SEA CHANGE
Prince Edward Island has always had an erosion problem. But as water levels rise and storms get stronger, Islanders are seeing their beloved province shrink at an alarming rate
“Everything is going against us,” says Adam Fenech, the climate scientist of Prince Edward Island.
Most islands, Fenech says, have a base of granite or another hard rock. “We don’t have that here,” he says.
Bit by bit, Prince Edward Island, made of sandstone and sand, is slowly washing into the sea and “everybody knows it,” Fenech says.
As director of the University of PEI Climate Lab, Fenech gives speeches about erosion all over the island. Today, he sits in a homestyle restaurant called Our Family Traditions, with salt fish and deep-fried clams on the menu. Fenech drinks coffee.
Erosion is natural. Historical. What’s different now, he says, is the ocean. Water levels are rising. So are ocean temperatures. Their extra heat can add fuel to storms, creating powerful, surging waves that smash against the coast and rip it away.
Winter ice used to appear on the coast in late November and spend the winter as a buffer for the shoreline. The sea ice came this year, Fenech says, but over the previous few winters it was hard to find. It used to form along the beaches or the base of soaring red cliffs, growing thick, extending into the ocean so that when a storm came the ice took the brunt of its energy, not the sandstone.
Fenech says P.E.I. is losing an average of 28 centimetres of land every year. That shoreline often falls off in large chunks in vulnerable locations. In some areas, land actually increased, due to shifting sands, but the dominant theme is loss.
The UPEI Climate Lab examined infrastructure at risk of damage, or disappearing, due to erosion over the next 90 years. It found 1,000 existing homes, eight barns, seven gazebos, 42 garages, 17 lighthouses, 146 commercial buildings, 50 kilometres of roads and one wind turbine were vulnerable.
Most islanders accept that change is coming, Fenech says. Some are fighting the seas, by “rocking” the shoreline. Granite from New Brunswick appears on some properties, the hard grey a sharp contrast with P.E.I.’s red shores. Others pile up the boulders of local sandstone, hoping it doesn’t get washed away. The problem is the rocks just deflect the ocean’s energy farther down the coast to a neighbour’s beach. For Fenech, who moved to P.E.I. from Toronto seven years ago, the early question became: how to help islanders help themselves.
One answer is a “video game” named CLIVE, an interactive 3D tool that allows users to simulate sea-level rise and storm surges.
In 2013, Fenech spoke at an Earth Day event in Charlottetown. “I gave my usual spiel about coastal erosion and then I said, ‘Oh, by the way, I’ve got this little video game that I will show you.’ ”
Conceived by a student, the erosion simulator is called Coastal Impacts Visualization Environment. CLIVE provided a visual prediction of erosion and ocean encroachment based on future scenarios of rising sea water and flooding.
“There were audible gasps in the audience,” Fenech recalls. “I remember at that moment thinking, ‘Hey, I think I’m onto something here.’ ”
He took updated versions of CLIVE on the road in 2014 and 2018, ultimately talking to residents in 16 communities across the province. “I’ve seen men cry,” he says, “usually because they see their investments go under water.” In Victoria-bythe- Sea, Fenech says he watched a woman elbow her husband, who sat with tears in his eyes, as CLIVE showed their recently purchased property disappear.
The Star visited “the gentle island” and, inspired by photographs shot by P.E.I. photographer and environmentalist Don Jardine, traversed the province, meeting the people who live on the front of Canada’s climate change.
Charlottetown Don Jardine calls himself “a bit of a storm chaser.”
He has a science degree, spent a few decades working in P.E.I’s environment ministry, runs an environmental consulting company and is now working on his master’s degree with UPEI Climate Lab.
But Jardine loves his time on the road, taking pictures of the island, talking to P.E.I. residents about the way storms are changing the land.
He’s done the drive, tip to tip, as the locals say, countless times, asking people along the way if they believe in climate change. Jardine says one man in North Rustico told him, “All I have to do is look out my window and I see it every day! I can see the water and I can see the waves and I can see the erosion.” That seems to be a prevailing sentiment.
“What I see and what I hear is that people are saying the climate change impacts are affecting the rates of coastal erosion and increasing the frequency of storm surges, and the magnitude of the storm surges are increasing,” Jardine says. “The intensity of storms, like rain storms, thunderstorms, freak or extreme events, those seem to be getting worse or stronger.”
Most of the framed photographs seen on these pages were shot by Jardine. His picture of the 2008 post-tropical storm Hanna captured the aftermath of an intense deluge that crashed into Charlottetown with 90 millimetres of rain. It was one of those 100year storms that, he says, are happening more frequently.
