By DONALD WITTKOWSKI
The walk from the parking lot at Townsends Inlet Waterfront Park to the beach is like trudging through the deep sands of the Sahara Desert.
The sandy pathway to the beach was one of the areas that were radically altered earlier this month by the powerful waters of Townsends Inlet, the channel that separates Sea Isle City and Avalon.
Part of the beach on the Sea Isle side of the Townsends Inlet Bridge was stripped of the top layer of powdery sand, leaving thousands of clam shells in its place. The remnants of the beach, in turn, have formed a gigantic sandbar that extends far into Townsends Inlet.
Meanwhile, the beach pathway leading from the parking lot now has undulating mounds of sand that are difficult to walk on. But Sea Isle’s Public Works crews are scheduled to be at Townsends Inlet Waterfront Park on Wednesday morning to level out the pathway to make it safer for beachgoers, city spokeswoman Katherine Custer said.
There is another pathway leading from the park to the beach nearby that the Public Works crews will take a look at, but it is not immediately clear whether they can fix it, Custer said. At that pathway, the beach sand has been washed away, leaving a steep drop-off.
“They’re going to see what they can do. It may be that way for a while,” Custer said of the drop-off.
A bigger issue is whether anything can be done to restore the now bare beach at the foot of the bridge and to remove the massive sandbar that juts well into the inlet.
Custer indicated that Sea Isle may simply have to wait until the beach is returned to its former condition by Mother Nature.
“This is a natural environment. There are ever-changing environmental conditions,” she said.
Although the sandbar extends into the inlet, it does not block boat traffic heading through the channel under the Townsends Inlet Bridge.
“Our bridge channel is navigable,” said Lewis Donofrio, chief engineer for the Cape May County Bridge Commission, the agency that operates the bridge.
Donofrio speculated that the deep and swift waters of Townsends Inlet created the sandbar and reshaped the beach next to the bridge – much like a whirlpool effect.
“Through winter and summer, there are dramatic changes to Sea Isle’s beach line,” he said last week, when the sandbar was first discovered.
This is not the first time that the beach on the Sea Isle side has been radically altered by Townsends Inlet. Last summer, a large section of the beach south of 94th Street collapsed like a mini avalanche and was gobbled up by the water.
The phenomenon was captured on video that went viral after it was posted on social media. Similar to Sea Isle’s newly formed sandbar, the collapsed beach last summer was blamed on the inlet’s rapidly flowing waters.
Last summer, Sea Isle’s beaches were widened and replenished with more than 750,000 cubic yards of new sand between 28th and 52nd streets in the midsection of town and from 74th to 93rd streets in Townsends Inlet at the southern tip of the island.
It is not clear whether the beach replenishment project may have had any role in the creation of the new sandbar. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a federal agency, supervised Sea Isle’s beach replenishment in partnership with the town.
