Posted on April 16, 2018
By Audrey Cooney, The Patriot Ledger
Residents learned about a plan to streamline the process of dredging Green Harbor and replenishing Marshfield’s beaches at a public meeting Thursday night.
Almost 20 people gathered to hear the presentation by Leslie Fields, a coastal geologist with Wood Hole Group, an environmental and engineering consulting group that’s been tasked with studying beach nourishment for the town. Fields is the project manager for the beach nourishment project.
“There’s a history of long-term erosion along the Marshfield coastline,” she said.
Fields explained that one of the most important benefits of beach nourishment is protecting the area’s seawalls.
“Without that elevated beach and that sand in front of those seawalls, they become exposed to wave forces they weren’t designed for,” she said. “And they fail.”
Every summer, the Army Corps of Engineers dredges the harbor and deposits the sentiment they remove into the sea near South Marshfield and North Duxbury. And every winter, storms like the ones that battered the coast this past March remove large amounts of sand from area beaches. Woods Hole Group is studying whether the town should use sediment dredged from the harbor to replenish the beaches.
Sand used to replenish beaches must by law resemble the original sand in composition, a requirement that can be expensive and complicated for municipalities to adhere to. Using sediment dredged from Green Harbor would circumnavigate that problem, said Fields.
Marshfield’s town administrator, Michael Maresco, said the most challenging part of the plan would be securing access to privately owned beaches, which would be a requirement before work could start.
“When you’re using public resources, there has to be a public benefit,” he said. Maresco explained that beach owners would have to grant the town easement and allow members of the public to use their beach in order for the project to go forward.
The Wood Hole Group submitted a grant application last May on the town of Marshfield’s behalf to Massachusetts Coastal Zone Management under their Coastal Resiliency Grant program. The town received $36,000to study whether using dredged up sand to replenish the beaches would be a viable solution. The town also contributed $12,000 of its own money to the study.
There will be a second public meeting when the study is completed in June to presents its findings to residents, said Fields.
“I’ve been coming to Marshfield beaches for a long time,” said Stephen Maher.
He said he’s spent his summers in Marshfield since childhood, and moved there full-time with his wife in 2015. He said they used to see 30 or 40 feet of sand at Marshfield’s Fieldston Beach. But that’s changed within recent years.
“An hour before high tide, we have no beach,” he said.
Source: The Patriot Ledger
