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Cottagers celebrate completion of shoreline wall near Grand Bend

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Cathy Purdom admires a 700 foot long steel wall, she and 11 of her neighbours had built to separate them from the raging waters of Lake Huron.

“Just in the four years that I’ve been here, it’s eroded like 30 to 40 feet and the water was digging into our embankment,” she said.

To help protect their cottages from potentially sliding right into Lake Huron, Purdom and her neighbours on Windy Hill Lane, just north of Grand Bend, spent about a year navigating a sometimes frustrating process to build their seven foot tall wall, through the Ausable Bayfield Conservation Authority (ABCA).

“It was very easy to understand, we needed to give them exactly what they needed. To take any shortcuts was not going to work. So we all committed to the process of making sure we did it all right,” said Purdom.

The new shoreline wall along the waterfront of Windy Hill Lane, north of Grand Bend, Ont. (Scott Miller / CTV News)
It was a busy summer for shoreline work along Lake Huron, as record-high Great Lakes water levels subsided, allowing cottage owners’ access to their eroding waterfronts.


But, according to the ABCA, not everyone followed the rules. A contractor was fined $13,500 and three landowners near Grand Bend were charged in December for doing shoreline work without the proper permits.

The ABCA says they recognize how arduous the permitting process is for shoreline protection work and how unhappy some residents are with it. But, they say it’s also necessary for the protection of the environment and the safety of property owners.

“The enforcement activities we undertake that take up a lot of our staff time is really from a minority of people,” said Daniel King, regulations co-ordination with the ABCA.Looking out onto Lake Huron from Windy Hill Lane, north of Grand Bend, Ont., (Scott Miller / CTV News)
“Most people, when you lay out the process for them, they want to follow the rules because people want good relations with their neighbours, and it’s neighbouring properties that are the most likely to see impacts when shore protection isn’t installed properly,” said King.

Purdom and her neighbours, who used CM Excavating from Thedford, Ont. to build their shoreline wall, say they are breathing a little easier knowing their properties are hopefully protected from Lake Huron for years to come.

“Our hope is the sand and sand dunes come back, and we don’t actually see the wall in three to five years as we know lake levels cycle. We now, at least, have that protection. If I don’t see that wall for the next 30 years, at least I know it’s there, and we know our embankment, is safe,” said Purdom.

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