looking at a substantial increase in the incidences of conditions like we saw in 2012.

In the future decades.

We have the chance to change that trajectory for sure.

If we make changes in terms of how much carbon dioxide and other things we are pumping into the atmosphere, there is the potential that that we could slow down and change that trajectory.

(gentle music) - As severe weather events become more common throughout the world.

The Great Lakes region is being talked about as a potential safe haven from some of the worst effects of climate change.

I'm here with Great Lakes Now contributor Stephen Starr, who wrote about how different communities in the region are preparing for and thinking about climate migration.

Stephen, thanks for joining us today.

- Thanks for having me.

- From what you found, is climate migration something that's happening here at a large scale or are we just the early stages of it?

- Right, and this is the big, big question that people in communities around the Great Lakes want to know and also planners, whether it's planners, whether it's residents, and also people in other parts of the country as well.

And the answer I guess, is that we're not seeing yet a large scale obvious migration of people from other parts of the country to the Great Lakes region.

Now, there's one kind of exception to that and that is the Puerto Rican community that has grown and developed in Buffalo over about the last decade or so since Hurricane Maria In 2017.

We've seen tens of thousands of people move from Puerto Rico to Buffalo, New York.

But outside of that, it's not something that's been happening on a very large scale.

And that's something I think that a lot of folks who live in the Great Lakes from planners to residents are happy about, I guess that we're not seeing this mass migration.

- In your reporting, you state how as of summer 2025, Buffalo was the last city in the lower 48 states to have never reached 100 degrees.

Why do you think Buffalo has embraced this title of Climate Haven and what are they doing to support or attract climate migrants?

- The city of Buffalo has made some efforts to attract, to place itself and position itself as a place for so-called climate migrants where they could live.

There's obviously a bunch of losses for that.

The more people who live in a particular place and for example, Buffalo increases the tax revenue that the city might get, income tax, property taxes as well.

But there's still lots of challenges, right?

The fact that infrastructural updates need to be made and it's an issue right across Great Lake cities.

It's not just Buffalo Cleveland or Detroit.

Lots of different cities, you know, the water situation in terms of providing upgrading water systems, lots of our infrastructure, whether it's roads and electricity, you know, there's a bunch of different things out there.

The housing, as I mentioned as well, older stock of houses, maybe they're not up to spec in terms of installation and weatherization.

So, you know, there's opportunities out there, but there's still a host of challenges for cities that do like to mark themselves as destinations for climate migrants.

- How are rural areas preparing for an influx of residents, especially as existing healthcare and housing infrastructure is already kind of struggling in some of these places?

- Yeah, it's a big challenge and it's certainly easier for cities and metro areas to make plans ahead into the future because they do have these larger, for smaller communities, rural communities and townships, it's a much bigger challenge.

But simultaneously, they are already facing the effects of outward migration and so it's important in for them to maintain their population levels if they want, you know, medical or other schools, education facilities at all, right?

So it's kind of, it's a really tricky and difficult advancing act that the smaller rural communities are facing.

They're losing population as it is, and they do need to maintain that, obviously, to keep the services and facilities that they have.

Again, it's not clear to folks how many people may arrive or come to the region in the years ahead.

It's happening at a very small scale.

I think for the most part, the rural communities of the Great Lakes are generally positive about this, but there is a fear that, you know, what will happen if there are hundreds of people moving in over the course of a few years.

We're not seeing anything like temperatures again in the lands of Arizona or Texas.

We're not seeing the lakes of severe hurricanes in Florida expected to decrease or ease up in the years ahead.

So it's something that could continue to be an issue.

It's a big challenge for these communities as they try to figure out what the future could look like.

Right?

(gentle music) - Thanks for watching.

You can find more about the stories in the show at greatlakesnow.org.

While you're there, please follow us on social media and subscribe to our newsletter.

(upbeat music) - [Voice With Clean Tone] This program was brought to you by the Fred and Barbara Erb Family Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Richard C. Devereaux Foundation for Energy and Environmental Programs at Detroit PBS, Polk Family Fund, DTE Foundation, and contributions to your PBS Station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(upbeat music) (soft music)