WBM
The heavy machinery required for beach nourishment appears every
four years in Wrightsville Beach.
november 2021
ON the East Coast, the heavy machinery and trucks
that are required for beach nourishment projects are
a common sight. For outsiders, it can be hard to under-stand
why the value and cost effectiveness of beach
nourishment never seems to be questioned. Those who work in
coastal preservation daily have more insight.
“Beach nourishment and temporary sandbags are simply the only
options in the toolbox that can be permitted right now,” says Randy
Boyd, principle of Scenic Consulting Group, an environmental and
coastal engineering service. “There needs to be a platform for testing
innovative, potentially transformative new technologies.”
Innovative technologies are something the company is familiar
with, as it was a finalist in the 2020 North Carolina Tech awards
in the Industry Driven-Clean Tech category. It was also recently
included in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers “Engineering with
Nature” atlas. The company has a variety of successful projects
under its belt, including a project to protect the shoreline at
Brunswick Town/Fort Anderson.
The historic site and its Colonial-era wharves were at risk from
constant tidal forces and dynamic wave action. Important histor-ical
artifacts were being washed into the Cape Fear River, and the
erosion was destroying valuable coastal resources. Scenic Consulting
Group installed 220 feet of Reefmaker, a living shoreline wave
attenuation system, along the area with the highest erosion.
The second phase installed an additional 240 feet — just before
Hurricane Florence hit the North Carolina coast in 2018.
The Reefmaker is designed to mitigate coastal erosion. The
system utilizes flow-through technology to dissipate wave energy
by reflecting it back into open water from the front face of the
structure, ensuring wave collisions occur along the sides of the
octagonal structure, and by dissipating water energy.
The system stabilizes the shoreline and marsh while enhancing
the fish and shellfish habitat on and around the structure for marine
fauna, sessile and non-sessile organisms.
“This system has not only proven to protect our delicate coastal
ecosystems, but it is helping those ecosystems to thrive, where some
were nearly destroyed,” Boyd says. “It’s been encouraging to see
everything from river otters, fish and seabirds, to oysters, crabs and
shoreline marsh grass thrive in this new, engineered habitat. And it’s
important to note we didn’t reintroduce a species or plant anything,
we simply created the conditions that are conducive to growth.”
Beach nourishment projects appear to be an essential strategy for
shoring up the economy and ensuring tourism dollars continue to
flow. But beach nourishment — dredging sand from other areas and
funneling it onto the beach — is not optimal for marine life.
Inefficient from an economic standpoint, renourishment must
be done every few years to remain effective. Repairs post hurri-canes
Florence and 2016’s Matthew to Carolina and Kure beaches
combined with the scheduled nourishment received total funding
of more than $17 million. Though officials touted it as a highly
successful means of protecting the shoreline, particularly from the
destructive impact of hurricanes, others claim that artificial reefs
would be at least as effective while offering a considerable savings.
“A ‘living’ artificial reef deployment is very economic given the
consistent rise in global sea surface elevation,” says Stephen Rodan,
president of the Beyond Coral Foundation and inventor of CHARM,
an automated robot designed to help restore coral reefs. “Some reefs
are able to grow in volume, which provides a positive economic return
for investment. In certain cases, a living reef might rise in effective
height at the same rate as (or greater than) the mean rise in global sea
surface height (3.4 + 0.6 mm/year), which is very promising.”
WBM FILE PHOTO
COURTESY OF ATLANTIC REEFMAKER
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