Newsletter #4

Welcome Sustainable Shorelines' Newsletter #4 chronicling this past week's events on and about our coastlines.

As in every letter, I urge you to forward this e-mail to others concerned for our coasts.  To those friends without e-mail, please print this and give/mail to them.  The more people who know and the more they know about what is happening on our coastlines, the more likely we can influence this for the better.

Of importance to our East Coast and Gulf residents is a new federal MMS study being proposed to further study the biological impacts of offshore sand mining from submerged shoals located in ridge and swale areas.  These features are often areas of intense biological activity (fishery resources, etc.), as well as playing a role in mitigating the local wave climate, especially during intense storm events.  A recently completed biological/physical monitoring protocols study raised questions of whether these can be dredged in any way to minimized ecological impacts and/or speed recovery.  In the past, the MMS has used the most ardent proponents of dredging to review (seemingly favorably for dredging options) these studies.

NORTH AND SOUTH CAROLINA
A tight funding schedule is more threatening to a Bogue Banks beach nourishment plan than Atlantic Beach's opposition to the federal project. The Corps will decide in July on a $26 million plan to nourish Atlantic Beach, Pine Knoll Shores and Indian Beach with sand pumped from a Beaufort Inlet spoil island.  $13 million is currently approved and the county is sending its shore protection officer to lobby for the rest.  Otherwise, the project cannot proceed.  The project also requires state funds.

FLORIDA AND GEORGIA
Biscayne Bay, FL is on the receiving end of a Corps draft EIS for the Biscayne Bay Coastal Wetlands Project intended to rehydrate wetlands and reduce point source discharge to Biscayne Bay. This is to replace lost overland flow and partially compensate for the reduction in groundwater seepage by redistributing, through a spreader system, available surface water entering the area from regional canals.

The Corps is soliciting for bids for the Ft. Pierce nourishment project with sand mined offshore.

Palm Beach's long range planning board recommended suing the federal government over erosion caused by the manmade Lake Worth Inlet dredged almost 100 years ago.  It also decided to continue its 10-year, $42.5 million nourishment project to restore 10 miles of its beaches.

An editorial in the Stuart News states Florida has been spending about $30 million a year to battle beach erosion, and the federal government has spent even more. Now, with money tight, the expenditures may be reduced or halted.  Beaches erode because of tidal action, and modifications to the shoreline made by man.  It recommends not building or barrier islands "unless science and engineers can come up with a better, cheaper, more permanent solution — expect less and less of the spending pie to go toward fighting the Atlantic Ocean."

A Collier County commissioner is calling for a moratorium on spending certain public tax money on Marco Island beaches until city officials there change their view that Marco beaches should be exclusive.   A Marco city councilman says its attitude may be "exclusive or arrogant. It's our island. Let's be as arrogant as we can."  The county's 3 percent bed tax mainly beach renourishment projects.

On nearby Naples' beaches, the city wore out its beach raking machine by using it to collect rocks on the shore and "baby boulders" under the sand spewed by its last renourishment.

The Georgia House intends to create a legislative study committee to try to determine what is causing hundreds of acres of marsh grass to die and what could be done to replace it. These provide a vital barrier against erosion of coastal uplands. "If you don't have salt marshes, you won't have marine life,'' said James Holland of Altamaha Riverkeeper.  Small hammocks and islands are becoming developed and need stricter buffers to protect marshlands.

GULF
Karen Gautreaux, chairwoman of LA's wetlands restoration panel LA and executive assistant to Gov. Mike Foster, says its coastline cannot be built out to what it was before the Mississippi River was constrained by levees.  It has suffered from national policy decisions to handle the once oft-flooding Mississippi River and the setup of various projects to aid the oil and gas industry.  It needs $14 billion in federal help, to get a manageable coastline and ecosystem that can be maintained.

Weeks Marine Inc., Covington, won a $4.41 million contract from the US Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans, for dredging associated with the Houma Navigation Canal's Cat Island Pass in Terrebone Parish.