On the day of the storm, Jardine saw the flooding in his own backyard. “I said, ‘Wow. Better hit the road, Jack,’ ” he laughs, “so I started looking.”
As he drove along an overpass in Charlottetown, Jardine saw the police car below, on North River Rd. and pulled over.
“The picture tells you a lot of stories,” he says. “It tells you that this place is very vulnerable to flooding. It also tells you the infrastructure that is in place is not able to handle that type of event. It tells you how it disrupts life.
“There is a kid on a bicycle in the picture. He was probably heading into town on his bike and he was going to have to detour. The police get involved, because it is a public safety thing. Some people are adventuresome and will just go splashing through.
“But how do you know there isn’t a pothole and your car might drop out of sight?”
North Rustico When Stephanie Arnold moved from Toronto to P.E.I.’s north shore in 2013, residents were still talking about the stormsurge flood from three years earlier.
In 2016, big waves from another storm flooded the land around the harbour.
Arnold, a PhD student in environmental science with a focus on climate change and agriculture, says flooding is “the least of our concerns, actually.”
“I am alarmed about other facets of climate change more than I am about flooding,” Arnold says. “Most people don’t realize (what is happening) beyond sea-level rise.”
The warming temperatures will have a tremendous impact on the food that islanders farm, on land and in aquaculture, like the mussels that grow in the nearby bay.
“Food security is a significant concern and I don’t know if that is on people’s minds when they think about climate change,” she says. When water temperatures rise, invasive species such as tunicates, a marine invertebrate, thrive.
Tunicates are starting to enjoy the living conditions here, Arnold says, affixing themselves to mussels in socks on aquatic farms. Fishermen grow mussels in long mesh sleeves reminiscent of legwear. Tunicates make the job of harvesting mussels more labour intensive, “an operational nuisance,” she says. Extra labour means higher costs down the food production line.
“They would not have been here years ago because the water would not have been warm enough for them,” Arnold says. “They are going to thrive as the temperatures increase. If they survive winter kill, then their population will build.”
P.E.I.’s most famous agricultural crop will also react to warmer weather. “Potatoes are not going to like climate change,” Arnold says. Plants have their own temperature preference and potatoes don’t grow well, becoming smaller, in warmer conditions. Some farmers are moving toward the pulse family of lentils and peas, she says. Others don’t know what to expect from future growing seasons.
At Climate Lab meetings held around the province, one farmer stood up and said he moved to the island seven years ago and every year since other farmers have told him the weather they are getting isn’t normal weather for P.E.I.
“He has heard that for the last seven years,” Arnold says.
“He asked us ‘Is there normal anymore?’ ” Cape Egmont “Don’t go too close.”
Eighty-eight year-old Alcide Arsenault has been fishing this shore for 75 years but he’s not keen on dropping off the soft cliff near the lighthouse his grandfather once operated. Arsenault is at home on the ocean. It’s the weak earth along the shoreline that he does not trust.
Recent studies show P.E.I. is losing, on average, 28 centimetres each year to erosion. Some areas, hit by storm surges, lose chunks of land, three or five metres at a time. The Cape Egmont Lighthouse, its white paint crumbling, had already been picked up and moved back from the edge about 20 years ago. Its former concrete base now lies on the shoreline below.
Arsenault looks at a rock jutting out of the ocean, a resting place for cormorants, their beaks toward the sun.
“The land used to go past that rock,” Arsenault says, pointing to the birds. “It didn’t take long to chew that off — 40 or 50 years.”
The lighthouse, with an octagonal lantern, was built in 1883, along the Evangeline Trail, home to many of the island’s French-speaking Acadians, including Arsenault’s family. His grandfather, a farmer, was the lighthouse keeper for a decade, starting in 1912.
“He had to go up at night to wind it up,” Arsenault says of the light that shone toward New Brunswick, across the Northumberland Strait. “The light turned by a steel cable and a heavy weight. It would last three or four hours. Then he’d go wind it up again.”
Arsenault started working at the age of 14, fishing lobster, rock crab and herring. He plans to retire at 90. “If I make it.”
Ken Richard grew up in Cape Egmont before moving to Charlottetown years ago. He comes back a few times every year. Just to sit and watch the sea.
Richard’s brother fished for 75 years until he died this spring at the age of 88. Before boats with GPS arrived, the Cape Egmont lighthouse guided him home.
“It is a very special place,” says Richard.
