The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Channel safety project progressing
Access to Mentor Harbor limited during soil investigation
An effort to improve the Mentor Harbor channel is making headway.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is scheduled to perform a geotechnical investigation of the area in and around the channel Sept. 21 through Sept. 25 to determine if proposed upgrades are suitable.
An ongoing study suggests that the existing west breakwall should be extended to the north and hooked to the east, and the existing west and east breakwalls be fortified.
These improvements should reduce wave energy within the channel and harbor, improve boating safety and greatly extend the life of the channel, officials say.
“Between both the Harbor Yacht Club and the Mentor marina, there will be approximately 750 boats that use the channel,” Mentor Parks & Recreation
Director Kenn Kaminski said.
Soil sampling equipment will be anchored in three locations within the channel and three locations just outside for five to 10 hours per location, to extract subterranean soil samples from the lake bottom.
The work will be conducted on a 90-foot-by-45foot marine barge carrying a soil sampling rig towed by a 50-foot tugboat.
Because of the apparatus’s size, boaters are being advised that access through the channel will be unavailable for extended periods during the investigation.
The work is weather-dependent and can only be performed when the waves on Lake Erie are 2 feet tall or less. As a result, the sampling operations may extend
into the week of Sept. 28, officials say.
In 2018, the city, Lake County Ohio Port and Economic Authority, and the Mentor Harbor Yachting Club entered an agreement with the Army Corps for a feasibility study examining permanent improvements to the channel.
Area parties each are paying one-third of the $100,000 local share of the estimated $650,000 analysis.
“We are just getting to the end of the initial phase of the study, which is information and data gathering to inform preliminary designs for construction,” said Peter K. Zahirsky, the Port Authority’s director of coastal development. “Those preliminary designs then have to go through extensive evaluation by the Army Corps.”
The construction cost was projected to be between $1.7 million and $2 million in 2013, according to a Determination of Federal Interest in the project.
“Usually these DFI projects come with 80 percent federal funding and 20 percent local match,” Filipiak said previously.
Zahirsky said he had no updated cost estimates at this time.
The channel project was among priorities identified in a Mentor-funded 2014 study by Abonmarche of Benton Harbor, Michigan, in conjunction with CT Consultants.
The firms were paid $12,960 to assess the facility’s condition, the regional market, the marina’s place within the market, and to provide cost estimates for needed maintenance and upgrades.