Posted on January 14, 2026
Palm Beach’s coastline continue to gain sand, thanks dredging and sand and dune-nourishment efforts, the town’s coastal engineering consultant told the Shore Protection Board during its recent meeting.
During the Jan. 8 meeting, Mike Jenkins said Palm Beach’s 12.2 mile-shoreline has gained 5.75 million cubic yards of sand since the town first started measuring long-term sand volumes back in 1990.
Jenkins, a coastal engineer with West Palm Beach-based Applied Technology & Management, said the average increase amounts to about 60.5 feet of added width for the town’s beaches.
Those gains can be attributed to the town’s coastal-management program, especially the Palm Beach Beach Management Agreement, he told the board.
Enacted in 2013, the agreement is a regional coastline-management plan that streamlines the permitting process for beach nourishment efforts. The agreement also serves to preserve and improve the island’s near-shore ecosystem by monitoring the sand migrating along the waters near the shore, sea turtle nesting, and so-called “hard-bottoms.”
Those nourishment programs include the large-scale beach re-sanding initiatives at Midtown Beach and Phipps Ocean Park; the dune restoration along the town’s South End beaches; the efforts to pump sand onto the island’s northern tip through the sand transfer plant on Singer Island; and the strategic placement of sand during the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredging of the inlet at the northern end of Palm Beach.
Not only do these programs ensure Palm Beach residents have a beachfront to enjoy but they also protect the health of the near shore ecosystem and shield upland properties from storm surges, Jenkins said.
“We are in a much better position because of the nourishment program — orders of magnitudes better than if we did (not have this program), relative to hurricane impacts,” he told the board.
The program also helps protect the beach against the effects of sea-level rise, Jenkins said.
While the recent survey found that Midtown Beach has lost a considerable amount of sand since last year’s measurements, Jenkins assured board members that amount of sand was within the levels forecast.
“This is not unusual. This is typical behavior,” he told the board.
That’s because Midtown Beach is a feeder beach, which means that any sand placed on that stretch of coastline is expected to be swept away and travel south to bolster the beaches between Midtown and Sloan’s Curve on the South End, he said.
Midtown Beach will soon see its sand replenished in the coming months when the Army Corpos begins a federally backed Midtown Beach nourishment project, he noted.
“That net trend of loss is going to be reversed in a few months,” Jenkins told the board.
That project is slated to start around March, according to board member James McKelvy.
Jenkins also noted that the areas of most concern for the town have all managed to stay relatively stable. Those include the North End shoreline from Onondaga Avenue to El Mirasol; the beaches near Sloan’s Curve; Midtown’s Clarke Avenue Beach; and the town’s coastline south of the Lake Worth Beach Pier.
The coastline just south of the pier recently received 23,796 cubic yards of sand as part of the town’s efforts to rebuild the area’s sand dunes, Coastal Manager Sara Gutekunst said.
“I would call it a complete success — it was a very challenging project, and we were able to get a lion’s share of sand onto the beach,” Jenkins said.
