Posted on September 25, 2024
WRIGHTSVILLE BEACH — Wrightsville Beach faced some significant erosion in the wake of Monday’s tropical cyclone, but the United States Army Corps of Engineers said the recent renourished areas were not greatly affected.
After a preliminary inspection following this week’sstorm, USACE Wilmington District spokesperson Jed Cayton told Port City Daily “the project itself appears to be healthy and functioning.”
The project put 1 million cubic yards of sand on the beach from the south of the Blockade Runner on Seashore Street to the north of the Holiday Inn Resort Lumina at beach access number 8. It cost USACE $13.6 million to do so.
“The projects are designed to absorb typical storm impacts and some erosion after a storm is expected,” Cayton said.
It’s unclear how much sand was lost, as teams begin to assess damage.
Monday’s unnamed storm seemed to take the Cape Fear by surprise as it offloaded upward of 20 inches of rain. Carolina and Kure beaches in New Hanover County, along with Southport and Oak Island in Brunswick County, were quickly inundated by rising waters, resulting in submerged cars, impassable roads and the death of an 80-year-old man.
Flooding-wise, Wrightsville Beach was spared the worst, but the hard-won effort to place more sand on its fading shoreline this past winter seemed to wash away with the tide. Residents and visitors took to social media to show the damage, one photo of a sand shelf getting over 3,000 shares on Facebook.
“We’ve been hit very hard,” Wrightsville Beach’s Mayor Darryl Mills said Wednesday, though he acknowledged the town was faring better than Carolina and Kure beaches that were “hit much harder.”
USACE concluded the majority of the damage from the storm was located north of where they placed sand.
Cayton said USACE is working with the town to evaluate the overall performance of the latest beach renourishment. This includes identifying volume lost and areas that may no longer function as designed.
“It’s kind of disheartening after all we went through to get our beach sand last spring,” Mills said.
Wrightsville Beach’s path to its last beach renourishment was not an easy one, as reinterpretation of the Coastal Barrier Resources Act prevented the town from using its historical sand borrow site.
The federal government barred the United States Army Corps of Engineers Wilmington District from using its funds for Wrightsville, Carolina and Kure beaches’ renourishments pulling from nearby inlets after an environmental rule change. Wrightsville Beach’s projects have historically been 100% federally funded.
While the other two found replacement sites, Wrightsville Beach struggled to locate a viable sand source, ultimately choosing an offshore sand bar riddled with old tires tied together to form an artificial reef in the 1970s. USACE made clear it did not prefer this option and its environmental assessment revealed a host of issues with the plan.
Though that seemed to be the only option until May 2023. Assisted with the entreaties of Mayor Willis and Rep. David Rouzer before Congress, USACE secured emergency authorization to use Masonboro Inlet from the feds.
It finally was able to put sand on the beach this past winter, six years after its last cycle.
Mills told Port City Daily the town was now exploring all options and for replenishing the beach.
Cayton said although the typical nourishment cycle for Wrightsville Beach is four years, it is possible to request funding and nourish on a more frequent basis if necessary. However, based on USACE’s preliminary inspection, he said emergency action is “not necessary at this time.”
When emergency authorization was cleared for use last year, the town reported most of the beach’s berm was gone. It limited space available for beachgoers, who were creeping up closer to the dunes. Emergency vehicles were also having a hard time traveling across the soft sand and the town moved its trash cans off the beach to prevent trash trucks from having to travel on the sand.
Though an emergency exception was granted once, the federal government still prevents funds from being used to pull sand from Masonboro Inlet, the long-time solution to Wrightsville Beach’s erosion.
The town has been borrowing sand to replenish its beach for half a century, but that process hit a snag in 2021. Wrightsville Beach, along with its coastal neighbors, were allowed to pull from nearby Masonboro, Mason and Carolina Beach inlets, despite them being protected areas by the Coastal Barrier Resources Act. This federal designation, established in 1982, mandates federal funds cannot be used for development in some coastal areas, which included moving sand from outside a CBRA zone, as was the case with local beach’s renourishment projects.
However, the beaches were grandfathered in and exempt from the CBRA limitation — until the Biden administration reinterpreted the rule and said they were not.
The United States Corps of Engineers Wilmington District, having coordinated all three beach town’s renourishments, scrambled to find an alternative borrow site with the shorelines scheduled for renourishment in 2022. Kure and Carolina beaches were successful, locating offshore sand sources, but Wrightsville Beach was not and missed its 2022 cycle.
In July 2022, USACE chose two offshore sand bars to dredge sand and pump it to shore. The only issue was 300,000 tires located there from the North Carolina Department of Marine Fisheries attempts to start a tire reef program to attract fish in the 1970s.
USACE reported its team would be able to navigate around the decaying tires, though an environmental assessment done by the federal agency revealed it would cost more, take longer and potentially have more environmental impact.
Without a federal rule change or emergency authorization, Wrightsville Beach will most likely have to return to the tire reef upon its next renourishment, whenever that may be.
PCD reached out to Rep. Rouzer for his thoughts on Wrightsville Beach’s erosion, but no response was given by press.
