Broward beaches getting sand refill
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plans to spend $9.7M to restore sand washed away by Hurricane Irma.
More sand is on the way for south Broward County beaches that took a hit from Hurricane Irma last year.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plans to spend $9.7 million in January to truck in and replenish about 123,000 cubic yards of sand — enough to cover a football field with sand 57 feet high — lost during the storm on beaches south of Port Everglades.
The January project won’t make the south county beaches wider, but it will put more sand on dry sand areas away from the water.
“It’ll provide critical storm protection,” said Jennifer Jurado, Broward’s director of environmental planning, for beaches in Hollywood, Hallandale Beach and Dania Beach, including at Von D. Mizell and Eula Johnson State Park, formerly known as John U. Lloyd State Park.
The money is part of a larger package authorized earlier this year for restoration work related to Irma. A total of $36 million has been authorized for south county beach restoration and another
$29 million for beaches from Pompano Beach to Fort Lauderdale.
The other projects are expected to be completed within three years.
Hollywood officials are looking forward to the sand boost as a way of keeping their beaches popular with tourists and residents.
“You can almost never have enough sand on your beaches, because nature most surely will cause it to erode,” Hollywood spokeswoman Raelin Storey said. “These kinds of projects help to protect our coastal economy and out tourist industry.”
Hollywood’s redevelopment agency spent $4 million earlier this year and in late 2017 to add sand to a mile-long stretch of heavily eroded beach at the southern end of the city.
The new Irma-related projects are being fully funded by the federal government.
Some of the projects will take longer to complete because they will widen beaches, adding sand up to the water line, which requires additional permitting.
The projects are designed to shore up previous beach renourishments.
The central county beaches were renourished in 2016, a $55.6 million project that was 20 years in the making. It involved about 700,000 cubic yards of sand that filled 38,000 dump trucks.
The plan to correct for Irma-related erosion would restore 388,000 cubic yards of sand there, with a contract for the work to be awarded in August 2019, Army Corps spokeswoman Amanda Parker said.
The south county beaches were last renourished in 2005 and 2006. The remaining south county money for Irma restoration is to add a million cubic yards of sand, Parker said. Final approval from Army Corps headquarters is still pending, Parker said, and the contract is expected to be awarded in fiscal year 2020.
The county is currently drawing up plans for a major beach renourishment there, also involving a million cubic yards of sand, but it won’t come until after the Irma-related work is completed.