By DONALD WITTKOWSKI
Jim Belcher remembers when the beaches in Townsends Inlet were little more than a thin sliver of sand, perhaps no more than 20 yards wide.
Belcher wasn’t reminiscing about narrow beaches of years, months or even weeks ago. Several days ago would be more like it.
“Now look at them,” he said, glancing out at a new expanse of sandy beaches that were easily hundreds of feet wide.
After seven weeks of work, a major replenishment project for Sea Isle City’s storm-eroded beaches wrapped up this weekend with the last loads of new sand being spread along the shoreline by an army of earthmovers and bulldozers in the Townsends Inlet section.
“I want to thank everyone for their patience and understanding as we accomplished this vital project that provides us with critical shore protection and wide stretches of sand for all of our beachgoers,” Mayor Leonard Desiderio said in a statement.
Altogether, more than 750,000 cubic yards of new sand has widened the beaches between 28th and 52nd streets in the midsection of town and from 74th to 93rd streets in Townsends Inlet at the southern tip of Sea Isle. The sand was dredged offshore and pumped onto the beaches through a network of massive pipes.
Belcher, who lives in Philadelphia and has a summer vacation home in Sea Isle, was joined by his wife, Trish, sons Jim Jr., and Brendan, and Brendan’s finance, Erin Detweiler, on Saturday while lounging on the much wider beach at 90th Street.
“It’s a perfect time to have it now. Everybody is social distancing,” Belcher noted of the coronavirus pandemic. “Before, it was 20 yards wide. It was tough to social distance then.”
For the five Ricciardi brothers and their sons, the beaches were wide enough to have a spirited game of soccer without intruding on the space of any other sunbathers. They are vacationing in Sea Isle from their homes in the Philadelphia area.
On Saturday, they set up two goals and drew lines in the thick, powdery top layer of sand for their makeshift soccer field on the 90th Street beach.
“This is a million times better,” one brother, Anthony Ricciardi, said of the replenished beaches during a break in the game. “It brings sports back to the beaches. It adds a whole new dimension.”
A block away on 91st Street, Ashleigh Hulmes and her 9-year-old son, Caleb, joked about the long walk they now have to do back and forth on the wider beaches.
“The downside is that you have to push your beach stuff farther. But it’s really, really nice,” said Hulmes, a vacationer from Kutztown, Pa.
Hulmes, like Belcher, pointed out that the wider beaches have created more space for social distancing during the pandemic.
Caleb said he likes the bigger beaches for another reason: “I get to play Whiffle ball with my brother,” he said of his 12-year-old brother, Shane.
Sea Isle is part of a $32.5 million beach replenishment project, supervised by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, that also includes Strathmere and Ocean City. There are options in the contract for even more sand if needed, which could increase the cost of the project to $41.3 million.
The project will be funded mostly by the Army Corps of Engineers and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. The three towns will each kick in a smaller share. Sea Isle’s contribution is expected to be less than $2 million.
In addition to widening the beaches, the project also includes repairing the dunes, beach access points and sand fencing that were damaged by storms. For the final stages of work in Townsends Inlet, work crews are adding new fencing and improving access to the beach for senior citizens and people with disabilities.
Most dramatically, the sand dunes in Townsends Inlet have been repaired and now have a smooth, contoured appearance. Before, the dunes had been sliced away by coastal storms, leaving cliff-like walls overlooking the beaches in some areas.
Beachgoers Mark and Becky Rubnitz, who live in Marlton, N.J., and have a summer home in Sea Isle, marveled over the new dunes in Townsends Inlet.
“They were cliffs, actually,” Mark Rubnitz said of the once-damaged dunes. “They’ve done an amazing job in fixing them.”
Becky Rubnitz was equally amazed about the wider beaches. She could hardly believe it while peering out at the huge swath of sand that now stretches from 90th Street to the ocean.
“It’s not really easy to push the ocean back,” she said.
