THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, October 10, 1996 TAG: 9610100318
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PAUL CLANCY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: OCEAN CITY, MD. LENGTH: 139 lines
Strong winds with a cutting winter's edge push row after row of powerful waves toward the shore. In a display of raw energy, the waves break and rush at the beach.
And then, as though a fastball pitcher has thrown a change-up, they die. Instead of racing across the sand, sending shorebirds running in retreat, the waves rush against the elevated shore, expend their energy and dissipate.
This is the gamble on which Ocean City officials, coastal engineers and property owners have waged $62 million so far in local, state and federal funds: that an elevated beach, backed up by a steel and concrete wall and dunes, would stop the ocean in its tracks.
It is the same wager that Virginia Beach is now making to preserve its vulnerable Oceanfront.
On Friday, Virginia Beach breaks ground on the most ambitious storm protection project in its history, one aimed at buying at least 50 years of protection against most - but not all - of the punishment Mother Nature can dish out.
Ocean City and Virginia Beach are two resort cities that long have flirted with disaster while all the while expanding their lucrative oceanfront hotel and condo bases. The stakes are high: billions of dollars in property values, millions of dollars in tax revenues, hundreds of thousands of tourists.
Both cities have taken advantage of a generous federal program that pays two-thirds of the cost of hurricane protection projects.
Ocean City's plan was less ambitious and, in the eyes of Virginia Beach officials, less pleasing aesthetically.
But to Ocean City's legions, it works just fine.
``I've been all over the world, but there's nothing like this,'' said Pat Glascow of College Park, Md., who's been coming to Ocean City for 48 years. Last week, she was doing what just about every one of the millions of visitors who come here do: sitting on the seawall.
The plain gray slab, glazed with an anti-graffiti coating, rises about 30 inches above the old wooden boardwalk. It is the cap for great steel sheets that were driven more than 30 feet into the sand. It pokes up just high enough to deprive first-floor dwellers - at least those lying down - of their view of the surf.
Every entrance from boardwalk to beach can be closed during storms by large, swinging aluminum gates. It has happened several times. They work.
``At first, I thought it was bad-looking, but now I love sitting on it,'' Glascow said, watching the passing show of bikers and strollers on the boardwalk.
Ocean City's resort strip sits on a barrier island that moves relentlessly with wind and tide. Like Virginia Beach's Sandbridge, it loses about two feet of oceanfront every year. And the only way to counteract this is to put back two feet of sand every year - forever.
Or at least until people get tired of living or vacationing at the ocean.
``Maybe they shouldn't have built this far eastward,'' said Bob Givarz, who owns and operates the Alaska Stand, a 9th Street hamburger-hotdog-ice cream store that was founded by his grandfather.
``But what's done is done. You have to protect it.''
Ocean City estimates it has a $3.5 billion investment in homes, hotels and businesses to protect. It pulls in some 8 million visitors a year and sends at least $60 million a year in tax revenue to the state treasury.
Twenty years ago, the city began to realize it had a serious problem. Eleven years ago, Hurricane Gloria tore up the boardwalk. Then, as winter storms pushed the surf under beachfront condos, all doubt was gone.
``The building was rocking so bad, it was like being on a boat,'' said Jack Rockford, a retired advertising salesman who lives in a third-floor condo on the beach. The complex was built with its forward edge right on the dunes, facing nothing but open sand.
``If this building goes into the water, we'd better go out the back window,'' Rockford said he told his wife.
All up and down the island, people like the Rockfords could look down from their balconies at the gnawing surf. When politicians came to look at the problem, they took off their shoes to wade through people's front yards.
It took almost 5 million cubic yards of sand to raise the beach and rebuild the dunes. Now, stretching almost eight miles along the sand, bristling with hundreds of thousands of sea-grass plants, crisscrossed by clay footpaths, is a massive dune structure.
The dune is a living, moving creature that must be fertilized, maintained and guarded by people such as Rockford, who leads a 55-person, volunteer dune patrol. Sunbathers, ball-playing fathers and sons, campers and kite-fliers have to be shooed off the dunes and their trash removed.
Ocean City leaders decided they had little choice but to move, and move quickly. First, they had to get permission from hundreds of property owners to dump sand on private property that in some cases extends to the waterline.
In the fall of 1988, with state and county help, the city spent $12 million to dredge 2.2 million cubic yards of sand from offshore bars and pump it onto the beach over an 8-mile stretch to the Delaware line. It was one of the longest continuous beach-fill projects ever undertaken in the United States.
In 1989, the Army Corps of Engineers joined the partnership. The 1.6-mile seawall was built and another 3.5 million cubic yards of sand was dredged from the ocean floor and piped onto the beach.
Up to this point, the project had cost about $40 million.
During the dedication on Oct. 29, 1991, with the governor, the mayor, several members of Congress and others looking on, the sea rose ominously. Days later, a northeaster struck, followed by another storm in January 1992 that took most of the sand and flung it back into the ocean.
It was a small price to pay. The Corps of Engineers estimates that $93 million in damages was prevented. ``The project paid for itself in one storm,'' said City Manager Dennis W. Dare, who was city engineer at the time it was built.
Emergency restorations followed. Another $22 million was spent, another $70 million in estimated damages prevented.
``It's worked like a charm,'' said Dare, facing the ocean recently on what was becoming a cold, windy day, a preview perhaps of things to come. ``It's the most important project this town has ever done.''
There seem to be few adverse environmental impacts, although property owners on the bay say the extra sand from the beach is filling in the bay and threatening to close boating channels. And surfers worry that elevated beaches have messed up their waves.
Ocean City residents and officials have no illusions that elevated beaches and even strengthened dunes can withstand major storms. They soften the blow. They reduce the number of devastating high tides that breach the defenses and roll into the resort strip.
``If you get too high a storm surge, there's nothing on God's earth that's going to stop it,'' Rockford said, surveying the dunes he watches over like a father.
``You'll never stop it completely. You only delay it for a little while.'' ILLUSTRATION: BETH BERGMAN color photos/The Virginian-Pilot
Bernard Patlen, above, of Kensington, Md., feeds the sea gulls by
the seawall in Ocean City, Md. The resort city has used $62 million
so far in local, state and federal funds to build an elevated beach,
backed up by dunes and a steel and concrete wall. An aerial view,
below, shows where newly built dunes in the foreground meets the
seawall, right rear, at 27th Street.
Graphic
VP
OCEAN CITY, MD. HURRICANE PROTECTION PLAN AND BEACH REPLENISHMENT
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]
Photo
BETH BERGMAN/The Virginian-Pilot
Dick Halliwell of Arlington, Va., holds the hand of his son, David,
3, as the boy walks the seawall in Ocean City., Md. The resort city
has about 8 million visitors a year. by CNB