N.J. Shore towns set to begin major beach replenishment projects

AVALON, N.J. -- A massive beach-replenishment project, costing at least $9.8 million, for this Cape May County beach town and neighboring Stone Harbor is expected to get underway early next month, officials said Thursday.

An even-larger beach-replenishment project in Ocean County  -- with an initial price tag of $92 million -- that has been years in the making will begin sometime this spring and will stretch south from Mantoloking through Brick and Toms River, including Ortley Beach, Seaside Heights, and down to Seaside Park.  The details of that project are still being worked out.

Avalon is calling its project one of the largest ever conducted here, and it will mitigate damage caused last year by a  winter storm and a nor'easter in October 2015.

Throughout Cape May County, residents and businesses insisted that the winter storm impacted their properties even more than Hurricane Sandy had in October 2012.

Shore points south of Brigantine, Atlantic County, where Sandy made landfall along the Jersey Shore, did experience far less impact than locales farther up the coastline in Ocean and Monmouth Counties, which had been on the north side of the monster hurricane's massive counterclockwise flow.  That position meant towns were devastated by the ferocious winds, high waves, and massive flooding during the superstorm. Nearly 100 homes in Mantoloking alone were washed out to sea, and hundreds of thousands of residents of other Shore towns were displaced when Sandy struck.

"I think after the Shore experienced Sandy, every time that we hear that a storm is going to hit us, we instinctively prepare for the worst," said Diane F. Wieland, a spokeswoman for Cape May County's Office of Emergency Management.

"And since the beaches are our lifeblood here, a lot of focus has to be placed on them," said Wieland, who is also director of the county's Department of Tourism.  Tourism is a $43-billion-a-year industry in New Jersey, and generates as much as $6 billion a year in Cape May County alone.

And while another nor'easter that struck Monday -- a year to the date after the winter storm -- didn't cause nearly as much damage in Atlantic and Cape May Counties as the earlier one had, some contend that it helps emphasize that such beach replenishment is a necessity along the coastline.

"Storms like the nor'easter that visited the Jersey Shore earlier this week prove that the beaches always take the first hit from a storm event," said Avalon Mayor Martin Pagliughi, who also serves as Cape May County's emergency management coordinator.

"When incorporated into a successful dune system, beaches provide the necessary protection of lives and property."

County officials have spent the rest of this week assessing the damage caused by Monday's storm, but have said the damage -- including beach erosion -- had been only minor to moderate and occurred in pockets from Ocean City down to Cape May.

Avalon officials spent most of Thursday in a "progress meeting" on the management of the upcoming beach fill with representatives from contractor Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Co. of Illinois and the Army Corps of Engineers, which has designed the project.

Great Lakes will use a hydraulic dredge called Texas to begin the project in Stone Harbor, where it will take about 20 days to pull  at least 210,000 cubic yards of sand from an offshore site. While the project is being paid for with federal and state funding, Stone Harbor has elected to pay for an additional 180,000 cubic yards of sand if necessary.  The project will begin at 117th Street and pump north and south from that point, directing sand as needed onto particular beaches that had been denuded in the storms.

When Stone Harbor's portion of the project is finished, the dredge will move up the coast to Avalon, where at least 940,000 cubic yards of sand -- and perhaps as much as one million cubic yards -- will be pumped along the town's north end beaches from Ninth Street south to 38th Street.

In addition, beaches from 76th Street south to 80th Street -- which includes the town's hotel zone -- will also be replenished.  That should all take a little less than six weeks to complete, officials said.

The project was supposed to have gotten started this week, but rough seas created by the recent storm delayed the arrival of the dredge from the Philadelphia area.

And the entire project had been threatened by a "peculiar issue," according to Scott Wahl, a spokesman for the Borough of Avalon.

Wahl said no one had anticipated that at the last minute, new rules would be imposed regarding precisely where sand could be dredged from.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service exercised a new Coastal Barrier Resources Act provision that prevents any federal funding from being used to pull sand out of Hereford Inlet, which is Stone Harbor's borrow area.  Avalon will remove its sand from Townsend's Inlet.

Wahl said that even though the act has "clear exceptions in it" that would have allowed Stone Harbor to pull the sand from Hereford Inlet -- which had been done in prior beach fills -- the federal agency decided to exercise the regulation forbidding the sand to be taken from the federally protected spot.

"Avalon took the lead and filed action in court, where it remains, and will continue long-term legal and legislative remedies to make sure this act cannot be arbitrarily applied again," Wahl said.

Wahl said the two towns and federal and state agencies worked out an arrangement under which only state and Stone Harbor funds will  be used to harvest sand from Hereford Inlet, while federal funds will be used to take the sand for Avalon from Townsend's Inlet, where the act does not apply.

"It was an unnecessary, arbitrary hurdle that diverted from past practice and took a tremendous effort for all four parties to figure out," Wahl said in an email. "Joint beach-fill projects benefit everyone financially as the mobilization costs are typically much lower, which results in more sand on the beach."

Federal authorities did not return calls for comment on the matter.

Stone Harbor and Avalon last week announced that they would increase the cost of beach tags by $1 this summer. Seasonal tags will cost $28, weekly $12, and daily $6 for the 2017 season and can be used on beaches in both towns. Officials in both towns said the fee increase was to pay for the cost of maintaining the beaches during the summer season and was not related to the beach-replenishment project.