Federal Beach Building Returns to OC This Year

OCEAN CITY – A multimillion-dollar federal beach replenishment project is set to rebuild beaches in Ocean City this winter, and help rebuild dunes along the Boardwalk that have been flattened by storms.
Work is set to begin by the end of the month, with a planned completion in January.
The $11.5 million project, paid for primarily with federal and state dollars, is expected to build beaches from Seaspray Road to 12th Street, according to an announcement posted by Mayor Jay Gillian to the city’s website recently. He suggested at least one additional block could be added to the beach building project, depending on the findings of pre-construction surveys now underway.
At 5th Street, nothing but beach stands between the ocean and the boardwalk’s pilings, while there are wide dunes along almost all the rest of the island. There are no shops on that block, where instead there is a sandy lot where people play volleyball in the summer. Beyond that is a city parking lot and the athletic fields of Ocean City High School. The block is in the shadow of the Ferris wheel at Gillian’s Wonderland, an amusement pier founded by the mayor’s grandfather.
Plans call for those dunes to be rebuilt, along with eroded dunes at 10th Street, as part of the latest round of federal beach building in the city.
“It’s really perfect timing,” said Doug Bergen, Ocean City’s public information officer. “None of the September storms were particularly devastating, but that dune at 5th Street is gone, and all of the beaches are pretty thin.”
At 10th Street, the dune remains, but erosion has led to steep cliffs on the dune, he said.
This will be the eighth time the Army Corps of Engineers has returned to refill Ocean City’s beaches since the first beach project in 1992. In two phases 25 years ago, that project added a massive amount of dredged sand to the city’s beaches, from the inlet to 34th Street.
As with New Jersey’s first such beach project, which rebuilt Cape May’s beaches a couple of years earlier, the initial Army Corps project came with a promise to keep replenishing Ocean City’s beaches in the face of continued erosion for at least 50 years.
According to Ocean City, Army Corps officials, representatives of the contractor, Great Lakes Dredging, and city and state officials met on Sept. 27 to go over the plans, which call for 930,000 cubic yards of sand to be added to the beach, and more sand to be stockpiled to rebuild the dunes. According to the city, the cutter dredge Texas will pull sand from about a mile off the Great Egg Harbor Inlet, and pump it through a pipe that will land at Morningside Road. The beach building will work north of that spot and then head south along the boardwalk.
The work is expected to last about 50 days.
“A work area of approximately 1,000 feet will be closed to beachgoers and move down the beach as the work progresses,” reads a statement from the city. That’s typical for these kinds of projects.
Under the current cost-sharing arrangement, 65 percent of the tab gets picked up by the federal government, with the remaining 35 falling to the state. Ocean City is responsible for a quarter of that cost, meaning the city’s share is 8.75 percent of the total cost.
Only about half the island was included in the initial federal beach project, but since then, the south end of Ocean City, running from 34th Street to where Corson’s Inlet State Park begins at 59th Street, has had its own beach building work. That included a big project to rebuild beaches hit by Hurricane Sandy, which was entirely funded at the federal level.
“The south end also remains on schedule for replenishment sometime in late 2018 or early 2019,” reads a statement from the city.
“These projects are absolutely vital to the protection of property in Ocean City,” Gillian wrote in comments on the beach building plans.
Since the early 1990s, Army Corps projects have added millions of cubic yards of sand to Ocean City’s beaches, at a total cost of more than $125 million, according to data posted on the Army Corps website. In all, New Jersey beaches have seen more than a billion dollars’ worth of sand added to beaches throughout the state, with federal beach projects planned or undertaken the length of Cape May County.
Ocean City is set for a number of sizable projects this winter, including the final phase of the reconstruction of its boardwalk. That $2.9 million project is set to start Oct. 16, delayed for a week after requests from boardwalk merchants in the project area from 10th to 12th streets who will have to close down while the work goes forward.
Also starting this month, a county project repairing the deck of the 34th Street Bridge will mean another winter of alternating single-lane traffic on the city’s second busiest entranceway. Last winter, the county redocked the east side of the bridge and replaced the steel reinforcements in the bridge deck. This project will address the other side of the bridge, work that County Engineer Dale Foster has said is needed to keep the bridge safe and open to traffic.
To contact Bill Barlow, email bbarlow@cmcherald.com.