Posted on April 4, 2017
By Ryan Mills and Eric Staats, Naples Daily News
From his condominium along Gulf Shore Boulevard North, Ewing Sutherland has had a beachfront seat to watch dump trucks deliver tons of sand to widen the shoreline.
Their engines roar, their tailgates bang — and the noise never stops from sunup to sundown, he said.
“I would prefer not to have it, but it needs to be done one way or the other,” Sutherland said.
Four years after Collier County turned to trucking sand from inland mines to rebuild its beaches, the shores are narrower than they were when pumping sand from offshore was the county’s main method to combat coastal erosion.
Now some Collier leaders question whether the county’s reliance on truck hauls is getting the job done.
“It’s deceiving us,” Naples Councilman Doug Finlay said. “It makes us think we are adequately addressing the problem long-term when we’re not.”
The debate in Collier comes as Florida lawmakers are considering changing how the state helps manage local beaches. The Legislature also is considering an increase in state spending for renourishment.
Beach communities like Collier shifted to truck hauls as offshore dredging projects got more expensive and offshore sand deposits got scarcer. But truck hauls typically are more expensive per cubic yard of sand and provide less storm protection because they are smaller.
Even after the county’s third truck haul in four years in late 2016, Collier’s beaches are on average about 15 feet narrower than they were after the last dredging project in 2006, according to a Naples Daily News analysis of county beach monitoring data.
That means, while frequent truck hauls have kept most beaches at their target widths of 85 to 100 feet, they are less able to buffer tropical storms and hurricanes than they were in 2006.
Collier County coastal advisers are pushing a plan to use offshore dredges to build beaches higher and wider, putting a new emphasis on coastal resiliency in the wake of damage Hurricane Matthew inflicted on neglected shorelines in Northeast Florida last year.
The plan could add 1.1 million cubic yards of sand to Collier beaches in one big project, about three times what the county has put on the beach with three truck haul projects since 2013.
It would require approval from the state Department of Environmental Protection and already is prompting calls to raise the county’s tourist tax to pay for it, a controversial issue.
“If we’re going to build resiliency into the (beach) program and we’re going to do a better job of resisting storm surge, the more mass you can put on the beach, the better you are,” said Gary McAlpin, the county’s coastal zone management coordinator. “Directionally, that’s the right thing we have to do.”
History
But that’s not what Collier County and other coastal communities have been doing. In fact, truck hauls have become more common in Florida.
After two dredging projects in 1996 and 2006, Collier County converted its beach program to truck hauls in 2013 after the sole bid for an offshore dredging project came in at $32 million, more than twice the county’s budget for the project and a whopping $89 a cubic yard. That compared to $27 per cubic yard for the 2006 dredging project.
The spike was due in part to the county botching the initial bid, by not providing dredgers with enough information about how much sand needed to go where. Secondly, dredgers were in high demand for Superstorm Sandy repair projects in the Northeast and for barrier island restoration projects in Louisiana after the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
“It was just a lot of projects that happened at once; a lot of planned projects, a lot of post-Sandy projects that put a limit on resources,” said Nicole Sharp, Broward County’s beach manager, who was working as a consultant for Collier County in 2013.
Dump trucks raised concerns about neighborhood disruption and safety, but erosion was bad enough that waiting a year or two for the dredging market to stabilize was off the table.
Nearly four years later, Collier County still is using truck hauls to renourish beaches. By not taking another look at offshore dredging, Collier leaders risk overpaying — possibly millions of dollars per project — to keep local beaches renourished and visitors flocking.
Collier County’s truck hauls typically have been more expensive per cubic yard of sand than the 2006 dredge project, which came in at $27 per cubic yard. On average, truck hauls since then have cost the county $38 per cubic yard, ranging from a low of $28 per cubic yard to a high of $49 per cubic yard, a Naples Daily News review shows.
Statewide, offshore dredging remains the predominant method to renourish Florida’s beaches, delivering about 97 percent of the state’s sand from 1994 to 2014, according to Florida Department of Environmental Protection records.
But as offshore sand gets harder to find — particularly in Southeast Florida, and increasingly in Southwest Florida — dump trucks that deliver sand from inland mines have taken a bigger role.
In 2014, dump trucks delivered 736,000 cubic yards of sand to six Florida beaches, accounting for about 8 percent of the state’s total. Last year, Broward County, which has used up all its offshore sand, trucked in 750,000 cubic yards of sand to its beaches, making it the biggest truck haul in state history.
Miami-Dade County, which also has used up its offshore resources, now is trucking in all of its sand.
