After delays, Bethany replenishment done

The much-anticipated repairs to Bethany Beach’s damage shoreline were finally completed two weeks ago, after months of delays as the project waited on the finish of periodic renourishment in Dewey Beach – a project plagued by delays since winter.

Bethany Beach Town Manager Cliff Graviet reported on June 19 that contractors had quickly moved their equipment in to the project’s landing zone and, by Wednesday, July 17, had finished their work and already removed the pipes that were used to pump sand from off the coast and onto the town’s dwindling beachfront.

The project was originally estimated to start sometime during the winter of 2008-2009 and to take about two weeks to complete. It was repeatedly delayed by the scheduling of dredging equipment for the Dewey Beach project, upon which it was to be piggy-backed, and subsequently by weather delays as that project – a full periodic replenishment, done every three to four years after reconstruction – extended well beyond its original timeline.

The goal in Bethany Beach was not a full periodic replenishment but rather a restoration of the beach to the original engineered design of the so-called 50-year beach reconstruction completed in May of 2008 and damaged in several subsequent storms.

The more recent delays on the Bethany project elicited strong concern from Bethany business and property owners, who worried that the closures and activity associated with potentially two weeks or more of replenishment work would suppress the population of beachgoers and disrupt vacations for those visiting Bethany in the earliest part of the summer season.

During their work in recent weeks, contractors Weeks Marine pumped additional sand onto the Bethany shoreline, restoring the original profile of the beach to its engineered design and pushing a limited amount of sand up against the eroded eastern dune face and against the drop-offs from dune crossovers that were also damaged in the first season of storms for the reconstructed beach.

“They did little to replace some of the dune that had been lost,” Graviet noted. “They worked more on the beachfront.”

However, the most problematic element of damage to the beach from the storms has been somewhat addressed by Mother Nature, Graviet said. The town’s lifeguards, he reported, had told him the drop-offs from the crossovers to the beach had been lessening over time, gradually smoothing out to where they might be considered merely challenging rather than dangerous.

Graviet said that, immediately after the work on the beachfront was complete, workers from the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) had begun working on reinstalling the dune fencing lost in last year’s storms, to help further secure the sand pushed up against the dunes in the location where dune face had been lost.

Further work on the dune crossovers is expected, and with a slight upgrade: Graviet said DNREC now plans to use a washed sand material instead of the clay-type material used in the original crossover construction, which had not held up well.

“It will compact more and wash away less, they hope,” Graviet reported.

Smoking areas to be reestablished this week

In addition to the ongoing work on the crossovers and replacement of the lost dune fencing, the town itself will also be working on the beach in the coming week, to reestablish the designated smoking areas that are required under the town’s no-smoking law.

That law prohibits smoking in and around the town’s children’s playgrounds, town parks and on the boardwalk plaza area at the street end of Garfield Parkway, on a year-round basis. The ban also affects the rest of the town’s boardwalk and its beach and shoreline between May 15 and Sept. 15 – the traditional summer season in the resort town – except for the designated smoking areas at the eastern edge of the dune.

Because of the damage to the beach from the May 2008 storm, the designated smoking areas were not ready in time for implementation of the ban last May, giving smokers a temporary reprieve from the ban. It was implemented later in the summer, after the temporary repairs to the dune face were completed.

Town workers were set to reestablish the designated smoking areas as soon as the dune fence in those areas was back up again, Graviet said on June 19. He said they could be completed as quickly as by the end of this week.

In other news from the town’s summer season, Graviet reported that parking-meter revenue has been down 15 to 16 percent thus far in the season, compared to the same period last year. He pointed to the 21 days of rainfall the area has seen since the meters went into action on May 15, as well as to cooler-than-normal temperatures.

“This has been one of the cooler and wetter springs in decades,” Graviet emphasized. He said he expected that a change in weather to warmer, dryer conditions as summer arrived on Sunday, June 21, would restore lost revenues and help the town come back from the deficit on parking revenues.