Posted on May 1, 2018
By Matt Bruce, The Daytona Beach News-Journal
It’s been three months since county officials began a do-it-yourself dune restoration project that eventually will encompass roughly 12 of the county’s 18 miles of beach.
Dale and Tommye Lee Hogan held hands as they walked along the beach in Flagler County on a sunny morning last week. Since 2000, the Gainesville couple has owned a home in The Hammock, an unincorporated coastal community along the county’s northeastern corridor. They visit regularly for weekend getaways and remember a time when stout cabbage palms lined the dunes along the beach.
“It was really nice, 18 years ago,” Dale Hogan said. “It was like a different world.”
Much has changed since Hurricane Matthew, the category 3 storm that decimated Flagler County’s coast in October 2016 and scoured away most of the coastal vegetation, leaving its protective berms in shambles.
Now bulldozers and dump trucks are traversing the beach almost daily, working to restore some of that old luster. Crews have been working since January to replace sand on the county’s protective berms, and this week marked three months since county officials began a $28.3-million in-house dune restoration project that eventually will encompass roughly 12 of the county’s 18 miles of beach.
County officials say they intend to dump about 790,000 tons of sand on the county’s beach as part of a multiphase plan to re-construct dunes along a stretch of coast spanning from River to Sea Preserve Park south to the Flagler Beach Pier. That’s enough to bury the entire football field at TIAA Bank Field, home of the Jacksonville Jaguars, beneath 200 feet of sand.
It’s a monumental effort for a small, yet growing county with a population expected to eclipse 110,000 by this summer. Nonetheless, the county remains at the mercy of Mother Nature as a strong storm could undermine all the work and destroy the unsettled dunes at any time.
“We’ve got to keep doing new things now to harden ourselves,” Flagler County Administrator Craig Coffey said. “The residents have been wanting us to get something up before hurricane season, and they’re pretty happy about it. We just hope it lasts and we don’t get hit with anything this year.”
Coffey said as of Wednesday, the project is about 25 percent complete. With sea turtle nesting season set to begin Tuesday and hurricane season starting June 1, the emergency repairs provide a level of comfort for coastal residents, most of whom have spent the past 18 months without any dunes protecting their homes.
“It’s a wonderful, welcoming sight,” said Monica Schmidt, who lives less than a block from the ocean and walks seven miles on the beach every day. “Everyone I’ve talked to is very pleased.”
It took more than a year of regrouping for Flagler County officials to get to this point. They spent much of 2017 tangled in regulatory red tape that strangled their plans to quickly reinforce the county’s dune line. Flagler County commissioners even traveled to Washington, D.C. last July to lobby U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis, top FEMA officials, and regulators from other federal agencies for help.
Frustrated by bureaucracy and determined to take action, Flagler officials opted for a do-it-yourself approach. The county is using state and federal funds, but will not bring in an outside contractor to reconstruct the dunes. Instead, officials hired eight new public works employees for the project’s construction phase.
It’s a move largely compelled by high sand prices and one that’s estimated to shave as much as 30 percent off the final cost.
Florida Department of Environmental Protection spokeswoman Dee Ann Miller said 12 coastal counties sustained significant damages in Matthew and Hurricane Irma. It was unclear if any of those counties are undertaking in-house dune repairs.
Neptune Beach City Attorney Patrick Krechowski, a former legal analyst for both the DEP and St. Johns River Water Management District, said Flagler’s approach is not commonplace.
“I’ve worked on beach projects all over the state when I was with DEP, and usually you use a contractor to do the whole thing,” he said. “Here in Duval County, when we do our beach projects, it’s not the county or the city beach staff doing it. It’s a contractor. But I can understand what Flagler County is facing.”
Multiphase plan
Work began Jan. 22 on the beach at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park. Flagler plans to spend just shy of $10.7 million in matching funds and use $12.1 million from the DEP and $5.5 million from FEMA.
County officials took out a $6.5 million loan in November and plan to secure another $4.2 million loan next month based on special assessment districts in Hammock Dunes, Ocean Hammock, Painters Hill, and the Hammock Beach Resort. Property owners in those districts have agreed to repay the county over five years.
A 10-person team has been working 50 hours each week, slowly moving south along the shore. So far, they’ve progressed 2.8 miles to 16th Road, near the Hammock Beach Resort, and crews worked last week on a half-mile stretch just south of Old Salt Park.
The goal is to finish a mile of dune each month and complete the nearly 11-mile county stretch north of Flagler Beach by January. County officials also have agreed to complete a FEMA project in Flagler Beach, pledging to repair a public 0.9-mile dune line near the city’s iconic pier. Officials expect to be done with the entire project by next spring.
One of the keys is six tracked crawler trucks the county leased from a New Jersey equipment company to climb and pour sand on the dunes. The trucks are capable of carrying loads of up to 25,000 pounds at a time. But Coffey said two of the crawlers are out of commission and two others are having mechanical problems. Those are being replaced, but officials are considering shortening the work days to ease the toll on the equipment.
“You’re dealing with a harsher environment here,” said Alex Spiller, a county project administrator who is overseeing the construction phase. “Equipment is subject to wear and tear from the sand and the salt. I guess it’s just basically keeping the equipment moving and making sure we have adequate equipment, which we’ve been able to do. It’s just tough.”
