OCEAN CITY — Ocean City got good news last week on federal beach replenishment funding when the Army Corps of Engineers announced it was including the last remaining piece of the funding puzzle in its fiscal year 2017 civil works plan budget.
The Ocean City beaches are routinely replenished every four years with periodic emergency projects as needed following storms and other natural events. Beach replenishment began in Ocean City in 1994 through a 50-year agreement with the town, Worcester County and the state of Maryland partnering with the federal Army Corps of Engineers, which provides over 50 percent of the funding for the massive undertaking.
The beach replenishment program is critical to the protection of Ocean City and its valuable resources from flooding from tropical storms, hurricanes and nor’easters. To date, the project is credited for preventing an estimated $600 million in storm-related damages.
Following winter storm Jonas last January and subsequent storms and weather events, an emergency phase was fully funded by the Army Corps and has been planned to begin this fall, but the federal funding for the next regularly scheduled phase had been in question until just last week when the corps announced the list of projects that will be fully funded in fiscal year 2017.
Included on the list is $2.45 million for the Atlantic Coast of Maryland Shoreline Protection project, or beach replenishment as it is known locally. City Engineer Terry McGean said this week the announcement assured the federal funding was in place for the next major planned replenishment project after this fall’s emergency repairs.
“The funding is all good news,” he said. “The $2.45 million was the last remaining amount needed to fully fund the beach replenishment project. Essentially, there were three funding sources we needed for the project, one to repair the damage from Jonas, one to bring the beach to what’s known as the minimum design template and the last to provide four years of advance nourishment so we don’t have to do a project every year. The $2.45 million was the advance nourishment funding.”
Also included in the Army Corps of Engineers announced list of projects funded in fiscal year 2017 were a pair of projects aimed at dredging the navigation channel in the Inlet and using the dredged material to renourish the north end of Assateague Island. The Army Corps’ project list includes $600,000 for the dredging of the Inlet channel and the restoration of Assateague, which has become an ongoing battle in recent years.
“Dredging the Inlet also uses three funding sources,” he said. “The first two are a 50-50 split between the Army Corps and the National Park Service and dredges sand from the Inlet and ebb shoal and transports it to Assateague. The purpose of the project is to stabilize Assateague Island by restoring the sand that gets trapped in the ebb shoal that would otherwise have naturally transported to Assateague if the Inlet did not exist. It has the side benefit of dredging the navigation channel in the Inlet as part of that effort. This effort happens twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall.”
While the Inlet and other channels in and around the mouth of the commercial harbor naturally fill in and are in need of continual maintenance dredging, the problem has become more acute in recent years to the point it is now curtailing commercial and recreational activity out of Ocean City. It’s been a problem for years and has put at risk the commercial and recreational fishing industries in the resort area. McGean said the corps’ announcement last week includes funding for the continued maintenance dredging of the Inlet channel.
“The other funding source is the operation-maintenance funding for navigation,” he said. “This is 100 percent corps funded and is used for the express purpose of dredging the navigation channel in the Inlet. This effort supplements the other ebb shoal effort and provides for additional dredging as needed outside the spring and fall efforts.”
Last month, the dredge boat Murden arrived in Ocean City to resume the semiannual dredging of the Inlet channel and that work is ongoing. The work performed by the Murden remains just a temporary fix in advance of a larger-scale project to dredge the Inlet to 14-16 feet. For the last several years, the corps has worked with local, state and federal officials along with other stakeholders on the longer term plan to dredge the Inlet to a depth that would keep the channel open and eliminate the silting problem that often makes the channel impassable for even modest-sized commercial and recreational vessels.
The latest part of that effort is a regional sediment management study being done as part of the corps’ Continuing Authorities Program Section 204 program. The corps is in the early stages of the study and is currently developing a scope and path forward. The Corps anticipates the study being completed with a finalized recommendation in 2018.
