By DONALD WITTKOWSKI
Coastal storms over the winter and spring washed away much of the beach and dunes in a four-block area in the southern tip of Sea Isle City, leaving some multimillion-dollar oceanfront homes with little protection from the surging waves.
But as the summer tourism season approached, Sea Isle was able to restore the bare beach through a process known as “sand harvesting.” Simply speaking, huge amounts of sand were taken from healthy areas of the beaches and used to replenish the depleted dunes and shoreline.
Now, the formerly storm-damaged beach between 88th Street and 92nd Street in the Townsends Inlet section has been restored with deep, powdery sand. Dunes that had been washed away by the stormy ocean, creating steep cliff-like drop-offs in the process, have been fortified with new sand, too.
“It was shocking. It really was,” beachgoer Chuck Marvil recalled of the badly eroded beaches and dunes before they were restored.
Marvil and his wife, Mary, admired a replenished section of the 89th Street beach while lounging near the water’s edge on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. The married couple, from Lansdale, Pa., have owned a summer home on 89th Street for 25 years.
Mary Marvil noted that some of the dunes were so badly eroded last summer that some of the pathways to the beach were closed off. They had to detour around the barriers.
“We had to come down a few streets to get to the beach. That was a cliff,” Mary said, pointing to where the damaged dunes at 89th Street had drop-offs about 10 to 20 feet high.
Looking at the restored beach now, the Marvils praised the city for rebuilding the dunes and shoreline.
“It’s great,” Mary said. “It was so small when we first came here, but it got wider and wider. This is back to normal.”
Sea Isle lifeguard Abby Ryan, who was protecting swimmers near 90th Street on Saturday along with fellow lifeguard Dennis Glancey, said beachgoers have been telling her how happy they are to have the sand back.
“People down here have said that the beaches are looking better. For a while, we were worried that we wouldn’t have a beach down here,” Ryan said.
Hoping to rebuild the beach and dunes before other storms caused further damage, the city began sand harvesting operations in February.
The process involves taking sand from the water’s edge during low tide to shore up the damaged dunes. In turn, the sand that is scraped away near the ocean is then naturally restored by the waves during the incoming tides, so nothing is really lost, city officials explained.
But another bout of storms in March washed away much of the new sand that was placed against the dunes in February. Sea Isle then brought in a contractor, Walters Marine of Ocean View, to replenish the beach and dunes on an emergency basis in early May.
With assembly-line efficiency, Walters Marine used a bulldozer to push sand from the water’s edge next to a massive excavator. The excavator, in turn, scooped up the sand and loaded it into the back of two dump trucks.
The trucks transported the piles of sand up the beach and unloaded it in front of the eroded dunes between 88th and 92nd streets. The mountains of sand were then smoothed out to create a new beach and dune barrier.
“They did a great job. Hopefully, it will last all summer. So far, so good,” beachgoer Sue Curran, a vacationer from Doylestown, Pa., said as she walked out on the 90th Street beach on Saturday.
Before the beach restoration work was done, some of the oceanfront homes in Townsends Inlet had only a sliver of dunes to protect them from the ocean. In one dramatic case, an oceanfront house at the end of 90th Street was left only a few feet from where the damaged dunes dropped off like cliffs.
Dale Lintner kept an eye on the dune erosion while he considered buying the house at the end of 90th Street when it was on the market over the winter for $4.5 million. He purchased it for $4.25 million in March.
Before buying it, Lintner made sure the home’s foundation piles were high enough to protect it from flooding. He also consulted with his real estate agent about the sand harvesting that was being done to strengthen the dunes in front of the house. Now, his house has an all-new protective barrier of sand in front of it.
“They did a great job,” Lintner said in an interview Saturday while looking at the restored beach and dunes. “Compared to what it was, this is unbelievable. This is much safer.”
Lintner, a resident of Abington, Pa., initially became aware of just how close the house once was to the edge of the damaged dunes by looking at a photo of the home published in SeaIsleNews.com. Later, after he bought the house, he kept a camera at his home trained on the sand harvesting work to watch the project unfold.
The restored beach has created what Lintner calls “the perfect location” for having an oceanfront vacation home.
“Now I have my dream house,” he said.
In the fall, even more sand will be coming to Sea Isle to replenish the beaches and dunes. Sea Isle will be part of an estimated $30 million federal project to restore the shoreline with new sand. Strathmere and the southern part of Ocean City will also have their beaches replenished in the same project.
The contract for that project is expected to be awarded in August by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but it is not yet known how much sand will be added and which beaches will be restored. The project is tentatively scheduled to get underway after Labor Day.
The beach replenishment project supervised by the Army Corps will be far more extensive than the sand harvesting operations that Sea Isle’s contractor did on an emergency basis in Townsends Inlet.
