Last year on 3 November 2023 a one-day conference was held. There are five recordings from the day. Each is roughly an hour long. Most of the presentations featured aspects of biology, but the keynote speaker (opening session) about erosion was given by Peter Zuzek. Here are links to recordings of each of the five sessions. If you are particularly interested in this topic of the local lakeshore erosion, I encourage you to watch and listen to the Opening Ceremony and Keynote Speaker, starting 30 minutes in.
Regarding the sand at Long Point, here is an excerpt from Peter Zuzek’s presentation. This excerpt is from the opening session of the day and is from 52:20 (52 minutes and 20 seconds) from the start of the recording. Peter Zuzek’s full presentation starts at about 30:08.
“Let’s focus now on the bottom because we [clipped word(s)?] ton about the bottom too. And the bottom, I always like to say, bottom doesn’t lie. No secrets on the bottom. You can understand what’s going on. This is 17 here. So right at the tip. Um, and some consistency here on the mid depth here. You get out into deeper water, again, we’re starting to see that area where there’s accretion. So there’s sediment moving. There is sand in the system. It’s moving out towards the tip, but it seems to all be accreting in deeper water. And so this is the area here where the shoulders of the spit are starting to grow underwater. And then 19 is right at the tip, right here off the bottom. And an enormous volume of sediment here. This one is by far the biggest amount of sedimentation I’ve ever measured in my entire career anywhere. The five meter contour, so again we have the 1948 survey, ah, has migrated almost a kilometer lakeward. So there’s an enormous volume of sand moving out into this tip of this spit. But for some reason it’s all only accumulating on the lake bottom.“
A few minutes later he asserts this relatively new enormous volume of sediment at Long Point is 23 m³. He professes to be puzzled as to where it came from!
“I guess to preface that, I think the first thing we need to do is build a committee that has all the right actors at it, all the appropriate people. But as I highlighted at the beginning, the sediment delivery in this cell has been impacted by the harbours, and so the harbours at Port Burwell, that one alone has 15 million sediment in it, and that was a really long jetty, built to facilitate, will take coal shipping into Port Burwell. We haven’t shipped coal into Port Burwell for over 50 years, so I think that there are solutions. The whole point of this framework is to have the right people at the table and to do the right type of science and engineering studies. And one of them that we’ve been kicking around is dismantling the west jetty at Port Burwell. There’s no reason to have a kilometer long jetty that sticks out in the lake when you’re not even using deep draft boats in there anymore. So that’s just an idea. I’m sure there’s many others. The point of the framework, though again, is to build up a committee of people that are all the stakeholders and look at these types of challenges and try to find solutions.”
Apparently the people who are directly impacted property owners, those people who have directly observed the erosion is all sorts of weather conditions for many thousands of days, are not considered to be “the right people” or “the stakeholders”.
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