“The lighthouse is such a beautiful spot. The water, the high cliffs, the beautiful sunset.”
The island’s lighthouse historian is Carol Livingstone. “Alias Mrs. Lighthouse,” she says, by way of introduction. Another lighthouse in nearby West Point, her home, is even more precarious, Livingstone says. A part of P.E.I.’s history and a symbol of the island’s livelihood, the lighthouses must be protected, she says.
“They are part of our past. We want them to be part of our present and future.” Alberton It could be the opening scene of a climate-change disaster mov
ie, narrated by the wife of a man whose uncle once owned the land facing the rising sea. “Cottages went over the bank,” says Jean Cahill. “There was a big, strong southeast, you get a full moon and the wind on water would come right in, so low, all around the cottages and they were just sitting on cement blocks. So they took off. Not all of them, just three or four.”
Those cottages are not there anymore. Most have been moved farther inland to the nearby property Cahill owns with her husband, Roy. Years ago, in the early 1960s, her husband’s uncle, Everett, donated a stretch of waterfront property, near the cottages, to the province. It is now called the Jacques Cartier Provincial Park. A study by Don Jardine, of DE Jardine Consulting, found that between 2004 and 2011, the land Everett donated lost an average of 2.1 metres a year.
Cahill speaks matter-of-factly about the encroaching Atlantic Ocean. Erosion has always been part of island life. She stands on the park’s shoreline beside little green sheds, battered by storms.
“When they first made the park, they had the idea that they would take cedar poles and make a fence all along and then they’d fill in behind it with sand. Do you have any idea how long that lasted? Not long! The first big storm,” she says.
“I remember one year, a local fellow that does trucking, he said he’d fix (the erosion) so he brought loads of clay and rocks and they all said that’ll never move. Well, it was on the beach inside of two months.”
Since then, sandstone rocks have been dropped along the beach, protecting the shoreline. It looks sturdy enough that Cahill predicts the shoreline, at least this slice of it, is stable.
“I don’t think this will ever go now.”
Lennox Island
After a weekend of drumming in Montreal, Gilbert Sark drove all night to see his family.
Sark is a member of the Mi’Kmaq First Nation, and Lennox Island, he says, “is home.” Sark has no plans to leave, even though chunks of land are being swept into the ocean or flooded by storm surges. A firepit on the beach, used by families for years, is now under water.
The island’s burial grounds are at risk, says Sark, who has twice served as the Lennox Island community planner.
“We have some really, really bad spots.”
There is a bit of good news, Sark says. A few metres from the sewage treatment ponds, new land, however temporary, is being built up along the shore as sand deposits shift. He points to a tiny island in the bay. “Before, you could swim across … now you can pretty much walk. I’m 5’5” and the water is up to my waist.” UPEI’s Adam Fenech and others believe the sewage lagoons remain vulnerable.
That is why the island is getting rocked — with large boulders placed against the most vulnerable land to deflect the power of massive waves, although many believe the deflected energy just moves the destruction farther down the shoreline, where the land is unprotected. A storm surge in 2010 damaged the causeway that connects Lennox Island to the mainland, leaving people without immediate access to emergency care. Now boulders buttress the bridge.
The band council hired Randy Angus as director of integrated resource management for Mi’Kmaq Confederacy of P.E.I. Angus is helping the band council create a plan for climate change. For erosion, he says, Lennox shores should be “armoured” with boulders. Sandstone “reefs” can be built, offshore, to protect the beach from rough waves. As the sandstone slowly erodes, it adds more sand to the beach, he says.
An offshore oyster hatchery could be built, using concrete blocks and fencing, to absorb the waves and buttress the land, Angus added. Sark expects some houses will have to be moved inland or that some residents may have to move to property the band council has purchased on the main island.
He believes the future of Lennox Island may be in the hands of its young people. In addition to expert recommendations, Sark says the youth have suggested adding earth to extend the land, bolstering it with gravel and different sizes of rocks.
“They know a lot about global warming,” he says.
North Rustico Harbour
After the storm of December 2010, as the ocean water surged across the harbour, people here started worrying the seas could cut off their roads to the rest of the province. “There have been people who have voiced that,” North Rustico Mayor Heather McKenna says. “And we are taking precautions.”
The Town of North Rustico wants to add a separate exit road, up the hill, McKenna says, so people can find a way out if the street that runs along the harbour is flooded again.
