Posted on July 3, 2018
By Lee Hinnant, stateportpilot.com
Dredging of the inner ocean bar of the Wilmington Harbor shipping channel has reached a benchmark, as crews cleared the Smith Island Reach this week and began moving equipment from Caswell Beach to Oak Island.
Bald Head Shoal is the second of the two inner ocean sandbars being cleared by the contractor for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The corps announced Monday that the dredge is moving from Smith Island Reach to Bald Head Shoal, and the pipeline is being relocated from the shore along Caswell Beach to a float just offshore from Oak Island Pier.
The corps expects the contractor to resume pumping sand on the beach about 600 feet west of the pier as soon as Thursday, June 28. Work will continue 24 hours a day throughout the Independence Day holiday. Sand and water will pour onto the strand and move east until the newly dredged material meets the existing dune line at McGlamery Street.
The work is highly dependent on weather and mechanical factors, but the current best guess is that the contractor will reach the McGlamery Street area around July 2. The spot matches where previous sand placement ended. After tying into the recently placed sand, the contractor will pick up and move west of the pier, then continue going west for the duration of the project.
The contractor is temporarily working from west to east in part to avoid relocating the float for the pipeline offshore from the pier. After making an elbow and placing sand in areas around the pier, the pipeline will move sand onto Oak Island and not come ashore on Caswell Beach again for the duration of the project.
The parking lot of Oak Island Pier will be closed for the duration of the project. For at least the next week, the beach access at Barbee Boulevard will also be closed.
Sand placement is expected to end at about SE 64th Street in Oak Island.
Caswell Beach Mayor Deborah Ahlers said she was impressed by the rapid pace of the work and added that she could hardly tell the new sand berm from the former beach.
The C.R. McCaskill, the dredge working the project, can put the equivalent of 3,800 tandem-axle truckloads of sand on the beach in a single day. A standard dump truck holds 10 cubic yards of material.
Source: stateportpilot.com
