A day at the beach

Written by Michael Fickes

For Ocean City, life really is a beach. Situated off the coast of Maryland, the island — which is 10 miles long and three blocks wide — is a year-round resort offering miles of sandy beaches on the Atlantic Ocean.

Ocean City’s population hovers around 7,000 during the winter but explodes to 300,000 in the summer, when the town becomes the second most populous municipality in the state. Real estate valued at approximately $4 billion accommodates the infusion of tourists and provides tax revenue to the town and Worcester County. “Ocean City is 10 miles of intensely developed beachfront and an economic tourism engine for the state,” says City Manager Dennis Dare.

As in Ocean City and other communities, beaches can drive the local economy, or, in some communities, they may serve primarily as a quality-of-life amenity. In either case, cities and counties invest in beach maintenance for one purpose: preservation.

Equipment basics

Eleven years ago, beach maintenance was actually a shrinking problem in Ocean City. According to Dare, the island loses about two feet of real estate to erosion each year. In 1991, the beach width was only 60 feet, but today — thanks to an ongoing replenishing program — the beach stretches 200 feet wide.

Bruce Gibbs, superintendent of maintenance and public works for Ocean City, oversees daily maintenance for the restored beach. He manages an annual budget of approximately $440,000, which covers the payroll (34 full-time employees and three part-time employees), and maintenance and renewal of the department’s equipment inventory.

Beach preparation and maintenance is labor-intensive and requires multiple pieces of equipment, Gibbs says. “We have six tractors and operate four at a time,” he explains. “We use the tractors to drag the beach with heavy timbers, leveling out piles of sand. Then we switch to 14-foot rakes, which loosen the sand and make it soft. Finally, we go back over the beach with sanitizers. These are mechanized conveyor belts that sift through the sand, pick up debris and dump the debris into a hopper.” During the tourist season, when the beaches are heavily populated during the day, the crews work unnoticed, from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. each night.

Like Ocean City, San Diego recently restored its beaches — 27-and-a-half miles of coastline that include numerous public beaches and more than 11 miles of shoreline and beaches in the Mission Bay Aquatic Park. (Owned by the city, the Mission Bay park is an enclosed bay with a channel to the ocean.)

“In the winter, the higher tides caused by storms from the north erode these beaches, and there is no sand for people to sit on,” says Dennis Simmons, beach maintenance manager for San Diego. “In the spring, currents and swells from the south create a natural sand transport system that washes the sand back onto the beaches.”

In the early 1990s, winter storms eroded the beaches in Southern California so completely that the natural renewal system failed to return the sand. A massive dredging and replenishing program corrected the problem last year.

Today, with an operating budget of $3.5 million, Simmons directs a maintenance crew of 22 people and another eight people who provide support for irrigation, erosion control and construction projects. Equipment purchases and maintenance costs range between $1.75 million and $2 million annually.

“Basic beach maintenance includes raking and screening the sand,” Simmons says. “We have four tractors that pull screens and rakes. They’re on the beaches five days a week. On Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays, we service the ocean front beaches. We do Mission Bay beaches on Wednesdays and Thursdays.”

Waste and weed management

Of course, where there are crowds, there is trash, and nowhere is that more true than on a beach. In addition to raking and screening the sand, maintenance departments try to divert as much trash from the beach as possible. In Ocean City, the beach maintenance crews place 700 55-gallon trashcans and 200 recycling containers along the beach, while in San Diego, the crews set out 1,000 55-gallon trashcans.

Both cities are using collection vehicles with automated arms to help manage garbage pickup. “Ten years ago, we dumped the trashcans by hand,” Gibbs says. “Buying the automated equipment took us from a nine-person trash collection operation to a two-person operation.”

Automation also is helping San Diego crews manage trash of another sort. Modified front-end loaders are used to empty the ash from fire rings, or beach grills, on a regular basis. Additionally, kelp washes onto shore regularly, and crews are dispatched with modified front-end loaders and trucks to collect the seaweed and transport it to a maintenance facility.

The modified front-end loaders have front buckets with forked tines and heavy rakes on the rear. The rakes move the kelp into piles, and the tined buckets load the piles into the trucks.

