Could a new inlet cut off Holgate?

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From yesterday's Asbury Park Press...

Could a new inlet cut off Holgate?
Once more, into LBI's breach

LONG BEACH TOWNSHIP — The last storm of September that scoured Long Beach Island has some people at its southern tip dreading a repeat of 1920, when a gale punched a new Beach Haven Inlet through the island.

"You can see that happening throughout the Holgate peninsula," said Murphy Flynn, an engineer and surfer who led the Army Corps of Engineers feasibility study for replenishing the island's beaches with new sand pumped from the sea floor.

"Should it breach closer to the developed areas — there's been more homes and businesses built there since the 1990s . . . and (a new inlet) is not going to care which way it widens."

The storm and new moon tides of Sept. 25 and 26 narrowed the beach at the Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge Holgate Unit, leading the township and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to close the beach last weekend. Even after it reopened, mobile surf fishermen were blocked at high tide.

"I took a ride out to go fishing. It was three hours after high tide and your tires were still wet," said Don Kartan of the Holgate section of Long Beach Township. "If you're a business or a homeowner here, you don't want to lose that."

Longtime residents say the westward-sweeping concave curve in the beach at the north end of the refuge has gotten deeper this year. However, refuge manager Steven Atzert said the Fish and Wildlife Service is adamantly against allowing the federal-state replenishment project into the Holgate unit.

"The reason we're not (participating) is it's part of the national wilderness system. The type of equipment you'd have to bring on the beach is not allowed," Atzert said, citing the federal Wilderness Act of 1964.

Long Beach Township Mayor Joseph H. Mancini says he's not impressed with that argument.

"To me, it's totally irresponsible," Mancini said.

He says sand from the lengthening southern tip of the refuge is shoaling the Intracoastal Waterway channel, and suggests those shoals could be a sand source for the ocean beach — if the Army corps pumps it out as a navigation project.

Flynn, the former Army corps coastal engineer, said one answer could be to stockpile sand just north of the refuge property during the beach replenishment, so some of it drifts southward into the refuge, to widen the beach against the possibility of an inlet breakthrough.

In his time with the Army corps, one issue over replenishment was its likely effect on piping plovers, an endangered species of small, beach-nesting shorebirds that live in the refuge. After a disastrous 2008 nesting season when storms were a factor, additional sand could only help the birds, Flynn contends.

"The wildlife agency's decision has a direct effect on Long Beach Township," Flynn said. "To me, Long Beach Township should be going to bat for that."

Factors already are in place for an inlet breakthrough, he says: a narrowed beach, washovers into the dune area on storm tides, and the deep bay channel behind, where "you've got 30 feet of water immediately adjacent, so you've got potential for a strong, outgoing storm tide.

"When it happens, it's going to be spectacular."
Tucker's Island

Coastal scientists call such inlet-birthing events blowouts, and the scenario is far from unprecedented at Holgate. The south end of Long Beach Island has seen geologic change on a human time scale, most famously with the disappearance of Tucker's Island, which was a 5-mile long barrier island between Long Beach Island and Little Egg Inlet. It arguably became New Jersey's first beach resort, when settler Reuben Tucker opened his home to visitors in the late 1700s.

Once the site of a lighthouse, two hotels and a small village called Sea Haven, Tucker's Island began to erode dramatically in the early 20th century after a new Beach Haven Inlet opened in a 1920 storm. The lighthouse fell into the sea in October 1927, and in 1934 the Coast Guard station there was abandoned.

"That's happened six or seven times in the last couple of hundred years," said professor Stewart Farrell, director of the Center for Coastal Sciences at Richard Stockton College, which measures beach height and width all along the Jersey Shore.

"The place where it usually goes through is a little north of the refuge. . . . When it went through in 1920, Tucker's Beach became Tucker's Island again. Then the inlet migrated south, and that took care of the rest of the island."

As Tucker's Island shrank, the south end of Holgate accreted sand and advanced southward, until the tip of Long Beach Island finally occupied a space westward of the vanished island, said Farrell, who has studied the Little Egg Inlet system for decades.

