Beach alliance

What an exciting/informative meeting ... where to start? ... Hold on, checking to see if Ari Herzog ran home and posted something so I don't duplicate ...

Well the dredging/beach nourishment project for Newbury is zipping right along - unless you consider not having easements in place, not having even a fraction of the necessary permits in place, DEP objections and outstanding agreements between Newbury and Salisbury about placement of dredged sand more like "not zipping."

Funny how Salisbury always seems to get its ducks in order so much more efficiently.

Apparently Newbury has some wetlands by-law that limits the time orders of conditions can remain in place to 6 years and the federal government is going to want to see some kind of assurance that Newbury (or its designee) is going to permanently maintain the beach and dunes because the fed is kicking in all this dough to dredge and so on and so forth.

I guess people are concerned that 6 years will come and go and no one will remember that the town needed to look at that permit.

Ahem. There's this new technology now, called a computer ...? What, no one keeps track of this shit? This is pretty alarming.

Mark Habel from the Army Corps of Engineers gave a little presentation of a beach nourishment project they did in Wells Harbor, ME, in 2000.

Cruising right along, he got to the part where he explained what a "toe dike" is. That's where they bulldoze sand from the beach into the surf to make a dike to hold back the surf while they pump the dredged sand onto the beach.

This sand could - and was - called "sacrificial sand."

Seems the DEP has an issue with this methodology. DEP doesn't see the sense of losing sand from the beach in an effort to add sand to the beach.

But this is the "best management practice," according to the Corps.

At this point Bob Connors of the Plum Island Foundation jumped in and said it probably wasn't a good idea to "micro-manage the project."

Also Habel (Army Corps guy) said he is concerned with the progress of the project partnership agreement between the state Dept. of Conservation & Recreation (DCR) and the Corps. The agreement, Habel said, "has to go all the way up the Corps' chain ... that takes time."

And if DCR makes any changes to the agreement - if it so much as adds a comma - the agreement has to go through more scrutiny.

I get the impression that the Corps is not too happy with the beach nourishment part of this project.

Anyway, there is also the little matter of the agreement Newbury has with Salisbury for dredged sand to be dumped on-shore. It's supposed to be, one time Salisbury gets all the sand, the next time Newbury does and so on.

I'll save the rest for later.