Welcome back dredging

There's good news and good news for Lake Erie commerce from the Army Corps of Engineers: Dredging for Sandusky's Harbor will resume this year, and the Corps has found a safe dumping site for the dredged materials. Dredging of Sandusky's harbor in 2020. Provided photo/DAVE BALA In its recently released annual report, the Army Corps office in Buffalo updated its dredging efforts, which helps keep commerce flowing in Ohio's nine Lake Erie harbors, which are Sandusky, Huron, Vermilion, Cleveland, Lorain, Toledo, Fairport, Ashtabula and Conneaut. There was no dredging in 2021 because the Army Corps did not have a place that could legally accept dredged material. Ohio law bans the Corps from following its previous practice of open lake dumping to get rid of the soil from the lake bottom. The City of Sandusky planned to use the dredged materials for the new wetland it is building along the Cedar Point Causeway, but work on the project did not begin in time, according to a project manager who oversees dredging in Lake Erie. But that's no longer a problem, Asquith said. The project is moving ahead "right now," he said. Lake Erie, the shallowest of the Great Lakes, is dredged regularly to keep navigation channels open. More than 35 million tons of commodities such as iron ore, coal, grain, sand, stone, potash and salt pass through Ohio's commercial harbors every year, supporting tens of thousands of Ohio jobs and billions of dollars of business revenue.