Jun 14, 2014 6 min read

MARBLEHEAD, Ohio – Ohio’s best beach is, sadly, the one etched in distant memories of a past generation.

“I’ve seen people literally break down and cry when they think of what the beach at East Harbor State Park used to be and what’s not there now for their grandkids,” said Dick Taylor, who used to frequent the beach as a child.

Now a Findlay resident, Taylor is founder and president of a nonprofit group called BeachAid-East Harbor. He has tried for more than a decade to convince state officials that the park’s shoreline needs to be re-engineered to give the once-massive beach there a fighting chance at a comeback.

But he’s had little to show for his efforts and faces an uphill battle with state officials, despite $88.5 million being made available for state park improvements over the next two years.

Huge slabs of concrete form a man-made breakwall, also known as a revetment or seawall, along East Harbor State Park’s southeastern peninsula.

They stand in place of where a Florida-like beach more than 2.5 miles long once drew 30,000 visitors a weekend between Memorial Day and Labor Day — so popular there were long traffic jams and 200 or more families would be turned away on a given day.

All that remains now is a 1,500-foot strip on the north end, an auxiliary beach that is barely a tenth of what East Harbor once had.

Placed along the East Harbor shoreline in 1957 by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the concrete structure hardened the shoreline.

It didn’t immediately cause the beach to erode. Most of the beach was wiped out by a 1972 storm.

But Taylor and his supporters believe the man-made barrier has made it impossible for the beach to regenerate.

Now that the administration of Gov. John Kasich has announced it is planning to invest $88.5 million in capital improvements at Ohio’s 74 state parks during the next two years, Taylor has visions of an economic carrot being dangled in Columbus that could get his coveted project off the ground.

He is proposing that state officials spend $250,000 to remove 2,000 feet of the breakwall and conduct a five-year study of how the enhanced flow of water promotes more synergy between the lake and a sand dune.

Taylor is convinced such a pilot study would convince the Ohio Department of Natural Resources that removing the entire breakwall would regenerate at least a fair amount of the original beach, though perhaps not all of it.

He considers the vanished beach one of the greatest losses of public access to Lake Erie in Ohio’s history.

“It’s an ongoing process we don’t think is ever going to change with that seawall in there, interfering with the interaction between the waves and the dune,” Taylor said when he addressed the ODNR coastal resources advisory council earlier this month.

A 1998 Ohio State University study concluded that half of Lake Erie’s daily beach visitors and more than two-thirds of the overnight visitors make substantial purchases within a 10-mile radius of the beaches they visit.

The idea of bigger, cleaner beaches is embraced by several tourism groups, such as the Ottawa County Visitors Bureau. But there’s no guarantee Taylor’s plan would work.

It would be costly. In 1981, the Corps of Engineers estimated that removing the entire breakwall would cost $5.6 million to $11.3 million. The cost in today’s dollars is unknown.

But, according to Taylor’s research, the region has been losing $14 million to $15 million in recreation and tourism revenue each year since the beach vanished in 1972.

During those 42 years, shoreline property values have risen and beaches have become more valuable.

He said his demonstration project, if successful, would be a first step in averting massive losses in the future.

Ohio Sen. Randy Gardner, R-Bowling Green, said the project has potential.

“I think by the end of summer we will know a lot more about the advantages of this project and the level of interest the Ohio DNR has in it,” Gardner said. “It’s at least worth taking the next step.”

While some at ODNR have defended it, one member of its coastal resources advisory council, Ed Herdendorf, a geologist, fisheries scientist, and professional underwater archaeologist, said the breakwall was placed in a bad location when it was installed in 1957.

“Yeah, I’d rip all of that stuff up and let it go natural,” Herdendorf said at the advisory council’s recent meeting.

Orrin Pilkey, a Duke University earth sciences professor who co-wrote a 1987 book about Lake Erie and a 1996 book that examined shoreline engineering projects across the country, said he’s surprised the breakwall was ever installed at East Harbor State Park because it wasn’t constructed to protect adjacent homes and businesses.

That’s the main purpose of breakwalls.

“You can have ocean shoreline or you can have shoreline buildings, but you can’t have both,” Pilkey said. “Seawalls almost always destroy beaches.”

Bruce Sanders, a Corps of Engineers spokesman, said the federal agency began a feasibility study on removing the breakwall years ago.

It came to a halt when ODNR – responsible for half of the funding – stopped putting money into it, he said.

The study probably could be picked up where it left off if ODNR resumed funding for it, Sanders said.

According to a Corps fact sheet, Middle Harbor is one of three remaining marshes along the Lake Erie shoreline. “Middle Harbor is an important area for migratory birds and many species of fish. Additionally, the blanding turtle and tiger beetle, threatened state species, are found at Middle Harbor,” the Corps said.