First New Orleans and now Milwaukee. Everywhere Brent coaches ....
Milwaukee Sinks as Ebbing Groundwater Undermines Its Foundations
2014-04-03 01:00:00.0 GMT
By Tim Jones and Marie Rohde
April 3 (Bloomberg) -- Milwaukee is sinking.
The walls and foundations of dozens of downtown buildings
that stayed structurally afloat for more than 100 years on
wooden pilings are deteriorating as once-sturdy Wisconsin pines,
oaks and cedars rot. The culprit is declining groundwater that
preserved the supports.
From Boston to the seaside town of Coos Bay, Oregon,
pilings are rotting, undermining homes and neighborhoods.
Drought, over-use of water and crumbling subterranean drains
that channel away moisture are to blame in Milwaukee,
hydrologists say. While Wisconsin courts hear a fight over who
should pay, there's a growing realization that water scarcity is
no longer the singular worry of dry and newly built regions.
"We've left the century of oil and now we're in the
century of water," said Peter Annin, author of "The Great
Lakes Water Wars," a 2006 history. "Water tensions are the new
normal, no matter where you live, and this is just the latest
example of that."
The tale of wood and water is told in inches -- as in how
much buildings have slipped. Milwaukee's consciousness was
aroused in 2000 by a newspaper report that said sewerage
commissioners were meeting behind closed doors to consider a
$500,000 claim from the owners of Milwaukee Auditorium, who said
the structure had sunk as much as 3 inches.
They blamed cracks in a deep tunnel built at a court's
order to reduce raw sewage dumped into neighboring Lake
Michigan. The commissioners approved a $200,000 payment. In
ensuing years, claims mounted as other foundations sagged.
Wary Eyes
Owners have gone to great lengths to protect their
property, some of it historic.
Two structures on the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance
Co. campus were built on 7,000 wood pilings and engineers
measure groundwater by peeping through several four-inch holes
in the basement of the 102-year-old main building, which
resembles a Greek temple.
They drain water from the roof to douse the timbers and
recycle 5,000 gallons used monthly to test the sprinkler system.
The company is now installing an alarm that signals when water
is too low.
"Expensive is a relative term," said Scott Wollenzien,
facility operations consultant for Northwestern Mutual, the No.
2 seller of life insurance in the U.S. last year. "We built
this building to last a hundred years. We expect it to last at
least another hundred."
Ancient Art
The wood that supports scores of cities is deteriorating as
groundwater falls and it's exposed to the effects of oxygen. The
pilings were driven in a common 19th century construction
technique to compensate for spongy or marsh-like ground. It
predated steel and concrete and, as long as water stayed above
the timbers, it worked.
"This is a warning to others," said James Lambrechts, an
associate professor of civil engineering at Wentworth Institute
of Technology in Boston. "In Milwaukee and here, people didn't
realize they had a groundwater issue until the pilings started
to rot."
Lambrechts wrote a 2008 study charting Boston's challenge
of protecting row houses and other structures of the Back Bay,
South End and Fenway neighborhoods, dating to the 1800s.
The old German town of Milwaukee developed from marshland,
starting in 1846 and, with breweries such as Pabst, Schlitz,
Blatz and Miller, slaked the nation's thirst.
Lake Blame
The cause of the sinking of the city of 600,000 on Lake
Michigan's southwest shore is the basis of a 12-year court
battle. The owner of a damaged downtown department store
building sued the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District in
2002, claiming a 28-mile (45 kilometer) tunnel stormwater system
that opened in 1993 has been draining groundwater from above and
undermining the foundation. Bostco LLC sought $11 million to
repair the pilings.
The district blamed the declining level of Lake Michigan,
which is affected by rain and snowfall. Lining the tunnel with
concrete to seal cracks would cost taxpayers tens of millions of
dollars and shut the system for a year, a spokesman said.
In July, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled the district
would have to fix the leaks. However, the justices returned the
case to a circuit court to determine how repairs should be made
and reduced the district's liability to $100,000 because of a
state law capping awards from government agencies.
Beertown Down
Dozens of other buildings are affected. Milwaukee's City
Hall, an 1895 structure listed on the National Register of
Historic Places, is working to save its foundation of oak and
pine. The Milwaukee Repertory Theater recently estimated it will
cost $1.75 million to fix its foundation.
By the time the Bostco lawsuit was filed in 2003, the
district had paid more than $7 million to fix foundations of 17
downtown buildings, according to the owners and court records.
They included the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts parking
structure; the Bradley Center, where the Bucks of the National
Basketball Association play; the Milwaukee Theatre; the Shops at
Grand Avenue; the Hyatt Regency hotel; and Usinger's Weiner
Works.
Bill Graffin, a spokesman for the district, didn't respond
to a request for information on payouts since then.
Groundwater across the nation is stressed, according to a
report from the U.S. Geological Survey. While climate change,
drought and faulty infrastructure all can contribute, there is
no refuting falling water levels.
Dangerously Dry
Sinking land is also occurring out west, where farmers have
been over-pumping groundwater in California's San Joaquin Valley
to feed crops, inadvertently draining the aquifer in the U.S.'s
most productive farming area. Parts of the Central Valley are
subsiding as much as a foot a year, damaging bridges and canals,
according to the San Jose Mercury News.
In Milwaukee, the deep tunnel has fissures through which
2.8 million gallons leak in every day, court records show.
"It's a big deal in some places," said Devin Galloway, a
hydrogeologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. "The dry rot
process doesn't take that long once the material dries out."
Galloway has studied foundation depletion in the
Netherlands, where declining water levels have left structures
built in the 16th and 17th centuries "visibly leaning and
deformed."
The sinking of Milwaukee doesn't afford easy solutions. A
century-old, three-story building was demolished last month
because the structure was beyond repair. Others have been saved
-- at a cost.
Franklyn Gimbel, a lawyer who is chairman of the board of
the Wisconsin Center convention hall, said the sewerage district
paid more than $200,000 to shore up Milwaukee's old auditorium.
It wasn't enough. The board later learned that the ground
wouldn't support an expansion, and modifications added $10
million to the project.
