Fenwick Beach Pumping Completed

Fenwick Beach Pumping Completed
Fenwick

FENWICK ISLAND – Distress has been relieved in Fenwick Island as the Army Corps of Engineers completed the beach replenishment project last week.
“I know the project caused a little bit of heartache in town but overall, and I think town staff will agree with me, it went off without a hitch. We still received a lot of inquiries and complaints, but once again the project was not set by the town,” Town Manager Merritt Burke said during last Friday’s Town Council meeting. “I want to give a lot of credit to Capt. [Tim] Ferry and the lifeguards for consistent posting of information, specifically photos on Twitter and Facebook. I would like to believe we set the standard for the rest of the beach communities moving forward using social media.”
There were no problems encountered, Ferry confirmed on Friday.
“It ended up being a very, very good working relationship with [contractor] Great Lakes keeping us up to date on the movement of their areas and keeping as much beach open as possible down there,” Ferry said. “I don’t think at any point in time there was one beach crossover that was closed during the whole process. There was access 100 percent of the time. You might have had to walk a little bit north or south to get to a particular beach but things worked very well with that.”
The project began on July 26 and the town announced the project had been completed in Fenwick on Aug. 21. There were three subline pipes dropped between Atlantic and Houston streets and the contractor, Great Lakes Dredge and Dock, worked in four phases pumping sand south of each pipe first as far as the Maryland State Line and then north to meet where they left off in the previous phase until they had reached the end of Fenwick on the North end.

In South Bethany, roughly 476,000 cubic yards of sand will be pumped onto the beach, while Dewey and Rehoboth will get a combined 455,000 cubic yards. Overall, from New York to Virginia, an estimated 26 million cubic yards of sand will be pumped onto the beaches at an estimated cost of $600 million.
The contract duration will be approximately 210 days from start to finish and the wide cost range for the project is estimated at anywhere from $10 million to $25 million.