Dredging and Nourishment (Part II)

I last wrote about the $18 million Morehead City Harbor Dredging & Concurrent Beach Nourishment project in my post of January 2.  We had watched in curiosity on that day as long sections of pipeline were being moved into place down near the jetty at the Fort Macon Picnic Area.  A week later, we walked on the beach toward Fort Macon and realized that the actual dredging had begun.  Piles of dark dredged material were being spread out along the beach, watched by curious beach-goers like us as well as an unusually large flock of seagulls.  

I don’t know what I thought that the stuff being discharged through the pipe would look like, but I was surprised that it was so black.  That makes sense when you consider that it would be sedimentation that originated upstream, probably soil from farms and construction.  A day or two later, I walked out on the walkway at the Picnic Area and watched as this dark stuff was being pumped upward, like a dark mushroom, and was then being pushed away by bulldozers.

The informative project website confirmed that dredging indeed was fully underway.  “Weeks Marine's cutterhead-suction pipeline dredge, the J.S. Chatry arrived to Morehead City Harbor on December 29th, and transited to the most seaward reach of the channel to start dredging with concurrent beach nourishment on January 6th.”  (I love the way engineers talk!)  “In terms of the beachfill, the dredged sand is pumped through a submerged pipeline from the channel that lands west of the terminal groin at Ft. Macon State Park where the land-based pipe is affixed to.”  

Someone on a local Atlantic Beach Facebook page posted photos of the J. S. Chatry, apparently taken from a boat out in the harbor.

We walked a mile down the beach to check out progress the day before yesterday and watched as bulldozers continued to spread the “dredged material” out along the beach.  It was not a very attractive look for a beach!  I wonder how long it will take for this stuff to be covered up with sand brought in on the tide, and with shells and sand dollars and sea stars? 

As I continued to read about the project, I realized that this was just the beginning of “nourishment” that is to continue toward the condo building, under the Oceanana Pier, and ultimately as far as the “Circle” in Atlantic Beach, where the Causeway from Morehead City meets Fort Macon Road, a mile or so away.  Our walks and runs along this lovely, flat beach will be greatly impacted by this project!  Gone will be the white sand on the beach in both directions from where our walkway and dune-top deck open out over the dunes onto the sand, where fishermen set up with their rods augured into the sand, where little children with plastic pails gather shells, where kite-flyers show up every weekend.  If we want to walk on the beach I suppose we will have to drive down to the Circle and walk westward from there.

It reminded me of the Joni Mitchell song:

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone;
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.

It’s not pavement, but it’s the color of a parking lot. Something else to disturb the quiet seasons.

P. S.  I hope readers of this blog will appreciate that not once in this post did I mention the political events of the past week, or those of the coming week!