Summertime travel is starting up. But trouble at Buckeye Lake may be keeping tourists away.
And there are concerns about dam safety at other lakes. Ohio Public Radio’s Karen Kasler reports.
The 183-year-old crumbling dam at central Ohio’s Buckeye Lake means the summer won’t be the same there. The dam is part of a park owned by the state, and officials have ordered the lake water to stay at its winter level of three feet while work starts to repair that dam, which the Army Corps of Engineers says is in danger of catastrophic failure. But business owners say they’re suffering in the meantime. A study from Cleveland-based Silverlode Consulting showed keeping the lake at three feet could risk 1,100 jobs and $160 million in economic losses over five years. Jim Zehringer is the director of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, which oversees dam safety, inspection and regulation. He said state officials have heard the concerns about the lake level, but “it has to be where it is, and that’s not going to change,” Zehringer said. “Now, we’re going to do work as quickly as possible to do some risk reduction measures that we can look at something down the road, but right now, that level has to stay there until we can prove there’s going to be no seepage or deterioration or the health and safety of the lives downstream won’t be affected.”
The Senate budget includes $1 million for a loan program to help businesses at Buckeye Lake and other bodies of water that are hurting economically. And Sen. Jay Hottinger (R-Newark) has asked the governor to help get the area considered for a federal economic disaster declaration that could bring in some extra financial assistance. “We’re not talking about handouts here; we’re talking about loans that have to be repaid,” Hottinger said. “But it’s just to provide assistance to help them stay afloat. Right now the area that’s being impacted is Buckeye Lake, but certainly it can happen in any other part of the state as well.”
And that brings up the concern for the rest of the 4,500 dams in Ohio, including the 1,500 earthen dams. The state owns and maintains around 180 dams, and it’s estimated that it would cost $300 million to repair damage on just those dams – a third of which have problems that put them in the “deficient” category. Zehringer says ODNR is working on them. “When we got here, we had $3 million to work on dams. Right now we have $85 million,” Zehringer said. “We’ve already looked at our nine worst dams – four of them are completed, one of them’s just about done, and the other four are in design phase. So we’re looking throughout the dams throughout the state of Ohio and being really aggressive on inspection and our repair.”
And there’s new concern in Zehringer’s own back yard. Though he’s been an agency director since Gov. John Kasich took office, he says he lives in western Ohio at Grand Lake St. Marys, where there’s an earthen dam that’s almost as old as the Buckeye Lake Dam. There’s also a proposal to build more on that dam, alongside an existing residential housing and a hotel.
“There are conceptual ideas of a resort community being built there, and there were some things done prior to one we have there. But right now there’s no construction going on on the dam itself, into the dam itself – which is very important,” Zehringer said. “Some of these projects, they add dirt to the back of the dam, and add something. So we’ll look at that and examine it carefully. But the dam at Grand Lake St Marys isn’t comparable to Buckeye Lake Dam.”
But critics say that building on earthen dams is risky – especially dams as old as the ones at Grand Lake St Marys and Buckeye Lake.
