The Bay Beach Association met Tuesday to discuss restoring 27 miles of Delaware’s Bay Beaches from Pickering down to Lewes.
The project secured $25 million in federal funding from the Water Resources Development Act of 2022, which Senator Tom Carper, Chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, helped to author. The state’s share is 10 percent of the project cost, which wasn’t included in Gov. John Carney’s proposed budget, but DNREC Secretary Shawn Garvin wants to include.
Slaughter Beach was last replenished in 2004, and Mayor Bob Wood says they’ve put bandaids on erosion since, leaving residents fearful when a storm rolls through.
“And up until now it’s like, well we’re working on it, but we really weren’t getting too far," Wood says. "We were getting little bandaids, and now this is a real beach nourishment, a real one, where we’ll be able to engineer this beach correctly, properly, so that we might not have to worry about this for many many years.”
President of the American Beach & Shore Preservation Association Tony Pratt says the $25 million from the feds will fund replenishment in Slaughter and Bowers for now, but is only a downpayment on the full project.
“We have to look at that as an interim step, and look beyond that and say we have the longer term, much bigger project going in, which is estimated about $110 million.”
Pratt adds this is the most promising restoration effort he’s seen in five decades.
But former Slaughter Beach Mayor and President of the Bay Beach Association Kathy Lock says the project is about ten years too late, after the town watched its investments in beach repairs washed away.
“A few years ago the town paid $75,000 to bring in sand," Lock says. "And within a period of I think two weeks, everything that we had just put on the beach to shore up the dunes, was gone.”
She says the same thing happened last year – with five times the amount of sand, and it was gone within six months.
Lock says this issue doesn’t just affect coastal communities, but the agriculture, near-shore and inland communities as well. As storms get stronger and more frequent with climate change, hurricanes and nor-easters' impacts will push further inland.
