ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. – Just last month, fishing would’ve been impossible from the St. Augustine Beach pier. That’s because all that was beneath the pier was sand. But now, after Tropical Storm Debby, water under the pier is making a comeback.
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Ronan Larrabee comes to the beach all the time, and like many, was surprised by the sight.
“Last time I came out here, I sat up on that, like, the lifeguard tower,” Larrabee said. “Sand went all the way out there, and then, after yesterday, that five-foot wall from all that water.”
Dylan Rumrell, mayor of St. Augustine Beach, said he was a little surprised to see the water reappear under the pier so soon.
“I’m really disappointed,” Rumrell said with a smile. “I said November. It’s August. And so, I said, by November, they would be fishing, but you know it’s coming. It’s a natural thing that happens. The renourishment project is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.”
The United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has placed close to 2.5 million cubic yards of sand on the critically eroded beaches of St. Augustine, extending three miles south from Anastasia State Park.
The project cost around $33 million. The USACE is building a beach for storm protection, recreation, and environmental purposes. Namely for sea turtles and shorebirds to nest.
Jason Harrah is a project manager with the USACE Jacksonville division.
“So, it’s kind of a multi-faceted approach, but zooming in on St. Augustine, specifically, we’ve been building this project under federal authorization since about 2003,” Harrah said. “What we’re doing is, we are building about a three-mile project that extends from Anastasia State Park in the north, goes past the pier all the way past a street near the Sea Colony area. And that project gets renourished, typically, every four to five years, or it can be done sooner after major hurricane events.”
With the new sand in place from that project, the USACE said waves and currents would spread the sand to nearby parts of the coast through a process called equilibration.
Harrah explained that section of the coastline near the pier is among the most, if not the most erosive, in all of St. Johns County. For those reasons, he said the goal is to build that area up.
“Essentially, like extra layers on the cake, putting more sand there, knowing that storms will hit that,” Harrah said. “And we want it to do that because then it will move that sand to the southern beaches and fill in the templates all the way down for the three-mile project. So, we kind of built that notch there. We know that the storms are going to start hitting it. It’ll form that cliff, what we call an escarpment that you’re seeing now, and that doesn’t mean the sand is lost.”
The Corps also said in a statement:
“The pace of the re-shaping is in large part dependent of wave and storm activity. The greater the coastal storm activity, the shorter the duration of the equilibration process. In time, the St Augustine Beach Pier will reach out into the ocean again. It would appear that Hurricane Debby has started that process.”
“Mother Nature, I’ve said this before, Mother Nature is going to win no matter what you do,” Rumrell said. “But we still have to protect the assets.”
In the meantime, Larrabee is grateful for the project and all it’s doing to protect this place he loves so much.
“They came in here and did all that restoration, gave us all this beach back,” Larrabee said. “Up there, where the hotel is, there used to be all this sand for people to sit out here. But a couple months ago, you couldn’t, because the water went all the way up to the rocks in front of the front of the hotel. So, it’s a lot better now that we got a beach.”
The beach renourishment project is federally funded.