Da beach

I've been searching my storage CDs for about an hour, trying to find photos I took a couple of years ago of the Newbury Beach Committee installing fencing on the primary dune at Plum Island Center. That's where all the problems are right now with the erosion. No luck.

I did, however, find a story I wrote in 2006 about the committee, which serves in an advisory capacity to the Town of Newbury.

Photographs of the beach taken not that long ago show a flat surface running from the center parking lot down to the water. The dunes of old were completely eroded away. That water, with nothing to stem its flow, would flood the parking lot and Northern Boulevard at Plum Island center at regular intervals.

It was so bad that Bob Ducott, the owner of Dick’s Variety, says that sometimes they would put up a “no wake” sign out front.

Today the long process of restoring the main dune at the center is progressing, according to Paul Ivanska, president of the committee. Hundreds of clumps of dune grass and endless rolls of snow fence later, the dune has grown about four feet.

“We’re here to do the restoration,” Ivanska said at a meeting earlier this summer. He is accustomed to setbacks – the heavy rains and flooding in May erased some of the group’s earlier fence building and a part of the northern side of the dune collapsed. The landscape of the beach also changed – again.

A ledge just off shore pumps sand in on the southern side of the man-made breakwater, but draws it off the northern side during a storm. That is why, after the storm in May, the northern side of the beach dipped but the southern side gained more of a slope. The dune on the southern side of the entrance to the beach (which divides the dune) is growing at a faster pace.

“If not for the work of the committee, this erosion would be much worse,” says Doug Packer, head of Newbury’s Conservation Commission. The beach committee is an arm of the commission.

Over many long months, the town of Newbury has been involved in a small skirmish with the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) – if you think threats of a lawsuit constitute “small.” The “deal” they were trying to work out with DEP was exchanging parking for paving. The proposal, which may be accepted in an amended form, involved DEP allowing the paving of dirt streets on Plum Island in exchange for giving up some of the center parking lot to allow the dune to migrate back towards Northern Blvd. After reading about the concept – which was in no way finalized, Packer says – in the daily newspaper, a DEP official declared that no such deal was acceptable to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

(stuff about the water/sewer project)

The Beach Committee, meanwhile, struggles to find funds to purchase more fencing. The fence forms a barrier to the sand, and the roots of the dune grass provide stability. The fence costs $50 per roll (or $1 per foot). The committee, comprised of volunteers, is committed to that primary dune.

At a later meeting of the committee that I attended, they were also struggling to find funds to purchase beach grass.