Posted on February 20, 2017
By Rob Morris, The Outer Banks Voice
Bulldozers will begin rumbling onto the beach in late May as widening projects in three towns get under way.
Visitors and residents can expect 1,000-foot stretches at a time to be closed through September as dredges pump sand from offshore onto the beaches in Duck, Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills and possibly Southern Shores.
In a community meeting Thursday, contractors said that oceanfront homeowners can expect the beach to be closed from three to five days within the work areas as they move down the beach from Duck.
Daily progress reports will be posted online at morebeachtolove.com. But predicting very far in advance where the work will be at any given time, said Ken Willson of Coastal Planning and Engineering, “is pretty much impossible.”
Schedules are subject to delays from the weather, high seas and equipment repairs.
The meeting in Kill Devil Hills was the last of three this week in which the public was given details on the project and a chance to ask questions.
Combined, the three towns will receive 4.1 millions cubic yards of sand along 8.3 miles of shoreline.
The first dredge is expected to arrive off Duck at the end of May. It will pull sand from a borrow area about 6 miles away and haul it to a pump-out station closer to shore.
An underwater pipe will carry the sand from the pump-out station to the beach, where three to five builders will spread and smooth it out, working 24 hours a day. A tall tripod machine on wheels called a crab will follow the work taking measurements.
Once a section is done, the muddy sand should dry out within a day.
Work was scheduled during the spring and summer when the weather and seas are more predictable. But it is also turtle-nesting season.
Volunteers with the Network for Endangered Sea Turtles will check each 1,000-foot area before work begins and move any nests that are found. They will monitor each area while work is being done.
A second dredge is expected to arrive about a month into the project, said Julian Devisse, a coastal engineer with Coastal Planning who gave a presentation on the timetable how the project will look.
Work in Duck and Kitty Hawk will take about two months each. In Kill Devil Hills, things should wrap up in about six weeks. But work there will be in August and September, about the time the hurricane season starts to gear up.
If a serious storm is forecast, the dredges will head to port in Hampton Roads, said Arman Rhiel, project manager with Great Lakes Dredge and Dock.
Great Lakes also handled Nags Head’s $10 million project in 2011, racing the clock to finish ahead of schedule just before Hurricane Irene arrived at the end of August.
The Nags Head project has held up reasonably well until a series of storms, including Hurricane Matthew, swept away about 30 percent of the sand last summer.
Sand will be added to the dune line, on the berm — or the visible beach — and in the nearshore under water at a total cost of about $38.5 million, some of which will be paid by Dare County. The towns will cover the rest primarily from special tax districts along the oceanfront.
Duck will see additional width of about 200 feet on average, Kitty Hawk, 142, and Kill Devil Hills, 106. Southern Shore has hired Coastal Planning to see if it can be included for work on an additional 1,000 feet just north of the Kitty Hawk line, where the berm will form into a taper.
In a year or so, about 40 percent of the sand is expected to slide into the water to form a shallower slope and blunt wave action during storms, which “is part of the design,” Devisse said.
Source: The Outer Banks Voice
