How are homes and properties along Lake Erie being saved from falling into the water? (2024)

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CONNEAUT, OHIO — One foot fell one year.

Two feet vanished the next.

Eight feet in the span of a decade.

Three decades ago, Clyde and Ann Laughlin's home was close to falling into Lake Erie. Between 1972 and 1992, the roughly 60-foot-high bluff that their brick home sat on gradually eroded.

Along with neighbors, the Laughlins dug an 8-foot-wide trench and installed a drainage system to keep the silty land from sinking further. They even strung together old tires to slow the land from slumping. But before the retired elementary school educators knew it, only a dozen feet separated the edge of the bluff and their home.

"After we saw a crack in the land, we decided we've got to get the heck out," Clyde Laughlin said.

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They weren't leaving their 1.5-acre Lake Road sliver and its breathtaking view of Lake Erie, though. Nor were they investing in a costly and complex retaining wall if it might not work.

So Clyde connected, of all things, a series of extension cords to measure 200 feet from the bluff's edge to a safer spot and hired a Cleveland-based structural moving company to lift the home off its foundation and move it away from the lake.

"I didn't see us putting $18,000 into something over the hill and it not working," Clyde said. "This worked."

Today, remnants of the home's former foundation are scattered about the bluff's face, having been freed from the confines of sand and soil. One section of cinder blocks is still embedded at the edge, but it's no longer the Laughlins' concern.

Bluff Erosion Potential Index: How much land will your lakefront property lose in coming years? Interactive map has answers

'Till landslide brought it down'

Now that water levels have dropped, scientists are watching to see what effect a mild winter, in which Lake Erie had no ice cover, will have on beaches and bluffs. They're waiting for the storms of spring, which have grown fiercer, they say, from climate change.

For some, it's a race against time.

Mike McGovern and his siblings are considering selling family possessions — including rare sports memorabilia — to pay to move one of the cottages on their Lake Road property in Conneaut. The property has been in the family for five decades.

Since July 2020, about 70 feet of the bluff has vanished, including 10 feet in the past month. The family fears their weekend and summertime retreat is in jeopardy if they don't act.

"Forty years and nothing," McGovern said. "And then this."

The problem is so bad in Ashtabula County that miles down the road, west of the Laughlins and McGoverns, the Ohio Department of Transportation closed a section of Route 531 in Ashtabula Township and North Kingsville last year for an emergency repair project. ODOT drove 300 feet of sheet piling 40 feet into the ground, according to the Ashtabula Star-Beacon, and it will embark on an additional $5 million of erosion-mitigation work in the months ahead.

To the east, in Girard Township, Pennsylvania, the bluff that Lake Erie Community Park sits on has been prone to severe sliding in recent years due to the thick sands at its crestline. The bluff on the west side of the park continues to vanish to this day. Twenty-three feet of one section of the bluff is gone. The township can only afford to control the erosion through tree planting and other vegetation, lacking the financial resources to construct a break wall.

"By the time we've made a decision and have an arborist go out and look, we've lost more," said Tiffany Kramer, the township's zoning administrator and assistant secretary.

At one point, Kramer put a "danger" sign on a tree near the bluff's edge.

"That's now at the bottom, in the lake," she said.

On a Facebook page dedicated to the park, patrons document the ever-changing landscape through videos and photographs. A video posted April 3 prompted one person to write that it looked "almost unrecognizable" while another person asked, "Are we going to lose a large portion of our park?"

More: Erosion along Lake Erie bluffs a cause for major concern

'A dynamic ecosystem'

Erosion, the breakdown of rock, soil and other sediment over time, naturally occurs anywhere a body of water meets land.

"While it can be slowed down or mitigated, it cannot be entirely stopped," said Shelby Clark, the coordinator of the Coastal Resources Management Program for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. "The Great Lakes bluff is a very dynamic ecosystem. Wind, waves, ice or lack of, groundwater, and stormwater — all can affect the rate and severity of erosion of the bluffs. Most of these factors can only be controlled to a limited extent."

In recent years, erosion's accomplice has been high water levels in Lake Erie, which have since dropped by a foot to a foot and a half.

Lake Erie water levels set record highs in eight out of 12 months between the summer of 2019 (June through September) and again in late winter and early spring of 2020 (February through May), according to data from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Water levels fluctuate for multiple decades at a time and, when higher, can cause significant erosion, starting where lake waters meet the bluff, known as the bluff toe, and then moving up the slope of the bluff, referred to as the bluff face. Even when high waters recede, the higher rate of erosion might not, at least not immediately. Clark noted that this lag time is not well understood.

Human activity also contributes to erosion, she said. Clearing vegetation, including trees, along the bluff face, mowing to the edge of the bluff, adding weight to the bluff surface by building an addition onto a home or installing a swimming pool, or creating an impervious surface by installing a paved driveway or patio — all factor into the erosion equation.

