Posted on April 21, 2025
On the last day of March, the Barnstable County Dredge crew was waiting. They were on the precipice of April and found themselves in need of a waiver, from MassWildlife’s National Heritage Endangered Species Program, to continue their work dredging Mashpee’s Popponesset Bay.
“We just ran out of time, with the time of year restriction with the birds,” said Mashpee Harbormaster Robert Tomaino. “Ken [Cirillo, Barnstable County dredge director] was probably less than halfway done when April 1 came around. March 31 we were all sitting there thinking, ‘What are we going to do tomorrow?’”
The crew could not continue the dredge work, Mr. Tomaino explained, without a waiver from the endangered species program.
“On March 31 at 6:30 PM, that approval came in,” Mr. Tomaino said.
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Dredging is a behind-the-scenes job on Cape Cod.
“We are kind of the migrants of the Cape,” Mr. Cirillo said. “We do all of this work in the middle of the night and in the winter. Nobody knows what we do. They come in their beach chairs and don’t realize that the sand they’re sitting on came from the channel.”
The Enterprise joined Mr. Cirillo and Mr. Tomaino on the Sandshifter dredge on April 8 to see firsthand the dredging process, the mechanics behind it, and the trials and tribulations that come with the day-to-day work.
Mr. Cirillo said that the main reasons for dredging are to reduce channels from schooling, or sand build up, and to nourish the sand by moving it from the water to the beaches.
“People don’t realize; they come here in May and everything had to be done just to get their boats in the water through the channel for the past four months,” Mr. Tomaino said.
Popponesset Bay is required to have a maintained depth of five feet. Mr. Cirillo said that the depth varies for each channel.
“Cape Cod has some kind of shoaling that occurs annually,” Mr. Cirillo said. “Some projects, like this one, we do every single year, others every three years, others every once in a while. It really varies on the project of how often it shoals and how often we need to come and get out.”
Mr. Tomaino said that the sand moving through the channel is a funnel effect.
“This year, we estimated rips to be about seven to eight knots. We were down here a couple weeks ago. It’s almost like Wood’s Hole, that’s how quick it is,” Mr. Tomaino said. “It’s a funnel effect. This current here is our strongest current. It’s pretty incredible how quickly it goes in and out.”
“Sand moves,” Mr. Cirillo said. “It doesn’t care about town borders.”
This year’s dredging was incredibly complex due to the time of year restrictions and the weather.
“We’re going on a month of this project. Tomorrow, we could wake up and there could be 60 mile-an-hour winds headed east. You just don’t know,” Mr. Tomaino said last Tuesday, April 8. “It’s not that easy to predict and it’s not easy to get these things accomplished in a timely fashion.”
Mr. Cirillo said that the previous Friday was a short day due to the rain. Windy conditions forced the work to stop the following day, Saturday, April 5, and the team had to postpone dredging on April 7, also due to wind.
Barnstable County Dredging finished their project at Popponesset Bay on April 9.
“It’s a very complicated dredge project that happens every year, and this year was very complicated,” Mr. Tomaino said.
Mr. Tomaino said that the town and shore supporters are funding the project. He said that the Popponesset Spit is owned by Save Popponesset Bay, so the dredging crew coordinates with them. When the crew goes over a certain amount of cubic yards of sand, Save Popponesset Bay steps in to help with funds. Mr. Tomaino called them a big supporter of the project because “they get really nice sand for their beach.”
“It’s important to know these dredge projects have no burden to the taxpayers on them,” Mr. Tomaino said. “It’s funded through our waterways account and through grants.”
Mr. Cirillo said that there is a cutter head that is “like a big eggbeater.” The blades cut into the sand along the seafloor, which is sometimes loose and sometimes compacted hard. When the cutter hits up against this compacted sand, the whole dredge shakes.
“The dredge is basically going left and going right, all it’s doing is going back and forth,” Mr. Cirillo said. “This channel is about 50 feet wide, so it’s cutting all the way across the channel from side to side.”
The Barnstable County Dredging Crew has two dredges, the Sandshifter and the Codfish II. The crew used the Sandshifter at Popponesset Bay.
“We brought this dredge in because it has more pipe and allows us to go further down the beach,” Mr. Tomaino said. He said that there are yellow polyballs that mark the pipe underwater. It then discharges to the Spit. The pipe is 6,500 feet long.
Chris Armstrong is the dredge leverman; he controls the dredge with a series of levers and buttons inside a closet-sized booth at the center of the dredge machine.
“It’s a really slow, methodical process. Sometimes you’re not digging too deep, the material is a little lighter. This is getting better every year,” Mr. Cirillo said. “We’re going up a little further north of the channel. We’re trying to get as much as we can because there’s a lot of shoaling up here and when boats come out, this is where they need to go.”
He said that the leverman is in control of a wireless tide station that transmits the tide all of the time. The leverman lets vessels know what side to pass the dredge on based on where the dredge pipe is. There are also hydrographers who work with the leverman and are able to help manage surveys.
“Aside from the weather delays, we don’t stop. We started in September, and here we are in April and we’ve been running straight through. We have two dredges and two crews,” Mr. Cirillo said. “All we’re doing is figuring out the next move, the next day, the next plan, the next project, adding pipe, moving pipe, breaking pipe. It’s brutal. But whatever we say we’re going to do, it changes by the end of the day.”
Not dredging the bay creates an issue for boaters, Mr. Tomaino said.
“A couple of years ago, when this didn’t get dredged, it was a nightmare,” Mr. Tomaino said. “We were up at the library for two hours trying to explain to people how dredging works.”
Mr. Cirillo said that not many people even know that dredges exist.
“I will tell you that if you took a poll, and maybe one, maybe five [people] tops would say, ‘I know what it is, I’ve seen it before,’” Mr. Cirillo said. “People don’t know it exists.”
Every single channel on Cape Cod shoals, Mr. Cirillo said.
“If you stop [dredging], number one it would be incredibly dangerous at some point and number two, it would be incredibly difficult to get done.” He said that half of the County’s dredging projects are annual.
“The best way I can say it is dredging is an integral part of our waterways, especially for Mashpee. During the summertime, this community here, it’s all boating,” Mr. Tomaino said.
To make residents aware, the dredging crew puts floats out that will mark where pipes are in the water for boaters during boating season, Mr. Cirillo said. They send advisories to marinas to let boaters know that they are dredging.
“Dredging is not like getting a DPW crew out to Old Barnstable Road and saying, ‘here, fill the pothole,’’ Mr. Tomaino said. “It doesn’t work that way. I will always use that example because a couple of years ago when we had the nightmare of not dredging, there was a Facebook post that I read from someone who tried to compare dredging to filling a pothole on the side of the road.”
After the dredging team finished the Popponesset Bay work on April 9, they headed over to Chatham for their next project.
“We’re taking three quarters of pipe here and going to Chatham because we have to finish two projects there before May 1,” Mr. Cirillo said. “We’re going to run to Chatham with this dredge.”
