We recently attended our partner meeting with the Army Corps and received an update on the progress of the project. To date, the jetty work between first and second beach groin 56 is nearly complete. The jetty will extend to the dune line and then be backfilled with sand to make it safe to traverse. Work has also begun on the revetment rock work. The area around the wall has been backfilled with sand, and rocks are currently being placed on the east side of the wall. This work is expected to take approximately 3 months.

H&L is now receiving 40+ stone shipments per day to Town Park. This pace will continue until late March. The biggest issue the project in our area is facing is getting enough of what they call armor stone, the largest, head boulders, to complete the two jetties under construction in Town Park, the revetment and the jetty adjacent to the inlet, groin 58, by April 1st. This date marks the start of Piping Plover season and also marks when all work west of the chick barrier erected last summer throughout the Town of Hempstead must cease. Because of this, the contractor does not have a definitive timeline for when work will begin on groin 58. The issue is really two-fold, can H&L acquire enough armor stone prior to April 1st to complete the jetty and can they get those rocks in place by this date. Leaving a partially completed jetty and returning to complete it months later is not really an option.

Why is this an issue? H&L will need to operate two rock receiving operations, one in Point Lookout Civic Park (Town Park is off limits during plover season) and one on New York Avenue in Long Beach, as different trucks deliver different material types. This will require a tremendous investment in machinery and personnel for the delivery of a minimal amount of stone to the site. Second, since the actual construction is anticipated to take less than 3 months, their material handler will be stuck idle on the eastern portion of the island for most of July and August. At this juncture, the contractor has no intention of working on Point Lookout Civic Beach from April of 2017-September of 2017, thus the entire beach will be fully open all summer.

If the contractor cannot complete terminal groin 58 by April 1, the contractor will return to complete the work along with any work that remains on the two new groins in Town Park after September 1 depending on the availability of equipment and where they are in completing work in Long Beach, the “Reach 2” portion of the project. Long Beach has no restrictions on when work can occur.

Plans for Phase 2, which is the dredging work. should be preliminarily completed in the next month. NYS DEC and the Army Corps have both verbally confirmed that a sun shelter will be “relocated” which to them means building a new ADA compliant structure on Civic Beach. We actually had to send them the page and paragraph a couple of times prior to getting this confirmation. The Army Corps will include the community in final design process. This phase of the project is expected to commence in the Spring of 2018.

There has been a number of questions regarding vibration from the work. All monitoring was well within what is considered acceptable levels of vibration and deemed not to cause any structural damage to existing structures. If anyone would like to see the reports please let us know and we can request them.

As always, please contact us with any questions.