In the storm of 2010, the water rose across the parking lots and roads, past the spot where the fishing shacks of North Rustico meet the seafood restaurants along Rustico Harbour, which is operated by a non-profit volunteer port authority. When the tourist season opens in the spring, oysters from the bay are served on beds of ice.
In the years since, North Rustico Deputy Mayor Les Standen, a retired banker from Dundas, Ont., says the town has been busy, trying to protect itself from climate change.
North Rustico strengthened its shoreline with rocks, moved the sewage treatment plant to one of the highest points in the area and relocated the water plant. The town is also examining the capacity of its sewers, Standen says, because “we don’t want any spills. We have to be very careful, more than most communities, because we have a beach, a fishery.”
The 2010 storm surge “was the impetus for people to make change — to realize that climate change is real. You have to be prepared for it,” Standen says.
“It’s the old saying, you plan your work and then you work your plan.” Mayor McKenna has lived here all her life. To her, the weather is different. “The last few years, the wind, I’ve never seen wind blow this hard,” she says. “Very disturbing at night. To older people, I would say it would be frightening.”
Pigots Point
For years after his waterfront property disappeared under the ocean, Emmett McKenna kept paying his property taxes with the hope that the land would eventually come back.
“It’s not coming back,” says the island’s climate change scientist Adam Fenech.
Emmett is talked out. No more interviews for him. He has appointed his nephew, Dan McAskill, as the family spokesperson for the three oceanfront lots the McAskill/McKenna clan bought in the late 1960s, where they built summer cottages, added Emmett’s trailer and spent summers on the sand dunes, with plans to bequeath most of the land to future generations. “My Dad’s adage was always ‘It’ll be there for my life.’ And it’ll be there for (our) time as well,” McAskill says. It’s not their land anymore. McAskill is a former provincial manager of forest fire protection and an island bird expert. He speaks with precision about the history of P.E.I. and produces maps to prove that Pigots Point is spelled without an apostrophe, despite the popular use of the possessive.
Since his family bought the land in 1966 (including the lot his parents sold in the 1970s) more than one acre of land has been swept away by wild storm surges that often hit with high tides. Those storms carve off the shoreline, and in recent years the dunes aren’t protected like they used to be. “When we were children, you’d have miles of ice offshore so you don’t get much of a storm surge or impact on the dunes,” McAskill says. “Now that we are losing the ice — and the storms happen in December — you end up with pretty bad erosion.”
The storms arrive with a cacophony of sounds, he says.
“Some people stand out in the wind and hold their coats open. For some, it’s a thrill. For some, it is fear. If waves are going underneath your cottage and there is water all around, you are pretty nervous.”
Wearing his hip waders on a calm spring day, McAskill poses for a portrait in the ocean — in the spot where his Uncle Emmett’s trailer once sat.
When his family started building on the land, McAskill said his father figured there would be one bad storm every10 years. “We are seeing a lot more now,” he says.
Greenwich
A fog slides across the boardwalk of Greenwich Dunes Trail in the Prince Edward Island national park. Its rare and famous parabolic sand dunes, the shape shifters that are vulnerable to the wild storms that blow off the coast, have disappeared behind the mist.
Kevin Sanderson walks along the coastline with his younger brother, Dana. They grew up here, with an older brother, when their parents farmed the land decades ago.
The property was sold, ended up in the marketing plans of an enthusiastic international resort developer and eventually landed with the federal government, which created a national park in1998. Over the centuries, it has been home to the Mi’kmaq and later, French settlers.
The Sanderson brothers stand on the trail, reading the park’s history on an official tourist information sign. “It is believed that Charles Sanderson started farming here around 1820,” the sign read. The Sanderson family farmed mixed crops like hay and potatoes and raised chickens, sheep and cattle. “Nobody got rich,” says Kevin, 65.
Greenwich is a peninsula, separating St. Peter’s Bay and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, known for its long beaches. Federal environment minister Catherine McKenna was photographed walking the floating boardwalk when she hosted an international environmental conference in P.E.I. during the summer of 2017. The sand dunes are protected from tourists, allowing the marram grass to survive and protect the dunes from erosion. Parks Canada says the grass can die under the weight of just 10 footsteps. On this lowlying coastland, erosion can also be caused by wild storms.
“We’ve lost all kinds of land on the bay side,” Kevin says.
Dana hopes the dunes remain off-limits so they can act as a buffer against storms. “I honestly believe that this sand dune system protects the property very well — even though (dunes) change,” says Dana, 55, chief information officer at UPEI.
“This property is exceptionally vulnerable. The ocean moves with considerable power,” Dana says. “We just hope it will be protected.”