As Isle of Palms inches closer to another crowded summer season, residents and visitors, and even sea turtles, will have to share some of the beaches with trucks, heavy equipment and a lot more sand.
Work crews are mobilizing to undertake the island’s biggest beach renourishment project to date: placing 2.5 million cubic yards of beach-quality sediment along up to 19,200 linear feet of shoreline on the two ends of the island. “Sand placement will start on the north end in June and wrap up in September on the southern end,” said IOP Public Information Director Joshua Uys. “Our contractor is expected to move at a pace of 100 feet per day.”
Marinex Construction Inc. of North Charleston was awarded the contract with a project bid of $21.47 million – nearly $11 million lower than originally anticipated by IOP City leaders. Sand will be obtained from an offshore borrow area approximately 2 miles south of the pier.
More than just another way to combat coastal erosion from tides and severe weather, the hope is that this project will set a definitive standard for keeping the island and its beaches around for a long time to come. “This is the first beach nourishment project we’ve done for the island,” said Marinex Vice President Thomas Payne. “Other nourishments have included work at Pawleys Island, DeBordieu Colony, Folly Beach, Edisto and as far as South Amelia Island, Florida.”
Founded in 1991, Marinex, in part, maintains marine transportation channels and shapes coastal community shorelines from Norfolk, Virginia, to Tampa, Florida.
Payne pointed out that while the IOP renourishment qualifies as a large endeavor, many parts of it should be simpler to handle than similar company projects. “We just finished up a job on Hilton Head, and there were different locations in which we had to pick up all the equipment and move five times, utilizing five different borrow sites,” he said. “On IOP, we’ll only have to move once, and we will be in the vicinity of only one borrow site.”
Marinex will also have a mostly clear field of operations, as city leaders spent much of April trying to secure easements from 140 property owners for work to proceed along sections of the beach that have experienced severe erosion. All “Property owners who don’t sign would not get a dune, and a temporary swale may be left that will fill in within a few weeks,” Uys said. “We still start to see mobilization!late May to early June, and expect to see the first sand placement mid-to-late June.”
Payne emphasized that work crew safety will be the first priority, “especially when the weather turns bad and potential-ly puts the crews at risk.”
Because the project will take place during sea turtle nesting season, all crews will be in daily communication with turtle monitors to make sure these denizens of the island’s wildlife environ-ment are protected.
“We hope that at the end of this project, when another beach project is bid, the people want us to return again because this is where we live,” he said. “It’s part of our home too.” but three have assented.
By L. C. Leach III
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