Marshes and wetlands are nature’s water filter, its Petri dish, nursery, and incubator, and also its sanctuary for many creatures big and small. So when the bulldozers and dump trucks show up and suffocate the life out of these areas with fill, many see it as an avoidable tragedy.
“These areas should be viewed as something very valuable, not something to be conquered,” said Tara Baranowski, a wetlands expert with The Nature Conservancy in Ohio. “Everybody wants to talk about Lake Erie’s problems, but not many talk about the loss of our wetlands. These are Lake Erie’s filter, and when we lose them, that filter is gone.”
Advocates say an alarming number of wetlands and marshes have been filled in along the lake and in the greater Toledo area. Ms. Baranowski said the western lake Erie region used to have some 300,000 acres of wetlands, but today that has been reduced to 30,000 acres.
“That’s a 90 percent loss, and when you lose marshes and wetlands, you’ve lost all of the biodiversity they contain,” she said.
John Hageman, who spent most of his career at the Lake Erie Stone Laboratory research facility, has watched pockets of wetlands be wiped off the landscape at numerous sites around the region, including areas along the Ottawa River that were filled to provide a parking lot, wetlands adjacent to the CSX railroad properties in Walbridge, a wetlands just west of I-75, and next to the railroad tracks in Rossford and a marsh area filled in to allow for construction of a restaurant just south of the causeway to Catawba Island.
“The mentality seems to be to fill them in and try to get away with it, and then pay a penalty if you get caught,” Hageman said. “But once these wetlands are filled, they’re lost forever. We can’t replicate what Mother Nature has created with thousands of years of natural selection.”
One of the most egregious cases appears to involve a marsh area right along Lake Erie, inside the Lake Erie Business Park, where the property was filled and large earthen berms were added to construct a shooting range leased by the security force at the nearby First Energy Davis-Besse nuclear power plant.
The Army Corps of Engineers office in Buffalo investigated the case and referred it to the EPA in Chicago. The EPA would only confirm an investigation is ongoing.
“No matter who they are, they should not be able to get away with this kind of thing,” Mr. Hageman said.
Frank Ulrich, a high school science teacher who worked as a volunteer eagle watcher along the lakeshore, said he witnessed the wetlands get filled to create the shooting range.
“It was all overgrown with pits and ditches and lots of marshland, and then we watched them bulldoze and clear-cut everything, and then the dump trucks started filling it in,” he said. “You can see what it used to be on old satellite photos. It’s just sad. They filled in a wetlands, and I don’t think they ever got a permit for any of it.”
Washington Township resident Karen Mayfield fought to preserve wetlands and sensitive marsh areas of Shantee Creek along Suder Avenue, where the township adjoins the city of Toledo. She said the wetlands have been home to an array of wildlife but risked potential “destruction or encroachment” because of construction of a trucking business nearby.
Ms. Mayfield said 10 acres of trees adjacent to the wetlands were cut down without a permit and that the Army Corps of Engineers and EPA investigated. The developer paid a $100 fine, and only a thin line of trees on the edge of the wetlands remains as a buffer, she said.
“We called, but the City of Toledo didn’t seem to care one iota,” she said. “This has certainly made me more aware of the importance of any wetlands, and it just blows my mind that they would put light industry right next to a wetlands, knowing how precarious that is.”
First Published July 31, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
