Posted on January 3, 2022
NORTH WILDWOOD — On a weekday afternoon, a dog and its owner work their way through a steady December wind sweeping across the beach in the troublesome northeast corner of Five Mile Beach.
The tide is out, so there is a wide, flat beach at Second Street and a narrow patch of sand at the end of a stone seawall, but it is clear that high tide will reach the rocks.
A federal project is in the works, but it will be 2023 at the earliest before federal money adds a grain of sand to the beach.
In the meantime, the city has tried to stem the tide itself.
For the past six years, the city has trucked sand in to the area in the offseason, both so there will be some beach there for the summer and to protect against damage from winter storms.
The process is expensive, and according to Mayor Pat Rosenello, most years the added sand erodes quickly.
Last winter, the city trucked thousands of cubic yards of sand to the site. Starting in late January, plans are to do it again, at an estimated cost of more than $3 million. The sand will be pulled from the beaches of Wildwood in a process called backpassing, with the expectation that the incoming tides will replace the sand gathered from the wider beaches.
According to Rosenello, there is no way for North Wildwood to keep up with erosion on its north end using trucked-in sand.
He’s hoping for a longer-term solution in the form of a federal beach replenishment project. Even while acknowledging the analogy is somewhat off-putting, he compares the situation to trying to flush a five-pound bucket of sand down a toilet.
If a few spoonsful are added at a time, he said, the sand can be flushed away.
“But you put that whole bucket in, then that sand isn’t going anywhere,” Rosenello said.
In this case, the whole bucket would be a federal beach replenishment project.
Once unusual, federal beach replenishment projects have become standard in New Jersey. Federal projects have added to the beaches of almost every barrier-island community in the state. But not in the Wildwoods.
Wildwood and Wildwood Crest, other communities that share Five Mile Island with North Wildwood, have the opposite problem. Accumulating sand has built the beaches to the point where summer visitors complain about the long walk to the water. The sand clogs outfall pipes and leads to standing water on the beach.
In North Wildwood, the beaches have been disappearing near the inlet for decades. A seawall stretches the length of Hereford Inlet, and protective barriers are in place along the ocean beach in the north end of the city as well.
A federal project, in the design phase, will include rebuilding the north end beach and adding a tall dune from North Wildwood to the Diamond Beach section of Lower Township in the south end of the island.
“The schedule is mainly dependent on the state acquiring the necessary real estate easements to enable construction to move forward,” said Steve Rochette, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “At this point, it’s not likely construction would proceed before fall 2023.”
The project would help with storm protection, according to the Army Corps, which looked at the feasibility of the proposal in 2013.
The state Department of Environmental Protection is working on the project as well. According to Rochette, that includes working on acquiring the beachfront easements needed for the work to proceed.
Larry Hajna, a DEP spokesperson, said the department is committed to working with the towns on the project in 2022.
“The DEP is currently working with Wildwood, North Wildwood, Wildwood Crest and Lower Township on agreements for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ storm damage reduction project, consisting of beach replenishment and dune construction,” Hajna said in an emailed response to a request for comment. “The agreements will result in greater resilience and protection for these communities from coastal storms and sea-level rise while not requiring the municipalities to provide any cost-share for initial construction.”
As envisioned, the project would still use backpassing as the source of the sand for the new dune and for the beach construction in North Wildwood, but on a larger scale.
The plans call for using hydraulic equipment to pump sand from one beach to another, rather than trucking it in or pumping it from the shoals of the nearby Hereford Inlet.
This option will cost less than the offshore dredging used in other beach projects, Rochette said.
According to the Army Corps, North Wildwood has lost about 1,000 feet of beach in recent years, despite the city efforts to replenish the sand.
“The city of North Wildwood is experiencing significant erosion of its berm and dune,” reads a posted fact sheet on the planned project. “What was the largest beach in the state now suffers from tidal flooding and wave run-up over a formerly protective beach.”
U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-2nd, has helped secure approximately $15.5 million for Army Corps beach work in Stone Harbor, Avalon and North Wildwood, according to staff in his office. The energy and water appropriation is being negotiated, with a vote expected in February.
The office helped get North Wildwood close to $1.5 million for the 2021 beach work, according to staff members, in reimbursement from storm damage.
In addition to moving excess sand from Wildwood and Wildwood Crest north, the project proposal calls for 25,000 feet of dunes along the island’s beachfront, from more than 6 feet to up to 16 feet tall.
“The project area consists of the municipalities of North Wildwood, Wildwood, Wildwood Crest and Lower Township,” the fact sheet reads. “These municipalities are vulnerable to storm damage all year round from a combination of hurricanes and nor’easters.”
