Generally, USACE’s near-term coastal restoration projects are funded by two mechanisms: the Flood Control and Coastal Emergencies (FCCE) program and the Operations and Maintenance (O&M) program. “When you have a disaster declaration,” said Forcina, “the FCCE program allows you to repair projects to pre-storm condition – but many of these coastal flood risk management projects may not have been performing according to their design template prior to the storm hitting. Normally we would just be repairing it to what existed before the storm not to the design template. The beauty of this legislation is that it allows us to actually restore that project to its full design capability.”
In midsummer 2013, USACE announced a roughly $600 million package of near-term beach restoration projects to be performed up and down the northern Atlantic Coast on previously built coastal storm risk reduction projects. The restoration effort will involve the placement of more than 26 million cubic yards of sand. The vast majority of this material – about 23 million cubic yards – will be used to restore beaches in New Jersey and New York, but the remainder will be brought to projects in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia.
“In Florida, we really stress regional sand management, where we take the sand out of navigation channels and put it on the beaches. It’s kind of a two-for-one deal – I think at every one of these coastal inlets for which we’ve received supplemental funding, we’re using sand we’ve taken out of the inlet to put back on the beaches.”
The effort to restore Sandy-damaged projects, 100 percent federally funded, will involve USACE’s New England, New York, Norfolk, Philadelphia, and Baltimore districts. According to Forcina, most of the 26 million cubic yards will come from offshore. “All these projects are fairly close to what we’ve identified as offshore borrow areas, where material is available for us to pump back onto the beaches,” he said. “That will be the bulk of our effort.” In areas where offshore borrow areas aren’t accessible, some material may be trucked from inland sources.
The North Atlantic Division’s O&M program will fund repairs to 84 additional projects affected by Sandy – 90 percent of them, Forcina said, navigation channels shoaled by the storm and in need of dredging, but including other hard structures such as flood gates, storm barriers, and breakwaters. By midsummer 2013, most of these repairs have already been completed, and most of the contracts for the 25 FCCE-funded projects had been awarded – in fact, some of the projects had already been completed. USACE plans to have all of the FCCE projects completed by the end of the 2014 fiscal year.
Florida’s Coastline
Jackie Keiser, Jacksonville District chief of the Coastal & Navigation Section, said that while she understands the public’s focus on New York and New Jersey in Sandy’s aftermath, she thinks many people underestimate the damage Sandy did to Florida’s Atlantic coast. “When Sandy passed Florida,” she said, “it was fairly close to the coast, and it passed by very, very slowly. It really just sat there for several days and chewed away at the coast … The middle portion of the east coast of Florida had significant erosion.”
The town of Palm Beach alone lost 700,000 cubic yards of sand to Sandy. Cocoa Beach – one of the widest beaches in Florida – was nearly 100 yards narrower after the storm pounded it with waves as high as 10 feet and wind gusts up to 60 miles per hour.
The spill barge Shamrock places material to construct an underwater levee Jan. 19, 2013, as part of a beneficial-use site that will provide a shallow-water sea grass habitat along the south side of the new channel and help to protect the channel from wave action coming across Corpus Christi Bay. Part of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Galveston District’s La Quinta Channel Extension Project, work included deepening the channel extension and creating a beneficial-use site. USACE Galveston District photo by civil engineer Kenneth “Chip” Worley
At one of the most heavily damaged areas of the Florida coast, Fort Pierce Beach, USACE awarded a $5.2 million contract in April to move 420,000 cubic yards of sand from an offshore borrow area to renourish the beach. The work was completed by May 30, in order to avoid interfering with the annual sea turtle nesting season.
“When Sandy passed Florida,” she said, “it was fairly close to the coast, and it passed by very, very slowly. It really just sat there for several days and chewed away at the coast … The middle portion of the east coast of Florida had significant erosion.”
Fort Pierce was one of 11 Florida beach restoration projects to eventually qualify for nearly $150 million in FCCE funds. A few of these projects, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, were approved after Tropical Storm Debby damaged federal projects in Pinellas, Manatee, and Lee counties in June 2012.
In addition to these FCCE projects, USACE received emergency O&M funds to repair Hurricane Sandy impacts at eight navigation projects, including the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway that spans the coast from Jacksonville to Miami. These waterways were dredged on an expedited schedule, Keiser said, because storm-blown sand shoaled inlets made navigation hazardous or prevented deep-draft vessels from entering. “The side benefit of that,” she said, “is that we can use that material to nourish the beaches eroded by the storm. In Florida, we really stress regional sand management, where we take the sand out of navigation channels and put it on the beaches. It’s kind of a two-for-one deal – I think at every one of these coastal inlets for which we’ve received supplemental funding, we’re using sand we’ve taken out of the inlet to put back on the beaches.”