Flagler has been granted a countywide permit by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to work through sea turtle nesting season, which runs from May through October. Crews substantially finished building seawalls in front of 19 Painters Hill homes April 22.
Earlier this month, Flagler commissioners approved a $696,000 contract with EarthBalance, a North Port ecological company that will plant dune vegetation across 11.4 miles from River to Sea Park to Beverly Beach. The contractor is expected to begin planting May 21 at Washington Oaks, and county officials said they will complete the first three miles within a week.
That should alleviate some of Monica Schmidt’s concerns. The floor level of her home along Rollins Dunes Drive was damaged by floods after Hurricane Matthew and she admits she feels more protected now that dunes had been rebuilt in front of her street.
But the county is completely closing off openings in the dunes at three public access points as crews progress south. Schmidt worries her neighbors, particularly elderly and disabled residents, won’t be able to get to the beach once vegetation is planted.
“Everyone is very pleased to see them doing this,” she said. “But how are we going to keep those dunes? Will there be vegetation? Will they block it with a fence? Will they have access for people who do live in this area?”
Coffey said the county plans to rebuild the handful of dune walkovers destroyed by Matthew. In the meantime, 50- to 100-foot-long mats will be placed over the dunes at public access points and certain streets used for beach access. Wider mats will be used at Mala Compra Road Beachfront Park, 16th Road and Jungle Hut Park to allow access for emergency vehicles, powerskis and dune buggies, he said.
Long-term solutions
Perhaps the biggest shift in plans will come during a second phase geared toward a long-term solution for the county’s oceanfront south of Beverly Beach. During a joint meeting with Flagler Beach commissioners in August, the two governments decided to scrap plans for an Army Corps project that had been in the works for more than a decade. The $45 million federally bankrolled plan promised to extend coastal berms at least 10 feet seaward along the 2.6-mile stretch of Flagler Beach south of the pier. Sand would’ve been dredged from an ocean sandpit seven miles offshore every 11 years — five times over the next 50 years.
Despite the fact that federal lawmakers authorized $31.6 million for the corps project in December 2016, county officials lost patience last summer after Congress failed to appropriate any of that funding for design or construction costs.
Now the county is moving forward with a plan to expand the scope of the project and instead use money from DEP, the Florida Department of Transportation and county tourism dollars.
County plans call for pouring 20 cubic yards of sand on Flagler Beach’s entire 6.3-mile shoreline. Construction for that phase will likely not begin until late 2019 or early 2020, after FDOT completes permanent repairs to State Road A1A, which was undermined during Matthew.
According to county officials, the offshore pit may have as much as 5 million cubic yards of sand available and could be a good sand source for years to come if the county can get proper permitting.
Looking ahead
Returning the dunes to their pre-Matthew condition has been a priority for Flagler County officials since the 2016 storm blasted beaches and undermined chunks of roadway along Florida’s Atlantic coastline. Flagler was one of the state’s hardest-hit counties, but several setbacks derailed efforts to restore the battered dunes last year.
County officials said they pleaded with the Federal Emergency Management Agency for months to write work orders for projects, to no avail. Meanwhile, stringent FEMA standards and environmental regulations also prevented the county from moving sand.
One of the biggest hurdles was procuring sand. County leaders had originally planned to begin the first stage of the dunes project in May 2017. But a month before work was set to begin, commissioners rejected all three contractors’ bids after they came in at nearly double what had been budgeted. Sand costs were substantially more than anticipated and had bloated the price of the entire effort.
It was back to the drawing board. Officials spent months trying to find local sand sources to reduce the time and cost of transporting sand from miles away. They even considered buying properties along Old Kings Road and John Anderson Highway and mining sand themselves. But those negotiations fell through because there were no guarantees that sand from any of the local quarries would meet DEP’s specifications for beach sand. The state agency gauges sand for color, grain size, silt and shell content to make sure it is compatible. In fact, it was the DEP-approved specificity of sand for Flagler beaches that drove costs up, officials said.
In December, the county settled on using Vulcan Materials, a mining company based in Birmingham, Alabama . Vulcan sends in about 3,000 tons of sand each day from two quarries near Gainesville. One is in Keystone Heights, about 75 miles from the project area. The other, in Melrose, is more than 60 miles away.
Ultimately, county officials were forced to cut back on the amount of sand they will spread to make things affordable. The DEP project areas were originally slated to get 10 cubic yards of sand. Most of those segments have been reduced to eight cubic yards.
Despite the cutbacks, the project still is likely to cost about $2 million more than the county originally had planned.
“We resigned ourselves to the fact that we were going to have a project that cost more,” Coffey said. “So the project that we’ve got going now is somewhere between what our original estimates were and what the high bid estimates were. They’re about halfway between those. And that’s how we came to the conclusion we had to cut costs some way. The way to cut costs was to use in-house forces.”
Coffey described the effort as “one of the largest and most complicated projects we’ve ever done,” referencing all the moving parts involved in moving the plan forward. The county had to get more than 200 documents — such as interlocal agreements with other cities, homeowner easements, and financial contracts — signed for the endeavor.
“From head to toe it’s just been unique for our county,” Coffey said. “There were giant puzzle pieces and some of the puzzle pieces reshaped over time. But at the end of the day, you had to come up with a complete puzzle, and I think that’s what we’ve achieved.”
Source: The Daytona Beach News-Journal
