Port Burwell’s 1840-vintage wooden lighthouse – the oldest one on Lake Erie’s north shore – is so rickety it’s sealed off and at risk of being blown over.
More than a month after a three-day storm battered the lakeside community, downing trees and power lines and ripping the roof off a restaurant, part of the main road running past the lighthouse is closed.
Robinson Street is closed from Pitt to Brock streets, under the watchful eye of police, after the municipality of Bayham warned on its website of the building’s “structural stability issues.
That shocked a neighbor who’s lived across from the 183-year-old lighthouse for a decade.
“For them to post something like that was a surprise, I don’t think it’s really going to fall down, I hope,” said Tracy Farmer, whose bedroom window looks out on the structure, just meters away. “If this thing falls, I’m losing the front of my house.”
Bayham shut the lighthouse on Jan. 19 after an in-depth structural review, chief administrator Thomas Thayer said. The road that leads to the public beach was closed on Feb. 1 due to “risk of (the lighthouse) overturning in a significant wind event.”
“The closure is intended to protect public safety until stabilization measures can be implemented,” a municipal notice said.
Bayham officials are “investigating ways to address the structural concerns in the short term,” Thayer said.
But don’t blame the Christmas storm, he added. “It’s a structural issue coming to a head over a number of years, not a recent acute thing.”
The octagonal lighthouse has eight wooden structural columns set in a concrete base. Over time – probably decades – water got in and caused the columns to deteriorate. Some are 80 per cent compromised, said a report going to Bayham councilors on Feb. 2.
“Concrete is porous and (the water) has nowhere to go – it gets whipped in the wood,” Thayer said.
Temporarily stabilizing the landmark could cost $84,000, the report says. The municipality has $125,000 set aside for lighthouse restoration.
Built in 1840, the lighthouse was deactivated as a navigation aid in 1963. Now a designated heritage property, it’s part of the Port Burwell Marine Museum and Historic Lighthouse tourist site.
The 13.7-metre tower was restored in 1986, Thayer said, but a white vinyl coating applied to its clapboard cladding about 2010 may have “sped up deterioration.”
By 2018, a report to council recommended replacing the clapboard. Then a heritage professional’s investigation two weeks ago found “significant structural concerns.”
Port Burwell Coun. Tim Emerson says council will move quickly to stabilize, then “do what we need to do” to restore “the important landmark.”
“Nobody in council wants to see the building disappear,” he said. “Everything is being done with extreme caution. . . but you can’t underestimate, because it a public building and a public road.
“I don’t think it’s going to fall over, because (if it were going to) it should have fallen over in that storm at Christmas,” Emerson said.