After years of using offshore dredges to renourish beaches, the town of Longboat Key on the Gulf coast turned to dump trucks for the first time last summer. The town paid $50 per cubic yard of sand, about three times what it paid previously to pump sand from offshore, said Juan Florensa, Longboat Key’s public works director.
Town leaders were willing to pay extra for the inland sand because of its high quality.
“Not only is it pretty, it feels great on your feet,” Florensa said.
Protection
Collier County’s last dredging project in 2006 wrapped up just before Memorial Day weekend. For $18.5 million, Chicago-based Great Lakes pumped 673,000 cubic yards of sand onto the beach from offshore.
After the project was complete, the county measured the width of the beach every 1,000 feet or so along the coast from a point onshore to the mean high tide line.
At 47 stretches that were renourished in 2006, those same stretches averaged about 15 feet narrower after the 2016 truck haul, according to county data. That width includes dunes, not just sandy beach.
McAlpin said it shouldn’t be surprising the county’s beaches were wider after the 2006 project. They built the beaches with six years of what is called “advanced renourishment,” so they would last longer, he said.
“We added sand so that we wouldn’t have to renourish for six years,” he said. “They were wider, absolutely, but that’s not the standard we’re measuring against.”
McAlpin said the trucks have kept the beaches at their target width of 100 feet wide in most areas, 85 feet at Park Shore.
“That’s our marching orders,” he said.
A Daily News analysis found that between 2006 and 2013, those 47 stretches of beach were at or above the design standard 74 percent of the time. Since 2014, the county has maintained that standard 85 percent of the time.
Since that first 2013 truck project, which hauled in 230,000 cubic yards of sand, the county has hauled 52,000 cubic yards in 2014 and 90,000 cubic yards last year.
Four months later, Collier’s beach leaders already are eyeing the next project — trucking about 100,000 cubic yards of sand to the beaches in Naples and in front of the Ritz-Carlton. It would be the county’s fourth truck haul in five years.
In December, at the first meeting of the newly elected Collier County Commission, Commissioner Penny Taylor suggested exploring using offshore dredging for beach renourishment instead of “totally relying on truck haul.”
Commissioner Bill McDaniel said: “It’s astounding to me that we treat beach renourishment almost on an emergency basis.”
In early March, McAlpin offered the county’s Coastal Advisory Committee the plan to make Collier’s beaches more resilient to storms. The size of the project would require using an offshore dredge to build the county’s beaches 50 feet wider and a foot taller, McAlpin told the committee. It would cost at least $30 million, or about $27 per cubic yard, comparable to the 2006 dredging project.
Taylor, and others who support a return to offshore dredging for beach renourishment, advocate raising the tourist tax to pay for it.
“I think we need more money than we have,” Taylor said.
With dredging costs rising and communities turning to less cost-effective truck hauls, Gov. Rick Scott and some lawmakers want to increase the state’s beach renourishment budget to $50 million.
Bill Hanson, Great Lakes vice president of government relations, said dredgers should be able to offer competitive prices now that post-Sandy repair work has slowed and two new hopper dredges are expected to increase the capacity of the nation’s fleet by 30 percent this year.
“I think if you give us an apples-to-apples bid, we will easily beat trucking prices,” Hanson said. “It’s all in the details.”
Dredging projects come with large upfront costs to mobilize equipment and the pipe needed to pump the sand to the beach. That cost can approach $4 million, before even one grain of sand is delivered. That upfront cost makes dredging cost-effective only for larger projects.
Truck hauls, on the other hand, have much lower mobilization costs and can be done for less money overall. Because they often are smaller, the cost per cubic yard of sand is typically greater. But the trucks raise road safety concerns and prompt complaints from neighborhoods about truck traffic.
“The reality is, there is no question that if the economics are correct that dredging is a better alternative from impact on our residents,” said John Sorey, chair of the county’s Coastal Adivsory Committee and a former Naples mayor.
But dredging may still prove expensive for Collier. For one, Collier’s offshore sand is more than 40 miles away off the coast of Captiva Island in Lee County, requiring additional work to screen the sand and pump it to the beach. Dredgers are more interested in doing larger projects.
“We’ve got a lot of things going against us,” McAlpin said. “It’s a difficult project to execute.”
Broward, Miami-Dade and Collier counties are still coming to grips with the impact of sand haul trucks on their roads and at their beach access points, said Christopher Creed, a senior engineer and vice president of Olsen Associates, a Jacksonville-based coastal engineering firm.
“It is something I’m not convinced these communities have fully adopted as the future,” Creed said. “Collier still has some options. They need to spend more time evaluating the difference in cost.”
Source: Naples Daily News