The kelp is stored in piles, separated according to the beach on which it was collected. As the piles decompose, they leave residues of sand that washed up with the kelp. The sand is returned to its beach of origin, while the kelp piles are stored until winter, when they are used to build storm berms on beaches lacking seawalls. (According to Simmons, the kelp berms are 15 feet tall and 30 feet wide, and they extend up to three-quarters of a mile.)

The berms are particularly necessary on three beaches, where they protect the lifeguard towers. (In San Diego, the lifeguard towers are permanent concrete and brick structures that accommodate lifeguards 24 hours a day. They include sleeping quarters, cooking facilities and observation decks.)

“We remove the berms in the spring as we prepare for the summer season,” Simmons says. “We knock them down and spread them over the beaches, removing whatever kelp hasn’t decomposed.”

Even when seawalls are in place, maintenance crews must ensure they are not compromised, Gibbs notes. When summer ends, the Ocean City maintenance crews strip the beach of trashcans and erect a sand fence along the bayside, at the south end of the beach. The fence prevents sand from blowing onto the nearby boardwalk and piling up at the base of the seawall. “We have to keep the sand away from the seawall,” Gibbs says. “If sand builds up, high surf can get over the seawall during a winter storm.”

Environmental challenges

As San Diego’s kelp problem suggests, many beach maintenance challenges — and often the biggest ones — are environmental rather than manmade. That is the case in Minneapolis, where beach maintenance crews fight algae and aquatic vegetation annually at the lakeshore beaches.

Few people may think of Minneapolis as a beach community, but the city has six natural lakes with 11 sand beaches. The largest of the lakes, Calhoun, is three miles in circumference and accommodates three public beaches. The remaining lakes offer one or two beaches each.

Algal blooms are not uncommon in the late summer heat, according to Bill Olson, supervisor of park maintenance for Minneapolis. When they occur, they are treated with alum, applied by the environmental unit of the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board.

Of greater concern to Olson is the proliferation of Eurasian water milfoil, a plant sold for home aquariums but introduced into the area lakes through drainage systems. “Eurasian milfoil has no natural enemies and grows like wildfire,” Olson says. “We now have it in all six of our lakes. We use two weed-cutter boats that cut the tops off of the vegetation and remove it from the lake with a conveyor. The debris that doesn’t come up on the conveyor often ends up on shore, and we rake that off and haul it away.”

While Minneapolis’s major challenges come in the form of encroaching vegetation, San Diego is facing a problem with encroaching fish. The grunion, a small fish living along the Southern California and Mexico coastline, spawns on beaches during high tide. The female comes ashore and burrows in the sand to deposit eggs, and she is followed by the male, which comes ashore to fertilize the eggs.

“Grunion run year round, with April and May as the primary season,” Simmons says. “From May through September, we modify our practices in terms of raking the sand and gathering kelp. We check the tide lines, look for evidence of spawning, and restrict beach maintenance to areas further back. We’ve been doing this since before I arrived 10 years ago.” San Diego’s Park and Recreation Department, which oversees the city’s beaches, is cooperating with Pepperdine University on a study to determine the effect of beach maintenance on grunion spawning practices.

Simmons is similarly vigilant about the effect of beach maintenance on the breeding practices of the Least Tern. The endangered bird nests in the inner tidal zone of Mission Bay.

“During the nesting and breeding seasons, we restrict our maintenance operations,” Simmons says. “In fact, as part of our beach maintenance operation, we prepare Least Tern nesting sites. We have permanently fenced off certain areas where breeding pairs have been observed. As the breeding season approaches, we go inside the fence, weed the site, remove trash and clear the area. We also put out decoys to attract the birds. So we actively participate in the preparation of this habitat.”

Their work is dedicated to preserving wildlife habitat, recreational opportunities and local economies, yet beach maintenance crews often go unnoticed. That is fine by Simmons. “Most people will probably say that they never see the beaches being maintained,” he says. “That’s because we do most of our work early in the morning, starting around 5 a.m. We want an invisible operation that produces visible results.”

Michael Fickes is a Baltimore-based freelance writer.