Shell Island Newspaper Articles

Reprinted by permission of The News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina

August 10, 1999

The News & Observer

Florida firm outlines plans to cut new inlet

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Page: A3

WRIGHTSVILLE BEACH -- With the Shell Island Resort and other property in danger of going into the surf, a Florida company is gathering data on moving an inlet upstream.

The Mason Inlet has been slowly eating away the northern tip of Wrightsville Beach. Applied Technology and Management of Gainesville, Fla., plans to cut through Figure Eight Island to open a new inlet, fill in the old inlet to the south and dredge sand clogging Mason Creek.

The cutting process should take only about 48 hours, said Karyn Erickson, who heads the company. But preparations will take much longer.

Applied Technology set up eight recording stations recently to measure currents and surface water height. Workers will create a computer model to simulate different current alignments.

Similar projects have been done only a couple of times, including one along the South Carolina coast by a Jacksonville, Fla., firm.

"You're dealing with some substantial forces," said Erik Olsen, the head of the Jacksonville firm. "You don't want to end up with two inlets or with no inlets at all."

Olsen's team needed three tries to successfully cut a new path for Captain Sam's Inlet 1,300 feet north of Seabrook Island, a community across the inlet from Kiawah Island.

Crews with bulldozers failed to fill in the old inlet fast enough on their first two attempts. On one attempt, they came within feet, but the old inlet punched through at high tide.

"Within 24 hours, there was no evidence that you even tried to move the inlet," he said. "The lesson is, If you don't make it, you better have money to try again."

For the Mason Inlet project, New Hanover County will pay the expected $4.2 million bill out of a beach reservation fund, then charge more than 1,000 residents at Wrightsville Beach and Figure Eight Island, which will build up its beach with the dredged sand.

Spencer Rogers, a coastal geologist with North Carolina Sea Grant, said that "it's clear that this will be one of the most technically challenging permits" state coastal regulators have ever reviewed.

Dredging is at least partially to blame for the current problem.

Daniel Pearson, an independent coastal geologist, has studied the history of the inlet and thinks there is a strong correlation between the dredging and its lurches southward.

Mason Inlet floated south at about eight meters a year between 1887 and 1938, when it was first photographed from above. Aerial photography showed the inlet oscillating north and south until the early 1970s, when it headed south for good.

That shift coincided with the major dredging in the creeks and channels behind Figure Eight Island to build up that island's southern end. Water shooting down the channel slowly built up sand in front of Mason Creek, shutting off flow from the Intracoastal Waterway that had kept the inlet from speeding south.

Since then, a plug of sand blocking flow through Mason Creek, combined with greater dredging in Banks Channel, has helped tidal currents scour away the inlet's southern bank. Without the changes, Pearson said, the inlet would have moved southward at a much slower rate, and remained clear of the Shell Island Resort for at least another 70 years.

Section: News
Edition: Final
Estimated Printed Pages: 2

Index Terms:
NC
coast
Mason Inlet

Copyright 1999 by The News & Observer Pub. Co.

Record Number: 1999221082