Bluffs, which range from 5 feet to as high as 60 feet, make up 90% of the land along the Lake Erie shoreline in Pennsylvania and are also the predominant land feature in eastern Ohio.

Along the 45 miles of shoreline in Erie County, Pennsylvania, the bluff is receding by an average of 6 inches annually, but in some areas, particularly on the east and west ends of the county, some properties are losing as much as a foot to 2 feet each year due to erosion, according to data from the Pennsylvania Sea Grant, which operates through Penn State Behrend in Erie, and the Coastal Resources Management Program.

In Springfield Township, Pennsylvania, the bluff is eroding almost a foot each year. Clark said this is partially due to Conneaut Harbor break walls across the state line. The break walls block the west-to-east currents that carry sand to Pennsylvania, causing beaches to shrink. When the beaches degrade, so too does the buffer between the water and bluff.

"Degraded beaches are less protective of the bluff toe, particularly during storm events," Clark said. "Wave run-up can more readily attack the bluff toe and result in progressive bluff erosion."

'Trying to brace for it'

James McQuiston, 73, stands along Lakefront Drive in North East, Pennsylvania, looking east toward a shoreline that meanders along his cottage-lined roadway to a small beach and then a high bluff. Trees, nearly horizontal now, grasp the face of the bluff with their roots, barely able to hold on.

McQuiston scoffs at the landowners who live on the bluff. They've contributed to the erosion problem by chopping down trees that disturbed their sightline, he said.

"Everybody wants the view," he said.

McQuistin's cottage isn't perched on a bluff, though. It's just a few feet above lake level and only a stone's skip away from the water's edge.

A postcard from 1928 shows the stretch of Lakefront Drive, where McQuiston lives, as once having a sandy beach. Today, however, massive 8-foot deep by 10-foot wide tanks separate the dirt road from Lake Erie waters.

The tanks once held grape juice at the town's largest employer, Welch Foods Inc. In the 1990s, the tanks were welded together in pairs, placed on bedrock and filled with sand, dirt and gravel to replace the debris-filled oil barrels that had been blown out by storms. The tanks continue to act as a retaining wall, but some have begun to sink deeper into the lake.

"One of the flies in the ointment was that they just set them on the bedrock," he said. "They didn't seal them to the bedrock."

The sand and gravel in the tanks need to be replenished each year. McQuiston used to pay $500 a year to refill the three tanks in front of his cottage, but in recent years he's had to buy more material — about $1,300 worth — to top them off.

In recent years, including Halloween 2019, storms have carried the lake's high waters onto his small front lawn right up to his home. McQuiston lined his property with concrete blocks and a wood-plank barricade to block the surging stormwaters. It's helped, he said.

Wind and high waves are McQuiston's biggest worries.

"We're always watching wave height, and we're watching the wind direction," he said. "We've got a bunch of apps on our iPhones, and whenever we know the weather's bad, we're constantly watching, trying to brace for it, and we've never had to do that before."

McQuiston, an author and researcher, belongs to the 105-year-old Orchard Beach Park Association. Members have access to the small private beach below the nearby bluff and to an adjacent boat house. The boat house is barely usable anymore, and the beach continues to shrink.

In the early 1900s, according to McQuiston's research, it was touted by some to be the best beach between Buffalo and Cleveland. A trolley was built to provide people access to it. It was so popular that a wooden amusem*nt park, which the trolley company would later buy, was built on the land, a former apple orchard. But when the beach began to deteriorate, the trolley company sold the property to a group of investors who would form the neighborhood association to which McQuiston and his neighbors now belong.

"We put a sign there for everybody to stop, and we have all kinds of extra chairs and kids come and play in the sand, all that kind of stuff," he said. "Not a lot of people have that, so we know how lucky we are, I guess. But you also got to take the good with the bad and these last three years have been pretty bad."

What the data says

Scientists have been monitoring the effects of erosion for decades. Pennsylvania's Coastal Resources Management Program began what's known as control point monitoring in the 1980s, examining 130 points along the shoreline annually.

The Pennsylvania Sea Grant monitors bluff recession at greater intervals using aerial imagery and laser imaging, detection and ranging (LIDAR) to measure the elevation of the bluff crestline — where the edge of the bluff meets its slope. It has not collected comprehensive data since 2015, a period when the water level in Lake Erie was low.

But high water in recent years has taken its toll in areas.

Aerial imagery alone shows a noticeable change in the landscape between 2007 and 2020, said Sean Rafferty, the associate director and research director of the Lake Erie Office of the Pennsylvania Sea Grant.

"We've seen massive losses of property in that timeframe," Rafferty said. "Lake Erie Community Park in Girard has seen major slipping. A lot of that is groundwater driven. If you have high water levels combined with increased precipitation, which some attribute to changing climate in the Great Lakes, that's kind of a recipe for disaster for the bluffs."

High water, he said, "attacks" the toe of the bluff — where the bluff meets the shoreline — while precipitation makes the ground moist and more susceptible to erosion.

