A 2022 bluff slide closed North Beach in Port Washington. City officials are taking action.
The City of Port Washington is pursuing plans to prevent future bluff slides with the help of a grant from the Wisconsin Department of Administration’s Wisconsin Coastal Management Program.
The $40,000 grant is part of an overall $1.4 million investment to support economic development, protect Great Lakes resources, and create resiliency in Wisconsin’s coastal communities, according to an Oct. 12 release from the DOA.
Bluff slides are nothing new for Port Washington and have been occurring along the shore since the lake was formed, Port Washington Public Works Director Robert Vanden Noven said.
But the slides have recently been eroding the shoreline along the city at a rate of around 6 inches each year.
“It’s why you see those stories in other areas of people losing their homes to bluff recessions — homes that were once 100 or 200 feet from the top of the bluff,” Vanden Noven said.
No one in Port Washington has lost their home due to a bluff slide, but neighboring suburbs along the Lake Michigan shoreline, including Mequon and Whitefish Bay, have seen homes threatened by bluff slides, he said.
“The number one objective is safety," Vanden Noven said. "Even though it’s extremely unlikely that someone would be caught in a bluff slide, it’s still a risk. For me, that weighs heavily because people going to the beach should feel assured that they can lay in the sand and not have to worry about the bluff sliding on top of them.”
Serious bluff slide occurred in Port Washington in 2022
The city doesn’t keep a record of how frequently those potentially dangerous landslides occur, but in June 2022, Port Washington saw its most serious bluff slide in the last 20 years.
Heavy rains soaked the soil and triggered mud to fall about 50 feet out toward the lake on North Beach. The city was advised to shut down the beach by Miller Engineers and Scientists, a Sheboygan-based company, over concerns it could place beachgoers in peril.
The beach reopened in June of this year, but the city wanted to take measures to prevent future slides.
Steps taken to reduce future slides in Port Washington
The Lakeshore Natural Resources Partnership, a group that seeks to improve and protect the Lakeshore Basin, obtained an emergency grant of $53,000 from the Fund for Lake Michigan, which funds water quality projects in Lake Michigan.
Using those funds, the city hired Miller Engineers and Scientists to create preliminary plans detailing what it would take to stabilize the bluff, which were completed in April. At the same time, the city started searching for funding sources to carry out the engineering plans and applied for the Coastal Management Grant in October 2022.
The grant will cover around 40% of the cost for the engineering plans, around $100,000, which will be completed in June 2024, Vanden Noven said. The city expects the total cost of actually building the improvements to be around $5 million, he said.
Port moves forward with designs and plans for the improvements
The improvement project will likely include cutting off the top of the bluff to achieve a more stable slope, he said.
“It’s not hard to imagine how an entirely vertical shoreline 100 feet high made of clay and sand would be less stable than one on a more gentle angle,” Vanden Noven said.
Engineers will also likely construct stone revetments, which provide a wall of armor around the bottom of the bluffs so that the waves are hitting the rock and not the soil.
Vanden Noven said the city plans on applying for a separate grant to drill drains into the bluff, which would draw the water away from eroding the soil.
“We're moving forward with design and planning for all these improvements. It's just a matter of figuring out how we're going to pay for all of this,” Vanden Noven said.
Contact Claudia Levens at clevens@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @levensc13
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Port Washington starts planning improvements to prevent bluff slides
