03-26-08: Emerald Isle seeks sandbag extension

(c) The Tideland News

By Shannon Kemp, special to the Tideland News

Emerald Isle is working on a couple of projects aimed at protecting town property.

The first project, completed last week, pushed sand from lower parts of the beach near the Channel Drive walkway up toward the dunes, bolstering the area and adding additional protection to the oceanfront homes.

The second is an effort to get a variance from the state to continue to use sandbags in front of homes near The Point’s vehicle access to protect them from the eroding shoreline.

As for the dune project, bulldozers pushed the sand up to the dunes in an area that, according to Town Manager Frank Rush, is currently recovering from past erosion and is seeing significant sand accretion.

“We had erosion back last summer but that area continues to improve,” Rush said.

The permit for the two-day project was received last fall and L.B. Page, a Cape Carteret site development and grading contractor, finished the project March 18.

“We are only allowed to do (the bulldozing) between Nov. 15 and March 31 because of turtle nesting season,” said Rush. “We were waiting for accretion to continue to build up. We waited as long as possible in order to have more sand to push up.

“There’s nothing urgent … only the permit wouldn’t allow us to do it after March 31.”

Greg “Rudi” Rudolph, Carteret County Shore Protection manager, said the project bolstered the dunes in the area.

The front part of the dunes were “sort of weak so the town bulldozed sand from the lower part of the beach up to the dunes making a new dune.

“It’s like going to the beach at low tide and pushing sand up to create a better dune.  This is different than trucking in sand. This is using sand already existing on the beach,” Rudolph said.

Rush called the project a precautionary measure. Sand dunes are one of the beaches’ defenses against storms.

For the other project, the town is looking to receive a variance from the N.C. Coastal Resource Commission for a sandbag extension. The panel will hear the Emerald Isle Friday at its meeting in Kill Devil Hills.

The sandbags were put in place in the area in the late 1990s or early 2000s, according to Rush. Because sandbags that are used to protect homes have a two-year life span the town received a sandbag extension around 2005.

Then in 2005 when a project to relocate the Bogue Inlet Channel 3,500 feet to the west was completed, those sandbags were covered with sand and had vegetation growing on them – one of the pluses of the project.

There was no need to remove the sandbags at that point, Rush said.

However, recent erosion has uncovered some of the sandbags and technically when sandbags are uncovered they need to be removed.

“We are asking for a variance because we still think that area is going to improve,” Rush said.

He said the town has seen great success with the nourishment of 4.5 miles of beach, but there has been some setbacks. Still, the engineers expected a four- to six-year period for all the adjustments in the channel project to stabilize.

“We are only at year three right now,” Rush said. “We are asking for the extension to allow for that full four- to six-year period to take place.”

The request is going before the CRC Friday as well.

“We would hate to see those sandbags taken out and lose homes when we think it’s going to get better,” Rush said.

Even the N.C. Coastal Federation doesn’t want to see those homes fall into the ocean, but Frank Tursi, Coastal Federation Coastkeeper, offers a different point of view on the sandbags.

“It’s pretty clear what’s going on out there,” Tursi said. “There are now probably more houses threatened than there were before they started engineering the inlet.”

Normally sandbags have a time limit and they need to come out once the time is up, according to Tursi.

“They are put in for emergency purposes and they need to be removed when the emergency is done,” he said. “But it’s clear that those houses are still threatened.

“We certainly wouldn’t demand that those sandbags be removed because there would be several houses that would be in the water at high tide. We certainly wouldn’t want to put people’s property in immediate risk … I would think that we (the Coastal Federation) aren’t such a mean-spirited organization that we would want to see peoples houses fall into the ocean.

“It just goes to show that you cannot clearly predict what will happen when you start moving inlets and channels.”

Tursi said he doesn’t think the Coastal Federation has a serious problem with the town receiving a variance for the sandbag extension, “but we don’t want to see it become an open-ended thing.”

If the town does not get an extension on the sandbags, Rush said the town is contemplating other ways to put sand at the area near the Point’s vehicle access and the four adjacent homes.

The area is seeing some natural accretion and movement of sand down the east side of the Point, according to Rush. He hopes that will continue.

If the area does not fix itself naturally, the town is working on permit modifications to the Bogue Inlet Channel relocation project in order to dredge some sand out of the new channel and place it on the area in need.

The town may also work with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to get sand dredged from its Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway dredging project.

If that isn’t enough, the town may try to place sand dredged from the access channel to Hammocks Beach State Park at the Point.

But due to the permitting process, dredging before next winter is unlikely.

Despite all this, Rush said the problems the now faces in the area are much easier to deal with than prior to the 2005 channel relocation project.

“The whole inlet channel was banging up against the side of Emerald Isle,” he said. “That area used to be 25 feet deep. Now, since the main channel was moved 3,500 feet to the west, we don’t have that pressure there any more.”

He said the area is now between 1- to 5-feet deep depending on where you’re located.

“Five feet is a lot easer to solve than 25,” Rush said. “I still think it will work itself out in the end.”