Beach renourishment helped Nags Head survive Irene - MiamiHerald.com
NAGS HEAD -- Mike Phillips didn't know what to expect when he arrived at his beachfront house a day after Hurricane Irene shredded the North Carolina coast.
At high tide, the waves can lap the bottom steps from his house to the South Nags Head beach. And bad storms in years past ripped the stairs off completely.
But what Phillips found when he arrived last week shocked him: a wide expanse of beach between his house and the Atlantic Ocean.
"This time, the stairs wouldn't have even gotten wet, if not for the rain," he said.
His saving grace: 5 million tons of sand the town pumped onto the beach as part of a $36 million renourishment project that could prove to be an example for other coastal communities to follow.
The Category 1 hurricane, with winds hitting 80 mph and waves cresting over 10 feet, served as an early test for the project, which began in May after months of controversy about whether it amounted to throwing money into the sea.
But with about 85 percent of the project complete, town officials say the extra sand saved beachfront houses and roads. Even a row of condemned homes on Seagull Street that stand partially in the water were spared further harm.
It is the first time in recent memory that a hurricane didn't push the ocean over the dunes in Nags Head. Even Hurricane Earl, which skirted the state's coast last year, led to overwash.
"It's one of the better outcomes we could have had," said Bob Oakes, the town's mayor. "The waves didn't hit the dunes, which is good, because when they do, it's a hot knife through butter."
But sand did disappear. About 1 million cubic yards - or nearly 25 percent - of the new sand washed from the beach, according to an assessment this week from the project's engineers.
The beach receded an average of 72 feet at mean sea level, but it is still about 130 feet larger than before the project began, the report states.
The loss of sand is part of the design, according to project engineers, who want it to move from the visible beach to a protective offshore bar that will help break big waves. In the natural beach cycle, future storms will even put sand from the bar back onshore, engineers suggest.
"It's like an iceberg," explained Tim Cana with Coastal Science & Engineering, the project's designer.
"The bottom half of the iceberg is underwater and holds it all up."
The major question remaining is what happened to the sand gobbled by the sea. If it went just offshore, it's not considered "lost."
An underwater assessment is expected this weekend once rough seas subside. But based on the strength of the storm and the falling tide, Cana estimates "just a small fraction was completely lost out of the sandbox." If the town lost sand, it could qualify forFEMA money to replace it.
In the end, about half of the 4.6 million cubic yards of the new sand should shift offshore. The final beach is projected to be 50 to 150 feetwider when the project is completed in October.
To get an idea of what would have happened without the project, Cana pointed northward to Duck, where the ocean crested 13 feet above mean sea level and clawed the steep beach and dunes in some areas.
"In South Nags Head, 13 feet would have cut back dunes, put water in houses and water on roads," he said.
A test case for projects
The project is being watched closely by others along the state's 320-mile coastline, where the $20 billion tourism industry is at stake. Local municipalities increasingly are taking the lead as federal funds for beach projects wane.
04 Sep, 2011--
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