At Pecan Island, LA, a $3 million marsh terracing is being tried to act as wind and wave buffers, curbing erosion and trapping sediment to protect 3,550 acres of threatened wetlands in southeast Vermilion Parish, five miles north of the Gulf of Mexico. Marsh grass is planted on the earthen mounds to help bind and protect them against the effects of time and tide.  The Pecan Island project is funded through the federal Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration Act, commonly known as the Breaux Bill after its sponsor, U.S. Sen. John Breaux, D-Crowley.

Padre Island's Packery Channel dredging project's required environmental remediation site is downed to its third choice, Shamrock Island. The island was the tip of a peninsula before oil and gas exploration cut channels through it causing it to continue to erode.  A 4,000 foot-long barrier is built along its northern reach. The protected shore has filled in with sea grass, and sand placed along the barrier has migrated around the island as planned.  Extending that barrier and planting more sea grass may protect the island even more and provide a sanctuary for endangered birds.   Backshore lagoons are threatened with breaching which would increase erosion and wash away the island (a similar situation exists at Hunting Island, SC).

The corps continues its usual practices of maintenance dredging of the Intracoastal Waterway, channel entrances and stone breakwater maintenance construction (Texas City).

MID-ATLANTIC
In Maryland, Several environmental organizations have embraced a bill that would require the state to review dredging needs in the Chesapeake Bay and come up with ways of minimizing the amount of dredging that is done.  The Maryland Port Administration is opposing the legislation.  Much of the concern is with the disposal of spoils.

Maryland's wetlands, as Louisiana's, are also threatened by nutria, an introduced rodent species.  A bill has been introduced to eradicate these ad fund restoration of the eroded habitat.

Twenty years after state and federal officials pledged to revive the troubled Chesapeake Bay, federal support for the nationally acclaimed restoration effort is eroding.  Sediment and pollution from farms and air cognitio to degrade its waters according to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

NORTHEAST
In Fairfield, CN, a fight is over a new dredging project is centered on land accreted from a dike and breakwater structures built in the 1820's to protect the harbor mouth.  This built of sand on its east side including on the Country Club of Fairfield property.  The town wants this declared federal property and open to anyone before the dredging begins.

In Seabrook, NH, a state representative is calling on the federal government to properly maintain (dredge) the harbor as a strategic defensive point.  The state does not have funds to do this. Ever since the bridge across Route 286 was widened in the mid-1990s, increasing the currents in the Blackwater River, silt has washed into the south part of the harbor, blocking access to large vessels.

WEST
At Wrangell, AK, the Corps is proposing to build two rubble mound breakwaters (1800' total).

At Santa Cruz, CA, residents are fed up with "potentially harmful" vapors and the rotten-egg smell from sand dredged from the harbor mouth.  The Monterey Bay Unified Air Pollution Control District may be wading back into an issue that some neighbors and harbor visitors have complained about for years.  The problem gets worse when the outfall pipe breaks and dredge spoils are pumped on the nearby beach.

At San Clemente, CA, Metrolink is dumping more large boulders to protect its rails threatened by erosion from the surf.  The agency is open to alternatives such as dumping sand "as long as they will work for us and also be cost-effective."

The Native Hawaiian Legal Corp. is suing to block a project to refurbish the deteriorating 520' Kailua Pier in the hub of West Hawaii's tourist district.  The $4 million pier renovation project on the Big Island may damage the nearby native sacred site.  The wall-sided pier is blamed for extensive erosion of the white sand beach at Kailua Bay.

The Port of Portland will enter into a Project Cooperation Agreement (PCA) with the US Army Corps of Engineers to deepen the Columbia River Channel to 43 feet.  The agreement would charge the Corps to construct and maintain the 43-foot channel. The sponsoring ports must provide disposal and mitigation sites, maintain some of those sites along with ecosystem restoration features, and keep port berths at the new depth.

GREAT LAKES
Michigan City, IN will get $1.1 million in federal funds its outer harbor.