Posted on August 20, 2020
A $7 million U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project next year will strengthen the rocky north jetty at Ponce Inlet, which should help eliminate dangerous cross currents and the shoaling that can make the inlet treacherous for boaters.
In the meantime, boaters will need to continue to carefully navigate the inlet.
The Volusia County Council announced the project last week. Starting in the spring or summer of 2021, the 19-month-long project will decrease the dangerous cross streams in the inlet and fortify the jetty for future storms.
“That’s really a big thing for us to get $7 million in repairs to our inlet,” Volusia County Manager George Recktenwald said during the meeting. “That will assist with improving the safety through that inlet.”
David Ruderman, who works with the corporate communications office for the US Army Corps of Engineers in Jacksonville, said that after Hurricanes Matthew and Irma, the north jetty was severely damaged, and more than 100 feet of the jetty was completely degraded.
The upcoming project will include relocating some of the remaining original stones on the jetty, and the placement of around 2,000 more specially quarried new stones. Ruderman said the sizes of the rocks will range from a toaster oven to the size of an average living room.
“My understanding is that the damage the jetty has suffered over the years has made the navigation more difficult, more dangerous, so repairing the jetty will help to control the erosion,” he said. “It’s really going to help control those cross currents and help decrease the shoaling.”
Shoaling, a natural movement of massive amounts of sand from somewhere else in the sea into an inlet, has been a problem for years. The sand piles at the inlet floor, making the inlet narrower and more shallow, creating potentially perilous situations for mariners.
The main solution over the past few decades has been dredging. It’s a long, expensive process with different methods of execution. At Ponce Inlet, the typical method of repair is having large boats essentially scoop up sand and ship it back out into the Atlantic Ocean.
A nearly year-long Ponce de Leon Inlet dredging project completed in the summer of 2019 moved about 500,000 cubic yards of sand to New Smyrna Beach. It cost about $8.55 million. The Corps of Engineers picked up that tab as well.
Mike Mulholland, captain of Sea Spirit Deep Sea Fishing and an advocate for mariners who work in the inlet, said he was elated to hear about the stabilization project. After pushing to get the jetty repaired for years, he said this will hopefully be a long-term solution to shoaling.
“The dredging was only a temporary fix,” he said. “It was basically putting a band-aid on something that is really a hemorrhage.”
Although the dredging was helpful for a while, Mulholland said the shoaling will often come back with a vengeance only months after dredging. A long-term fix has been needed for a while, and he said he’s been worried about someone getting seriously injured or even killed because of how dangerous the inlet has become.
“This is going to prevent a lot of the shoaling in the area,” he said. “It’s going to make things a lot safer for us.”
Source: The Dayton Beach News-Journal
