The Great Lake Michigan Epidemic of 1954

While Chicagoans sweat through a series of brutally hot days, residents 70 years ago shivered. The city’s meteorological start to summer in 1954 was anything but summery, retired weather service observer Frank Wachowski told the Tribune in 2006. Highs didn’t rise above 60 degrees and nighttime lows were 50 degrees. But it was more than just chilly. The first four days of the month were rainy and there was virtually no sunshine as a thick blanket of clouds dominated the skies.

Then everything changed with one of the most dramatic temperature changes in Chicago’s history. Summer heat hit the city with a vengeance, and June 1954 became one of Chicago’s hottest Junes on record. Seven temperature records were set, and one was broken that month when a blistering heat wave swept through the city, bringing a record-breaking 11 days in a row of temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit.

Here are the hottest days in Chicago – with temperatures of 100 degrees or more – since weather records began

June 26, 1954, began hazy and stormy. That morning, a thunderstorm developed in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and tracked southeast, passing through Madison, Rockford, and Milwaukee, among other cities. At 7:30 a.m., it crossed Chicago and blew out onto Lake Michigan at nearly 55 miles per hour, leading Joseph Pecararo to believe the worst of the day’s weather was over. The skies were clear and the lake calm when the 24-year-old lifeguard captain arrived for work at North Avenue Beach. With temperatures expected to reach nearly 100 degrees, he expected a big Saturday crowd. But at that time, the beach was deserted except for a few fishermen on the hooked pier and a row of rowboats stored in front of the beach house, ready for use in an emergency.

At 8:10 a.m., the storm hit Michigan City, sending a 5-foot wall of water over the breakwater onto the shore. It reflected back and raced toward Chicago at nearly 55 mph.

“I thought the end of the world was coming”

At about 9:30 a.m. on June 26, 1954, a bizarre 10-foot-high inland wave broke on Chicago’s shoreline, stretching from the Chicago River north to Wilmette. A 1985 Tribune reconstruction described it as a “monstrous, humpbacked sea monster.”

The wall of water hit Pecararo and other lifeguards without warning, knocking them off their feet. When they surfaced, “we were laughing, we thought it was kind of funny,” he recalled in 1994. “But seconds later, a person came running and said a fisherman had been washed off the pier.”

John Jaworski, who was fishing with his 18-year-old son, Joseph, disappeared. Jaworski was only the first victim of the big wave that was originally thought to be one of Lake Michigan’s most unusual phenomena: a seiche (pronounced “saiche”). Such potentially deadly waves form when a gust front of strong wind pushes water across the lake, much like blowing on a hot cup of coffee pushes the liquid toward the opposite edge. The wind then moves away from the lake, but the water sloshes back, creating destructive waves without a storm warning of their impending arrival.

“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Pecararo. “I thought the end of the world was coming.”

Lifeguards from North Avenue Beach had just managed to recover Jaworski’s body from the rough water by forming a line and pushing it toward shore when a patrol car arrived with the news: “Dozens dead in Montrose!”

“We jumped into the patrol car. It was a wild ride,” Pecararo recalled.

“When I looked back, I saw people being washed off the pier”

The only warning Herbert Riederer, then a 24-year-old state conservation officer, had of the coming wave was wet shoes. He had just written a ticket for an unlicensed fisherman when water suddenly rose onto the Montrose Harbor pier where he was standing. About 50 people in Montrose Harbor were stranded on the pier.

“I went to higher ground,” he recalls. “I heard the rushing of water and when I looked back I saw people being washed off the pier.”

Riederer, who had no radio, raced to a nearby road for help, where he “commanded the first car I saw and had it drive me to a bait shop” half a mile away, where the nearest telephone was located.

Mae Gabriel, 48, and her husband Edward, 49, were later found drowned. The couple had planned to renew their wedding vows at their son’s upcoming wedding.

“It’s not something you can forget,” Riederer told the Tribune in 1994. “I can still see the woman riding the crest of that huge wave into the harbor entrance and then disappearing.”

Three bodies were recovered from the harbor that morning; four more were recovered later. One of them was Theodore Stempinski, the man Riederer had ticketed. Stempinski had apparently stopped to pick up his fishing equipment before fleeing the pier.

Cause of death: “Force majeure”

It would take more than a week to find all the bodies. On July 8, 1954, an investigative commission officially announced the cause of death of the eight people: “…victims of a seiche caused by atmospheric conditions, otherwise, force majeure.” They had no idea that the cause of death would be re-investigated decades later.

Chicago Park District officials were confident at the time that all victims of the incident had been recovered from Lake Michigan.

Prediction of a “big wave”

Small seiches occur on the lake from time to time, but the magnitude of the suspected seiche of June 1954 is rare. It triggered a flood of scientific studies on the phenomenon, which quickly saved lives: just a few weeks later, on July 6, 1954, a similar storm passed over Chicago, whereupon the local weather service issued a seiche warning.

Thanks to work in the early 1960s by a team at the University of Chicago led by George Platzman of the Department of Geophysics Sciences, it is now possible to predict with high accuracy not only which storm systems will trigger seiches, but also where the seiche waves will strike most strongly, how large they will be, and when they will reach Chicago’s lakeshore. The point is that when a seiche warning is issued, you cannot rely on the condition of the lake surface to know when the danger has passed.

Was the earthquake really a meteotsunami?

Scientists have now determined that the north coast was hit by a meteorological tsunami (commonly called a meteotsunami) in June 1954, rather than a seiche as originally reported. Both are caused by spikes in air pressure and gale-force winds that cause water to build up as a storm moves across a lake. However, they differ in size and duration. A seiche is a single, lake-wide wave that rocks back and forth, while a meteotsunami is generally the width of a storm front and lasts for a shorter period.

Chicago’s vulnerability to meteotsunami is due to factors such as the intensity, direction and speed of storms, as well as the depth and shape of Lake Michigan. The shallow waters and frequency of storms make it a “favourable location” for meteotsunami activity.

“Southern Lake Michigan has the kind of natural environment that allows the speed needed to form a meteotsunami (a storm), and the shape of the lake points toward Chicago,” said Adam Bechle, a coastal resilience specialist at the University of Wisconsin’s Sea Grant Institute.

Was there a shark attack in Lake Michigan? Here’s what Tribune reporters discovered in the 1970s.

Fast-moving storms that can trigger a meteotsunami move from west to east across Lake Michigan, directing a wave toward western Michigan or northeastern Indiana. When the storm makes landfall, the wave crashes against the shore and rebounds back toward Chicago.

“The risk of people being affected increases when it is independent of the storm that caused it,” Anderson said. “When a meteotsunami is approaching and is associated with lightning and thunderstorms, people know to take certain precautions to protect themselves. If it flies back to the other side of the lake, it is more dangerous because it could happen under sunny skies.”

That is exactly what happened on June 26, 1954.

Meteotsunamis are “kind of like the sharks of the Great Lakes,” Dave Benjamin, director of the Great Lakes Surf Rescue Project, told the Tribune in 2019. “They make national headlines, but only a small percentage of people are affected.”

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