Residents near the Great Lakes wonder: How do you handle a generation's worth of water level changes in just a few years?
CEDARVILLE, Mich. - On a frigid morning in late fall, resort owner Mark Engle studied the mangled planks and dock posts scattered along an ice-glazed channel that feeds into Lake Huron.
Les Cheneaux Landing Resort, tucked behind an archipelago of 36 islands off Michigan's Upper Peninsula, once had a 175-foot dock with slips for a dozen boats, a boathouse and a bait shop.
In the past two years, Lake Huron rose through the floorboards of both buildings and overtopped the adjoining dock. Now, the weather-beaten boathouse sits stoically marooned, beset on all sides by crystal clear water.
All that Engle has left to carry him through the next tourist season is a small makeshift dock.
"Man can't seem to make anything big enough, strong enough to maintain an advantage over the lake," Engle said. "I've been dealing with Lake Huron since 1982. And I'm afraid the lake is winning the battle."
Near-record high lake levels have astonished residents and business owners in the tiny hamlet of Cedarville, an unincorporated waterfront community built around boating. The consternation isn't solely from the high water - in 1986, lake levels were slightly higher - it's also from the pace of the rise. Less than seven years earlier, many docks and boathouses were sitting on dry land.
In 2013, Lake Huron bottomed out, hitting its lowest mark in more than a century, as did Lake Michigan, which shares the same water levels, according to data from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Around that time, the lake withdrew so far from the shore around Engle's resort - then a collection of 12 rustic cabins and three docks - that mud was all that remained beneath his boathouse.
In just 3 1/2 years, levels rose more than 4 feet and last summer peaked at nearly 6 feet above the record low.
"We're living in a time period of extremes," Engle said, looking out at a waterfront that has morphed into a graveyard of
