Posted on February 18, 2019
DUXBURY — With temperatures in the high 50s and sunny skies, a steady procession of visitors took advantage of an April-like afternoon during the first week of February.
Walkers, joggers, cyclists and bird watchers seeking the snowy owl found their way to Duxbury Beach and headed along the back road or to the ocean-side sand. Drivers in SUVs set their sights on the road’s first cross-over, parking near the ocean. “We need a day like this once in a while,” a jogger said as he ran by.
The beach lovers’ scene 10 days ago was typical except for this: the caravan also included a dozen large trailer trucks that moved steadily along Gurnet Road hauling in and depositing tons of sand. They drove in from Marshfield, stopping to unload in efficient fashion, proceeding to the turn-around and leaving as the next rolled in.
Welcome to the dune restoration project of the Duxbury Beach Reservation, a nonprofit group working to save the barrier beach for future generations. The project, which started in December, was briefly interrupted in January by frigid temperatures, then resumed with a deadline of finishing by the end of March. Come April 1, that part of the beach closes to protect the piping plover.
The last of the sand was brought in Thursday. More than 76,500 tons trucked in from Carver have been deposited on the beach to build higher dunes in shapes designed to blunt the ocean’s force. Come summer, as families arrive, they will see new landscapes, ones that have delighted Maggie Kearney, president of the Duxbury Beach Reservation.
“You stand on the back road now and look up towards the dune, you can no longer see the ocean,” Kearney said this week. “That’s good news. The dune looks 10 times wider, flat like a plateau. You could have a soccer game on it.”
It was frightening, she said, to drive out to the beach across Powder Point Bridge, look ahead and instead of seeing dunes, see the ocean and the potential for flooding over the beach, road and parking areas during winter storms. “The ocean was rising and the land was subsiding,” she said.
She has been president of the group for 13 years but has been coming to the beach for more than 70. During that time, there have been three large-scale rebuildings of a section of the beach after punishing winter storms going back to 1992.
“Saving the beach is saving our town,” Kearney said. “By rebuilding a very vulnerable area of the beach, the narrowest portion, we hope to prevent flooding that some other South Shore towns have had in the winter storms.” The barrier beach is a buffer between the ocean and Duxbury, Kingston and 200 homes in Plymouth.
In August, the group received $500,000 from the state’s Coast Zone Management Coastal Resiliency Program to add sand to rebuild or nourish 3,600 feet of the narrowest part of the beach and a protective dune.
Cris Luttazi, executive director of the group, said the goal is to keep the integrity of the beach by strengthening critical or most fragile parts, increasing the width of the dunes from 6 feet to 45 feet. If the new sand is washed away by forceful waves, the landscape has been designed so it will move to other parts within the beach, staying within the system. “We are working with what we know the storms are doing,” Luttzai said. “We know that barrier beach sands do move and they roll over themselves every 100 years.”
The project is using a ‘living shoreline’ approach on the east and west sides of the ocean-side dune that will provide erosion control, buffer storm surge and protect critical habitat for wildlife. “Beach nourishment,” or hauling in sand to rebuild the dunes, does not stop erosion, but it does strengthen the sand-starved system by adding compatible material, Luttazi has said.
Before the sand was brought in from a RYCO excavating company pit in Carver, extensive sediment analysis was done to ensure the grains would be compatible — not too fine in texture or contain too much iron — with sand that was already there.
Using ocean research from The Woods Hole Group, a strategy was developed. The bulldozers and front end loaders that move sand into a 17-foot-high trapezoid shaped dune rely on GPS devices and lasers hooked into the equipment. The margin of error is 2 inches. Along the top of the dune, occasional tufts of old dune grass poke through the new sand; Lattazi calls them toupees.
Now that the sand installation has been completed, the next steps are to have SumCo Eco-Contracting of Peabody plant 80,000 stalks of dune grass to trap the sand and hold the dune in place and to place fencing along the top. Reservation volunteers will plant woody shrubs including beach plum. On March 23, there will be a beach cleanup and then reservation staff will monitor how well the new beach grass grows and fills in the slopes.
As part of the new design, the first and second cross-over sections — spots where SUVs with over-sand permits drive from the road through openings in the dunes to the beach — will be raised to fit with the higher dunes. The angle of the first cross-over will also be changed, so that oncoming waves in a storm can not flood the road. Finally, the crews will fix the post and cable along the back road and grade it.
For more updates on the Crossover 1 and 2 dune restoration project, visit the web site of the Duxbury Beach Reservation at duxburybeach.com and follow the group on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can also sign up for their email list.
Source: www.patriotledger.com
