Posted on May 27, 2019
A massive beach widening project will get under way at the Oceanfront just as tourist season peaks this summer.
Hoteliers in the resort area are preparing for the temporary disruption in front of their businesses, but they say it’s worth it in the long run.
“It’s going to be a little bit of an inconvenience for everybody, but having a wide beach is important, not only for safety, but for what we’re selling to our guests,” said Jimmy Capps, who owns the Breakers Resort Hotel on 15th Street.
The beach will remain open during the project except for a 1,000-foot-wide space where sand mixed with seawater will spew from a pipe and bulldozers will spread it around.
Equipment will be mobilized beginning June 10 at 15th Street, and work will continue 24 hours a day, moving one block north each day and ending at 70th Street by Aug. 31. The city is looking at ways to reduce the beeping noise that the equipment makes, according to Drew Lankford, Public Works spokesman.
The $22.6 million project includes the placement of 1.85 million cubic yards of sand. The federal government is ponying up $14.7 million, or 65%, as part of a long-term plan to protect the Commonwealth’s shoreline from storms. Virginia Beach will pay the rest.
The city is partnering with the Army Corps of Engineers Norfolk District, which awarded the contract to Great Lakes Dredge and Dock Company of Oak Brook, Ill.
“Operation Big Beach” began in 2001. The $143 million pump station, seawall, and beach replenishment project was so successful that additional sand wasn’t needed until 2013.
Now, six years later, studies show that it’s time for another nourishment to protect against storm surge from a Category 2 hurricane.
Twice a year, waterway surveyors measure the volume of sand on the beach from the Boardwalk to 500 feet offshore. The position of the shoreline and the impact of storms is also taken into consideration.
“The beach is much more than what you see,” said Dan Adams, coastal engineer and coastal program manager for the public works department .
Gentle wave action naturally deposits sand onto the shore, but much of it is lost in the longshore current as sediment drifts north or south depending on the wind, Adams said.
Sand that will be used to expand the beach will be dredged from the Thimble Shoal and Atlantic Ocean entrance channels in the Chesapeake Bay, as it was in 2013.
Cost and environmental concerns dictated the dredging timeline this year, Adams said.
The sand replenishment industry is busy in the winter season in Florida and the Gulf coast because of sea turtle restrictions on dredging during the summer in those areas.
The process can disrupt turtles’ migration cycles. In southeastern Virginia, turtles migrate through the area between Sept. 1 and Nov. 15.
Beach replenishment in the summer can also be a concern because of its impact on turtle nests on land.
When dredged sand is a different consistency or is too compacted, the nesting behaviors of turtles can be drastically altered, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Also, there’s a possibility that nests will be buried too far underground or be run over by trucks.
In Virginia Beach, nesting takes place nearly every summer south of the resort strip in more secluded areas, including Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge and False Cape State Park.
But turtles rarely lay eggs at the Oceanfront where human activity and lights deter them, according to the Virginia Aquarium.
In late summer of 2017, however, more than 100 eggs hatched from a loggerhead turtle nest at the North End. Loggerheads are a threatened species.
Inspectors will be on the lookout for turtle tracks and nests day and night, Adams said.
Sandbridge beach is also slated for sand replenishment, but it likely will have to wait.
“We got a turtle season that Mother Nature and the Lord can’t change the dynamics of that,” City Manager Dave Hansen said at a public meeting on Tuesday. “In all likelihood, Sandbridge will get the sand after the turtles.”
Stacy Parker, 757-222-5125, stacy.parker@pilotonline.com
Source: pilotonline.com
