Posted on September 22, 2015
By Abbey Kunkle, Port Isabel
The South Padre Island Shoreline Task Force met Monday afternoon for their regular monthly meeting. Coastal Resource and Parks Administrator Reuben Treviño brought some good news regarding the Beneficial Use Dredge Material (BUDM) project.
The BUDM project, which began in 1997, is the City’s primary way of combating the erosion of beaches by using the sand that is dredged from the maintenance of the jetty channel and placing that on sand on the City’s beaches. The project is a collaboration between the Texas General Land Office (GLO), HDR Engineering, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and has proven to be beneficial for all parties involved. The USACE is responsible for maintenance of the channel, and the partnership provides an extremely affordable source of sand for the City. Typically, SPI places about 200,000 cubic yards of sand at a cost of $2.74 per cubic yard. Treviño recently announced that because USACE has decided to expand the channel by dredging the entrance in addition to their usual project, this year, the BUDM project will provide about 650,000 cubic yards of sand for the north end of the City’s beaches, which have been tagged as “erosion hotspots.”
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