Cutting Into Dunes Concerns West End Residents

West End residents still feel vulnerable in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

That, at least, is the collective sentiment John Bendo, a Maryland Avenue resident, evoked at Tuesday’s City Council meeting at City Hall, when he asked officials about cuts that were made to open the temporary, makeshift dunes or berms at West End beach entrance.  

Speaking as president of the West End Neighbors Civic Association, Bendo expressed concern that in making those cuts, the city perhaps has put “easy beach access” above the protection of people and property.  

“The city did a great job of putting those in, and then we went and put cuts in them at the entrances again, which I’m a little perplexed by,” Bendo said. “Because I don’t know if we forgot already what happened in October. We’ve already had one main storm; we got hit with the remnants of it.”

Follow Long Beach Patch on Facebook.

Jim LaCarrubba, the city’s commissioner of public works, told Bendo that

in preparation for the summer beach season, the city flattened the post-Sandy emergency berms that were built along the beach and pushed them to the back of the beach, where the city has requested to put the dunes in the west and east ends. The cuts were made into the dunes to

allow pedestrians direct accesses to the beach, so that they wouldn’t have to climb over the mounds of sand that blocked the beach entrances through the winter.

“If a storm is coming, we’ll fill them in,” LaCarrubba said.

After the power of Sandy forced the dunes and millions of cubic yards of sand off the beach and into the streets, the city renewed talks with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the nation’s public engineering agency, about short- and long-term storm mitigation projects. The temporary dunes will serve as protection until the Corps comes up with a beach restoration plan that could have a three to five year time horizon and involves permanent dunes and rebuilt jetties.

LaCarrubba said that once the summer season ends the city would close the open entrances for the fall and winter, just as sand will once again be pushed into berms along the central area of the beach to protect the middle of town.

The city has applied for permits with the Department of Environmental Conservation to replace the dunes in both the west and east ends, and build walkover structures that would go over the dunes, eliminating the need for open beach entrances. The city received the permits last week, LaCarrubba said, and will complete bidding process for the walkovers within the next four weeks, the cost of which the Federal Emergency Management Agency will cover. The city will also look to replace a wall that ran along the north side of the dunes that were destroyed during the storm.

“Official construction of the [temporary] dunes will probably start sometime next week, after we have all the profiles and the surveys,” LaCarrubba said.

The city will look to use its own manpower to rebuild the temporary dunes, since the original estimate the city received for the work was between $2 million and $3 million. “So we’re going to do it with in-house labor,” he added.

Bendo also inquired about ways to prevent sand that gets blasted off the beach during high winds or storms. LaCarrubba said that city couldn’t plant beach grass at this time, since planting season has passed and the city doesn’t have the means to irrigate.

MORE NEWS
Movie Reels to Roll Again at Long Beach Cinema

Jobs: Sloan-Kettering Center, Credit Union