Project Begins to Remove Sand from Cape May Beaches

CAPE MAY — A dredging, beach renourishment project underway here will attempt to remove excess sand from a section of the city’s beaches and flatten out a beach slope that has caused head and neck injuries for swimmers and body surfers.
In the future, Cape May could have the ability to remove cliffs of sand on the beach with its own personnel.
Dwight Pakon, project manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, explained at a Mon., Nov. 14 City Council meeting that sand from an offshore dredge would be placed on the Coast Guard base. Sand will migrate from that feeder beach to Cape May’s beaches, he said.
The piling of sand from an offshore dredge onto the Coast Guard beach will take 30 days.
The second part of the project is eight to 10 weeks of back passing with heavy equipment on Cape May’s beaches.
Sand will be taken off beaches from Trenton to Gurney Avenue using excavators, bulldozers and large dump trucks and placed on the Wilmington Avenue/Poverty Beach.
Sand has been building up on Cape May’s beaches.
“You have so much collected sand above and beyond your limited area of protection,” said Pakon.
He said 2.8 million cubic yards of sand has been placed in Cape May since 1991. The last beach replenishment was in February 2009 which was under funded resulting in a trucked-in beach fill at the Coast Guard base totaling 234,000 cubic yard of sand, said Pakon.
“The project needed way more than that but that was all we could afford at the time,” he said.
In the current project, the Coast Guard base will receive 620,000 cubic yards of sand.
The Army Corps will move 70,000 cubic yards of sand from mid Cape May and place it at Wilmington Avenue/Poverty Beach, said Pakon.
Chris Constantino, DEP senior environmentalist, said the Coast Guard beach has done its job sending sand to Cape May City beaches.
“It’s way above the design parameters in certain sections,” he said.
In some sections, the beach is almost two to three feet higher than the original design, said Constantino.
Removing the sand has a second benefit, he said, “to help adjust to the steeper slopes that we have been experiencing after beach fills especially in areas that are accumulating a lot of sand and receiving a lot of sand naturally through sand migration…”
He said the beaches get steeper based on grain size of the sand and how the material accumulates.
The back passing is a demonstration project, an experiment to see how the process works, said Constantino. He said the slope would be made flatter with less of a shore break.
Dump trucks will transport sand down the beach rather than use Beach Avenue.
The berm that will be created at Wilmington Avenue will be 100 feet wide at an elevation of 6.75 feet using 70,000 cubic yards of sand. Constantino said in good weather, the crew should be able to move 2,000 cubic yards per day.
Crews will work Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sections of beach will be closed during the project due to heavy machinery operating in the area.
William Dixon, supervisor with the state Department of Environmental Protection Bureau of Coastal Engineering, said the Army Corps will monitor how the beach reacts over time, to see if the project was positive and was worthwhile to be continued in the future on a larger scale.
He said he was confident the project would not reduce protection from the ocean for the city.
During public comment, resident Paul Johnston asked if the back passing would address cliffs forming on the beach. Dixon said that was part of the project.
“Would it be helpful if the city, during the summer bathing season, if city equipment, the beach rake, the beach cleaner could periodically at low tide run over the cliff and flatten it out?” asked Johnston.
Dixon said DEP does allow municipalities through a beach and dune maintenance permit to do periodic maintenance of the beach including “knocking down those scarps when they do occur.” He said DEP encouraged municipalities to do maintenance of the project in between beach renourishments.
Mayor Edward J. Mahaney Jr. said it did not eliminate the need for the city to contact DEP to secure approval for a cliff area on the beach.
Dixon said the city had a beach and dune maintenance plan but there were two, small sections of Cape May’s beach the city cannot rake or maintain during the Piping Plover nesting season, March 15 through the end of August.
Mahaney said the city did not have approval to work on the beach with heavy equipment and rearrange a beach without consulting with the Army Corps and DEP.
City Solicitor Tony Monzo said the beach maintenance permit was limited to raking, cleaning and minor maintenance. He said he would reexamine the permit.