Bulldozers were in place in Bethany Beach mid-week, preparing for work to commence in the rebuilding of the dune devastated in May 12’s nor’easter to a level that will sustain the town’s beachgoers as the vacation season arrives.
Tony Pratt, program administrator for the Shoreline and Waterways Division of the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC), said the first of two bulldozers had arrived on Wednesday morning and was just awaiting its operator’s arrival that afternoon to begin the dune reconstruction work.
“Tomorrow morning, we’ll have two ’dozers working on restoring the dune. They’ll be pushing sand back from the beach onto the dune,” he said.
That sand will come off the existing beach in front of the dune, which also lost a substantial amount of sand to the late-spring nor’easter.
“We’ll take as much sand as we can safely, without injuring the beach,” Pratt noted. “We don’t want to take so much that there won’t be any beach left for recreation.”
Pratt said some 12 to 18 inches of new sand had already been deposited from natural accumulation processes that began after the storm. That will be what the bulldozers will be scraping away to help rebuild the front foot of the eroded dune. But beachgoers should never fear — Pratt said he expects that amount of sand to come back onto the beach with the next spring tide.
“It will be a little low for a while,” he said. “But the tide will bring it in. We need as much sand as we can gain.”
At the top of DNREC’s priority list is repairing the erosion at the front of the dune that has left a sharp drop-off from the top of its 16-foot height. In some locations, a cliff ranging from 6 to 12 feet in height had closed the beach to use, with fears that a collapse might trap beachgoers and result in injuries or worse.
“It’s mostly to get that sharp cliff that has developed on the top of the dune,” Pratt said of the initial stages of planned restoration work set to begin this week. “Some of the sand has fallen in,” he noted, “and it’s allowed the bottom to grow where it has fallen in.”
Additionally, Pratt said there were concerns about the health of the recently planted dune grass, which has been more exposed to potential negative impacts now that the front of the dune is gone and has been replaced by that cliff. The grass is a key feature in securing the dune from erosion.
“We’re concerned that the grass behind it will dry out,” he said, “and then the cliff will continue to fall in.”
Pratt said that once the sheer face of the dune has been repaired by the bulldozers, the original dune toe will be marked and dune fencing will be put back in.
“Over the next several months, sand should blow in and begin to accumulate around the fence,” he said. “So we hope to see some natural building at the toe of the dune.”
The secondary impact of the erosion of the dune has been on the recently completed dune crossings, the toes of which were lost along with the rest of the front of the dune.
“We’ll be pushing sand back up, which will further help re-create the base for the crossings,” Pratt said. “Eventually, the crossings will be reconstructed.”
Pratt urged patience with that process, however, noting that when the base for the crossings was initially created, it was done with dredged material that was full of water and already compacted.
“Usually, it has some time to settle, for a month or longer, before the dune crossings are constructed,” he emphasized. “The dune crossing material is a thicker, heavier grade of material, with a clay base, so it’s more resistant to wear.”
“Now we have this sand want to push up, and we’ll have to give it some time to settle,” he added.
Pratt said he was all too aware of the timetable for full vacation-season use of the beach.
“We have several weeks’ worth of work ahead of us,” he said. “The Fourth of July is coming up, and I hope that we’ll have some rain to help it settle. And people walking on it will help settle it. And then we’ll work to restore the crossings to the way they were.”
Natural processes expected to help restore beach
Some loss of beach width has been noted, in addition to the erosion of the dune, with an estimated 50 feet of newly created width seaward of the dune gone from the more than 100 feet added in the reconstruction project.
While the obvious answer to the loss of sand from the widened beach might appear to be to bring back the dredging equipment for a fresh round of pumping sand onto the beach, Pratt said it was premature to look at that option just yet.
“We’re not talking about that right now,” he said.
Though a three-year periodic replenishment of the completed — and also heavily storm-damaged — Rehoboth Beach and Dewey Beach shorelines is being anticipated for this fall and could potentially have repair work on Bethany Beach’s shoreline tacked on to its contract, there’s much to do, and see, before that can be decided.
“We don’t have any firm contract with Dewey or Rehoboth yet,” Pratt said. “And we’re still evaluating the surveys that will tell us whether the sand is still there or whether we’ve had a severe loss.”
Instead, Pratt said he’s currently looking forward to seeing what natural processes of sand movement along the shoreline will bring to Bethany Beach in the coming weeks and months.
“The sand along this area of the coast naturally flows from the south to the north,” he said. “And if you look at South Bethany, the beach there appears to stick out pretty far compared to rest of beach. A lot of that sand, in South Bethany, Middlesex and Sea Colony, will work its way back to Bethany Beach.
“We hope the beach will widen over the course of the summer, and we want to see how the summer process will work, whether it will give a natural widening to the beach,” he added.
Pratt said he has reason for that optimism.
“We’re seeing the same kind of recovery in Rehoboth already,” he said, noting that dune fencing was being put back in Rehoboth Beach mid-week this week, with fencing to be replaced in Dewey Beach over the next few days.
“Typically, this works quite well for us, and I’m hoping the same thing happens here,” Pratt said.