"We just don't have the data to measure that right now," Rafferty said.

Costly concerns

McGovern, 40, of Columbus, his two brothers and their sister will inherit the cottage that their uncle, Dennis McGovern, put into a trust when he died in 2011.

As a kid, Mike McGovern would use a light pole near the bluff's edge as a boundary marker. He didn't want to fall into the lake.

He was shocked when he and family members noticed that the light pole was suddenly missing a few years ago. It had fallen into the lake. Then another 40 feet of the bluff dropped out, taking a fire pit with it.

"What's happening is that groundwater is coming out (of the bluff) and then the land above it just collapses," said McGovern's brother-in-law, Chris Schmedes, whose wife Megan is among the siblings who will inherit the property.

McGovern and Schmedes said there are few options available:

They can move the cottage, but that would cost roughly $100,000 — more than five times what Laughlin paid for the service in 1992.
They can install a wall to stabilize the bluff and prevent further erosion at a cost of nearly $150,000.
Or they can let nature take its course and let the larger cottage on the property meet its eventual demise while investing in additions to the smaller cottage that's farther away from the bluff's edge.

"It's crazy," said Schmedes, who lives outside of Chicago but visits the cottage in Conneaut with his family regularly. "We've been trying to find a solution, but there's no aid anywhere."

Ohio offers a low-interest loan to help property owners with the cost of bluff stabilization, but not any financial resources like a grant, he said. (The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection also does not offer any aid to private property owners for erosion control or bluff stabilization).

Girard Township in Pennsylvania used snow fencing to restrict access to sections of Lake Erie Community Park prone to erosion and is considering relocating a pavilion, which is currently on stable ground. Township officials, for the sake of discussion, even briefly talked about turning over the park to the state's Department ofConservationand Natural Resources since it has a larger budget, but that idea hasn't resurfaced.

Craig Smith is the field operations manager for Norwalk, Ohio-based Mark Haynes Construction, a company that has specialized in Lake Erie erosion projects for the past 30 years. In 2020, the company was fielding 15 calls a day from lakefront property owners. The calls have slowed since, but there remains an abundance of work, Smith said.

Every project is unique, Smith said, but the company has found that the most effective solution, and also the fastest, is to install a revetment, a type of retaining wall.

"It's almost like a buttress," he said. "You are building a triangle piece, in simple terms, out of armor rock, approximately 15 feet toed in, below lake level, into the lake bottom, and then getting to approximately 15 feet above water. That way you've got weight supporting the existing land to keep it from washing in. And then, the rock actually lessens the repercussions from the waves so when they hit, the energy dissipates."

The company then softens the slope of the bluff and plants vegetation that will naturally maintain it.

It's not a cheap date, especially as inflation has driven up the cost of fuel and materials. The average cost is about $1,500 per linear foot, Smith said.

"So if a person has a 100-foot lakefront that needs revetment — obviously it could go up or down depending on the exact site — you're probably looking at $150,000," he said.

That's the dilemma for McGovern and his siblings: How to come up with that sum of money and what's the best way to spend it? They want to keep the property in the family, but even if they would opt to sell, "Who's going to want to buy it?" McGovern asked.

There's actually a lot of interest right now in lakefront property.

'We did the right thing'

Libby Remache, a Howard Hannah realtor in Erie County, has seen a post-COVID 19 uptick in lakefront property sales. A majority of prospective buyers are from out of state or out of the region and are seeking to invest in a property that can be converted into a short-term rental, such as an AirBnB or VRBO.

That's not always been the case: Lakefront residential properties have had a tendency to stay on the market longer because they have a higher price point and a different pool of buyers, Remache said.

Those buyers, she said, have resources available, such as the Bluff Erosion Potential Index, to help them determine if they're making the right investment. Some buyers, she noted, even make their offers contingent upon a civil engineering inspection.

There's another type of buyer, too, who's less concerned about erosion.

"People who want to live by the lake, they don't care," Remache said. "They're going to live by the lake no matter what."

Count Clyde and Ann Laughlin among them.

They never gave much thought to selling and putting the problem in someone else's hands when erosion began claiming their property and almost their home — though Clyde admits he once asked a man, who was looking to buy his neighbor's property, for $1 million to buy his instead.

The junior high sweethearts were driving around Conneaut when they were in their 20s when Ann said she wanted to live by the lake.

"We were young, foolish and daring," she said.

If they have any misgivings about moving their home, it's that they built an addition onto it once it was relocated. The empty-nesters, parents of two adult daughters now, no longer need as much space. Between moving the main home and adding onto it, "It's a surprise I didn't have a massive ulcer by the end of that summer," Clyde Laughlin said.

"We did the right thing," Clyde said as he looked over the bluff recently, where cinder blocks from his old foundation have tumbled down the bluff or are now at its edge. "We wouldn't live anywhere else."

Matthew Rink can be reached at mrink@timesnews.com or on Twitter at @ETNRink.

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