How Cape Bretoners are working to prevent coastal properties from going underwater

Climate-driven sea level rise and increased storm activity has people in Cape Breton thinking about how to best protect existing coastal properties and new builds.

Homeowners, businesses and organizations on the coast have some options, from armour stone barriers, to living shorelines, to building up properties.

The Sydney waterfront campus of the Nova Scotia Community College — the most prominent coastal construction project on the island in recent years — has employed the latter approach.

"Based on sea level projections for the year 2100, this site would actually be under water," Mike Chapman, the NSCC manager of Infrastructure and Sustainability, said of the recently completed campus.

In planning for the build, the design team looked at projected sea level rise over the next 80 years. It determined the sea could rise by one metre in the area.

As a result, the entire campus site was raised by 1.25 metres. To do so, more than 800 steel piles were driven through decades of fill under the campus, to reach solid bedrock.

The added cost to raise the campus footprint was about two per cent of the $140-million project budget, said Chapman. All of the combined measures to address the effects of climate change amount to about five per cent, or $7 million, he said.

For example, the building's windows are more energy efficient than conventional windows, and also much thicker, to better withstand storm-force winds. 

Another prominent project, Cape Smokey Holdings is constructing a condo village on a relatively small piece of land jutting into Ingonish Harbour.

Through earth moving, they've raised the shoreline of the peninsula by two metres, and girded it with armour stone — heavy quarried rock used to line seawalls.

Ingonish Harbour is protected by a breakwater, but that natural barrier has been breached in recent storms, and its future is uncertain.

"The insurance company was very, very thorough," said Martin Kejval, Cape Smokey project manager, adding that the process took months to complete.

"They were doing a lot of models for the hurricanes, you know, from Fiona, Dorian ... and what kind of damage they created."

Over the next few years, Cape Smokey plans to build 74 villas on the property.

"My biggest guide is the insurance companies," said Kejval. "We don't want to build houses which cannot be insured."

Further along the shoreline of Ingonish Harbour, Susan Reeves is struggling with the effects of coastal erosion on her residential property. A few years ago, runoff from heavy rains was eating away at her bank.

She considered installing armour stone, but that would mean bringing heavy machinery across her septic field.

She opted for a more natural approach. She connected with Helping Nature Heal, an ecological restoration company out of Bridgewater that specializes in living-shoreline work.

They put stakes in the bank, and piled on logs, branches and hay, Reeves said. They also planted low-lying shrubs, in an effort to eventually establish a root system to bind the soil.

It worked well for a few years, but then came a historic storm, and then another.

Following post-tropical storm Dorian in 2019, Reeves had the Helping Nature Heal workers back to make repairs. Three years later, post-tropical storm Fiona wiped out a lot of that effort.

"The cost became prohibitive for us," said Reeves. "[Because] it had changed from a project of three years, you're finished ... to a maintenance project of $3,000 to $4,000 a year."

If there was a company in Cape Breton that specialized in living-shoreline work, the labour would be less expensive, Reeves said, and she would be more inclined to continue with that strategy.

For now, she's going to wait and see how her bank holds up. If another big storm hits, she may reconsider going the armour stone route.

A major downside of using amour stone, however, is that by redirecting the wave energy, it can exacerbate erosion on neighbouring properties — something Reeves has been trying to avoid.