Work begins to build beach wall on Empire shoreline

From staff reports

Beach “hardening” has begun, and a ramp has been formed to build a beach wall and rock riprap along a private Lake Michigan property on Storm Hill, south of Empire public beach and north of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore’s Empire Bluff.

As the Glen Arbor Sun reported in mid-August, that Storm Hill homeowner, whose waterfront house is currently under construction and who lost 25-30 feet of their bluff and substantial shoreline last fall and spring during record-high water levels, already secured permits from both the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers and Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) in July to install a 165-foot steel seawall and 10 feet of boulder riprap at the toe of their existing bluff. 

The Empire Village Council on July 28 approved use of Niagara Street, which runs west to the public beach, and use of 30 feet at the very southern end of the beach, for the Storm Hill homeowner to haul supplies, build a ramp down to the beach and install thousands of dollars worth of rock rip rap to reinforce their bluff. Trucks, bulldozers and equipment were seen Tuesday and Wednesday preparing the ground for the steel and boulders to come. (Photos taken by Empire Township residents David Early and Anne-Marie Oomen.)

The Storm Hill Home Owners Association is still waiting on permit approval from the Army Corps to build a much larger, 740-foot-long steel seawall along 6 properties—that’s the length equivalent of 2.5 football fields. They also applied to place 925 cubic yards of boulder “riprap” along a 10-foot wide stretch across four of those properties. The Home Owners Association applied in June.

Rachel Nys, regulatory project manager for the Army Corps’ Detroit District, tells the Sun she is “still evaluating the Storm Hill proposal and has not made a decision on the application.”

Home Owners Association president Carey Ford wrote an email to Storm Hill owners on Monday stating that “Once we receive their permit, the larger project will begin within a few weeks.”

As the Sun reported in mid-August, some Storm Hill homeowners who don’t live on the water oppose the push for a seawall. They argue that the rock riprap could make it difficult to walk the shoreline on days of high waves. And they worry about the long-term effects that steel and rock fortifications will have on the Lake Michigan shoreline as the water rises and potentially falls, and the powerful waves reshape the beach and the sediment below it.

“I don’t want to lose access from the village to the National Park without full consideration of options and balancing interests,” said Lea Ann Sterling, an attorney and member of the Storm Hill association. “Some of us are calling it ‘The Atlantic Wall’.”

Guy Meadows, director of the Marine Engineering Laboratory at Michigan Technological University’s Great Lakes Research Center, worries that hard shoreline barriers affect Lake Michigan’s natural process and will worsen erosion over time. 

“Nothing is more dissipative to wave energy than the natural beach, which is constantly adjusting its above-water and below-water slope. The natural beach can adjust to more frequent and more intense storms,” said Meadows. “Any manmade structure, no matter how well-designed, will reflect the natural waves, causing more turbulence in the near shore zone and more sediment transfer in the offshore zone. The structure may ultimately fail not by being beaten back by waves but by falling forward into the waves.”

Meadows explains that the waves will continually deepen the water depth offshore and ultimately dig under the seawall, though that process may take 20 years.

EGLE approved 1,771 permit applications for shoreline projects between October 1, 2019, and June 30, 2020. That represents a dramatic increase over previous years that, according to Bridge Magazine, “reflects the scope of the crisis facing shoreline owners, as well as efforts by regulators to speed up the permitting process as land owners race to save their properties.”

Stay tuned for further developments.