Great First Month of the Project

I have continued to consult with interest the Carteret County Shore Protection Office website for updates on the beach nourishment project, now alarmingly close to the condo.  Yesterday’s update indicated the project is now about one-third completed.  381,324 cubic yards have been dredged, from areas farther out on the ocean when weather permits, or in the inlet as we saw on Wednesday.  “The fill density on the beach is close to 80 cubic yards/linear foot,” the CCSPO congratulated itself.  “Great first month of the project!”

While I am amazed as the technological feat of this project and awed at the bulldozers hard at work on the beach, it is definitely having some negative impacts for us.  For one thing, the crews are working long hours.  Last night I kept awaking during the night and hearing them still at work, with bright lights shining and the loud beep beep beep every time one of them backed up.  At 4:00 a.m. I dug out some earplugs.  This morning, I went down to the dune-top deck and discovered that the big mushrooming plume was right outside the condo, bulldozers pushing it out into the surf itself.

 I walked down the beach in the opposite direction, toward the Oceanana Pier, and found the beach littered with an unusual amount of weird debris.

It made me wonder if all of this was being carried through the pipeline from Beaufort Inlet.  It also made me wonder, not for the first time, if the main objective of the project was the dredging portion rather than the beach “nourishment” portion, and this formerly pristine beach was merely a convenient place to dump all the dredged sand.  It had seemed wide and flat and well-nourished enough before the project  began.  A few puzzled gulls were waddling along, wondering what kind of marine life had been washed up.

Someone had built a remarkably ambitious sandcastle just down the beach a little way.  Most of it remained, its turrets topped with shells and a big whelk screwed down onto a platform, although its ramparts were already succumbing to the incoming tide.  But the contractors for this fragile, ephemeral little structure had already knocked off for the day, and there was nobody else on the beach but me, collar pulled up against the stiff breeze, hands shoved deep in my pockets.