The system still is in flux; in the mid-1990s, a new sandbar appeared inside Little Egg Inlet, and was immediately dubbed the new Tucker's Island by boaters who partied there.

At the north end of the refuge, "the cut has been there 25 years, and it's just getting worse," Farrell said. The indent is an effect of human intervention in the sand stream that flows southward along Long Beach Island, he said.

"It curls westward because the sand supply is restricted by 98 groins (farther north) along the island," Farrell said.
Unintended consequences

Groins, the stone structures popularly called jetties, began to appear along the Shore after punishing storms in the 1920s pushed beaches back toward newly valuable real estate. One groin built then south of Beach Haven may have had a role in the demise of Tucker's Island, and refuge manager Atzert said the last groin in Holgate contributes to the beach cut.

"If they were to cut off that groin, that would solve the problem," Atzert said.

He said Flynn's idea of concentrating replenishment sand just north of the refuge is valid, too.

"There is about a 500-foot stretch of beach immediately south of the bulkhead (beyond the end of Long Beach Boulevard) that is not part of the refuge," Atzert said. "If people want to put sand there, we wouldn't have a problem with that. Double- or triple-stack it."

Direct replenishment onto the refuge would disrupt the environment used by endangered species, and "you end up with a sterile pile of sand," Atzert said.

Flynn disputes that, recalling how birds colonized replenished beaches in Cape May County. Now, the Army corps has a priority on environmental restoration projects, and restoring coastal wildlife habitat is one of its goals, he added.

If the south end of Holgate were to detach, the Fish and Wildlife Service would find itself managing an island refuge without the four-wheel-drive access that has been a source of bitter contention between fishermen and the service for years. But considering the 20th-century history of Tucker's Island, there's no telling how long it would last.

In June 1960, the National Audubon Society bequeathed Holgate to the federal government for the token price of $10, and the property then was 256 acres above mean high water, Atzert said. By the time a township tax map was drawn again in 1989, the Holgate Unit had nearly 439 acres, he said.

"We grew about 200 acres. We're still gaining land," Atzert said. "The whole south end of the island is moving west and getting longer."

In a 2006 report, the Stockton research center noted that from 1899 through 1994, the westward migration of Holgate created a 700- to 900-foot offset in the eastern edge of the barrier island — by far the most dramatic difference in the Ocean County coastline, and perhaps a harbinger of what beaches would do without human intervention.

That's lengthening the outflow tidal channel in the bay, and increasing the chances for a blowout, Flynn said. Typically that can happen during a hurricane or strong northeast gale, when successive high tides wash over dunes and raise water levels in the bay. The trigger is a sudden wind shift that pushes that water onto the barrier beach's western shore, Farrell said.

"The overwash is going to happen early in the wildlife refuge. Piece of cake," Farrell said.

"Whether it breaks through is a hydraulic issue," if overflowing water from the bay concentrates in a low spot, and "it can channel and start carving away," he said.

"The likelihood of it happening in a really serious (storm) event is a probability," Farrell said, noting that the March 1962 storm cut two major inlets across Long Beach Island that were filled in by dredge crews.
Possible solutions

"There is not much we can do down there," said Ed Voight, a spokesman for the Army corps district office in Philadelphia.

The closest inlet maintenance project is at Barnegat Light, at the other end of the island, with "no vehicle for getting it there."

Some Holgate residents say they could use some of the sand that's built up 2,400 feet wide on the beach south of the jetty at Barnegat Light since the project at that inlet was completed in the early 1990s. But state regulations don't allow quarrying the sand.

Mayor Mancini may have a point about that sandbar at the Intracoastal Waterway, Voight said: "If New Jersey paid the corps, we could do that. But they could contract that work themselves."

The state has a $25 million shore protection fund, and municipalities can request emergency beach funding. At the moment, the state Department of Environmental Protection is waiting for word on the Army corps' review of bid proposals to begin a new phase of beach replenishment at Harvey Cedars on the northern reach of Long Beach Island, and the borough's resolution of access easements from oceanfront property owners, said Elaine Makatura, a DEP spokeswoman.