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| Workers put dredging pipes in place along Masonboro Island on Wednesday. |
Just in time for the tourist season, Wrightsville Beach will soon get a fresh injection of sand.
Crews from Weeks Marine of Camden, N.J., are about to start pumping 500,000 cubic yards of sand onto Masonboro Island. Within a few weeks, the $4.6 million renourishment project will move to Wrightsville Beach, where another 750,000 cubic yards of sand drawn from Masonboro Inlet and Banks Channel will be deposited.
The renourishment project, which should wrap up in early May, will run from just south of the Blockade Runner Beach Resort to near the Holiday Inn SunSpree Resort.
Unlike most communities worried about their beaches slowly disappearing, Wrightsville Beach is guaranteed a renourishment project every four years. Carolina Beach and Kure Beach are the only other communities in the state guaranteed periodic sand injections by the Army Corps of Engineers.
Town Manager Andy Honeycutt said the renourishment project is always a welcome sight.
“Both as a recreational benefit and for property protection, we think it’s an essential project and we are happy to see the state and federal government continue to support it,” he said.
Officials credit the 1998 beach renourishment project, which wrapped up just before Hurricane Bonnie, with helping protect beachfront property from most storm-related damage.
But why is the government also renourishing uninhabited Masonboro Island, a part of the state’s coastal reserve system that is popular with boaters, sea turtles and shorebirds?
In large part because, if it weren’t done, a large chunk of the neighboring barrier island could disappear.
And, along with the environmental loss, that could endanger mainland property across the Intracoastal Waterway that relies on Masonboro Island for storm surge protection.
When the corps constructed the rock jetties on either side of Masonboro Inlet – one in the mid-1960s and the other in 1981 – it interrupted the natural transfer of sand between the islands.
The result is significant erosion in the midsection of each barrier island, although not near the inlet where sand collects. The “bowing” effect is more pronounced on Masonboro Island because more sand travels in an inlet north to south.
To help mitigate the jetties’ impact, the federal government agreed to renourish the barrier island whenever it pumps sand onto neighboring Wrightsville Beach.
But unlike the Wrightsville Beach portion of the project, whose cost is divided between the federal, state and local governments, the tab for the Masonboro renourishment is fully paid by Washington.
The local share of the Wrightsville Beach project’s cost is $157,500, said county Finance Director Bruce Shell. The money comes out of the county’s room-tax fund, which is collected via an additional 3 percent tax on hotel rooms and short-term rentals under 30 days.
John Taggart, who oversees Masonboro for the state, said the periodic sand injections are welcomed to help maintain the island’s integrity, which has been visibly altered by the jetties’ construction.
However, Bill Cleary, a coastal geologist with the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, said the renourishment is doing little but delaying the inevitable.
Along with losing sand due to changes in Masonboro Inlet, modifications to Carolina Beach Inlet have impacted sand reaching the southern half of the island.
“It’s getting a double whammy.” Dr. Cleary said, noting that the island loses much more sand annually than is pumped back on during renourishments. “And on top of that, they’re have been numerous storms recently, adding insult to injury.”
In short, the southern two-thirds of the island is in grim shape, he said.
Although there is still a lot of sediment between the ocean and the mainland, Dr. Cleary said the island’s usefulness as a storm break has been dramatically reduced in recent decades as the island’s topography flattens because dunes erode and can’t reform.
“It’s slowly but surely disappearing right now,” he said.
Pipe bothers some visitors to warm beach |
WRIGHTSVILLE BEACH | Traffic lights aren’t the only things slowing down some residents aiming to sit in the sun or dip their toes in the unseasonably warm Atlantic Ocean this week.
The summer-like weather has people hitting the beaches, but from the south end of Wrightsville Beach all the way to Johnnie Mercer’s pier, they have to cross over a nearly 3-foot-diameter pipe to touch the water.
That pipe is part of a beach renourishment project that began last month. An area of about 200 yards around where the pipe is discharging the sand and water is closed. And although workers with Weeks Marine, the New Jersey-based company doing the work, have pushed sand up and over the pipe in front of each public access point, some beachgoers would rather not see it at all.
“I don’t like that pipe one bit,” said Helen Yodersmith, who’s lived at Wrightsville Beach for 20 years. She said she doesn’t understand why the work is being done now. “Why couldn’t they have done it a few months ago?” she asked.
Town Manager Andy Honeycutt said it wasn’t a decision made by the town. The schedule of the project was decided by when the federal and state funds that are paying for it became available, he said.
The good news, Mr. Honeycutt said, is that they’re moving at about 500 feet per day and ahead of schedule. The work is required to be done before the end of May but should be done before then, he said.
Renourishment of Wrightsville Beach page 1