Outdoors Maryland; 806

Coming up. As the Atlantic's late summer fury rakes in Maryland's beach use coastal residents worry an acetate guy would survive the seas relentless pounding. Outdoors where with this produced in cooperation with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources DNR inspired by nature. A crisp autumn afternoon on the wild unspoiled beaches of Pasadena.

Tiny Santa tiptoe through the incoming surf. A small herd of the island's wild ponies searched the dunes for tender shoots of grass deer try to stay hidden in the underbrush. The pelicans are moving south. A good afternoon for a nature lover like you who's been walking on beaches for decades. Right now I'm thinking about South. North.

The timeless movement of sand on the shore is what drives barrier islands like acid ocean currents and waves the forces of nature the tug and pull of the barrier island are at play here. Yes it is so beautiful. It just keeps on moving relentlessly. It's moving all the time and all the time I am down grill. But that's. That's a natural process. Marshy land across the water. That's what this barrier island was called by the Indians of the Algonquin Nation. It is a national seashore a wildlife refuge and a Maryland State Park today a place then and now where a man encounters the raw strength and beauty of nature at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Right now the ocean looks here. And very very enticing. When we have a storm. It can take a totally different look.

City guy Island is a place of sharp contrasts. Storms bring change and new life to the island. But they also bring beach erosion. Acetate has absorbed the brunt of the ocean's fury for hundreds of years. But now the National Park Service which manages the ass at the National Seashore is worried that the island could be permanently breached and over time gradually break up. Park officials say the long term consequences could be severe if nothing is done to shore up the island. Karl Zimmerman is a resource management specialist with the National Park. And this is pretty much a consensus decision by the Coastal geologist to work and study northern asked to get in. Barring any action at all as well as a gradual

fragmentation and disappearance the solution of the well the island the erosion that's occurring on organized Bay continues to work farther and farther south. They were like a cancer eating away at Northern US take if you will a cancer is not going to stop. It's going to continue to go up to the point where ultimately we'll just lose a large portion of the island. This is what the northern tip of the island just south of Ocean City it looked like in 1901 a wide swath of sand dunes stretching south off the coast of Maryland. Now eight years later there's been a dramatic change. A large section of the northern end of the island has been reduced to nothing more than a thin strip of sand. Concerns about beach erosion grew sharply in 1998 when Hurricane Bonnie threatened to hit Asadi with the storm still hours away the Park Service closed down the

bridge to the national seashore and told all visitors to leave. Park officials were closely monitoring the location of the hurricane. You're. Going to have you're going to get well. The park service was most concerned about this man on a half long area in the northern part of the island that was flattened by two winter storms in 1998. Four to five feet of sand was washed away. Leaving only roots of trees behind. The air behind us is very very low. The lower portion we have right now to really doesn't take much of a high tide or wave action to push water right across the island. It's not expected the storm which at best was a can we can tell right now we have tropical storm strength but it has never asked. They will indeed have this part of the island

underwater. Intermittent rain squalls and rising surf meant the storm was closing in. Bulldozers with the Army Corps of Engineers plowed into the search. The only means of transportation on the now over washed beach. Coast Guard patrols urged most boaters to stay in the harbor. An exception was made for a tour boat captain Phil Neilson on the sturdy 65 foot vessel the angler which was staying inside the barrier island in Santa Paxson Bay.

He'll land on the left leg as young as the northernmost portion of the city guy on acid he grounds of barrier island thirty seven miles deep scratch all the way to Virginia. They're saying that this morning at that high water down on the North Carolina beaches they were up to 15 feet. Well it's it's very possible that that sometime just this evening or tomorrow morning at high water. With Bonnie bearing down. Captain Neilson gave his passengers a firsthand look at the effect of recent storms not only on acetate but also on the homes on the mainland. Here's the area just ahead of us which is no vegetation and now what about the next two miles was Levy washed over in January that where you had you know the the homes on the right actually had water from ocean front property for about a week something or a vacuum. My father. With a. Bad lot. So I laughed again. Several thousand people live on the mainland directly across from the northern end of a city Guyland. One of the hardest hit in those winter storms was the tiny bayside community of Snug

Harbor. All day people were busy securing their homes and their boats preparing for Bonnie. A beautiful place until you are calm. But when the storm of this nature comes at. 88 year old Raymond Hallman a retired fishing captain was getting ready to evacuate. Everything that I have here on the porch has been tied down so that it won't wash away and boys into the house. As far as inside I moved everything up as high as I can get it so that their water will not ruin it. But tonight I'm leaving because when there's an I'm foot surge which they claim it might be. We can't stand it. It may be that the House will be here after tonight home and vividly remembers the storm of 1992. I looked out my bedroom window. And I saw something white. I said to my wife what is that what I can't identify. She said that's the top of your

car. She had thought that her car had already been washed away. And invent wasn't visible anywhere. So yeah we had wave action quite a lot. Homans neighbor Joe Smith was also making last minute preparations since the barricades not going to hit that I was going to say. 80 90 mile an hour winds I think. Smith and his wife Mary retired to Snug Harbor six years ago. In that time they say the dunes on Northern acetate have shrunk and now give them virtually no protection. One time when we moved down here. We couldn't see the. Ocean. From. Our porch and. Now you can walk or is. There any more. It's very beautiful for me to sit and look at it every morning. And I enjoy seeing yourself there. But I do know it's protection for us.

Fortunately for the residents of Snug Harbor hurricane Bonnie veered away. Even before this past year's storms the National Park Service had a plan and a way to restore sand to us a big island. To deal with the erosion. They are proposing a multi-year project that could cost as much as 60 million dollars over the next 25 years. Most of the project would be federally funded initially through the Army Corps of Engineers and then later through the National Park Service. Normally the Park Service opposes beach repair projects but acetate is an exception. The reason Ocean City which lies just to the north across an inlet from the northern tip of Asadi the manmade jetties of the ocean city inlet put in some 60 years ago to keep the inlet open for boats have diverted the normal flow of sand.

The beaches on Northern Asadi have suffered the consequences. Those Jedi got stabilized and what has acted like a dam on a river of sand that naturally in this part of the country was north south. That constant flow of sand is what sustains the barrier on. And with that dam the flow of sand has been cut off. Man interfering with nature. The Park Service is trying to correct that in a perfect world we'd remove those jetties and let the inlet close or remain open as it would and that would be the end of it. We have a basically natural system. Because that stabilized unlike that navigable one letter so important to convolutions that it's probably not going to go away. Having your future. In August of 1998 the Army Corps of Engineers working with the Park Service began what was called an emergency Band-Aid proposal to shore up the most severely storm damaged stretch of beach. Is the Army Corps ecologist assigned to the project was publicly

covered up before the nor'easter January February 98 and now that much material but we're putting sand on the road. We think we're going to end up with. A project here is to just put the sand source back to where Mother Nature put. We're just trying to establish a natural condition and let Mother Nature take whatever course it's going to. The Army Corps contracted out the emergency retriever project to a specialized dredging company from New Jersey. By day. It was an easy day for Captain Dan seaman. The seas were calm as he left Ocean City. His job on the boat the captain Tom was to make the daily runs from Ocean City to the 300 foot long harbor dredge which was pumping sand from the bottom of the ocean off the

coast of Massachusetts. The hopper dredge vessel took the sand from great gold by just four miles offshore and then pumped it onto the beach. The chief engineer of the dredge vessel is Rick Bradley. We have called whores. On the computer that tell us where to dig. We run. That overboard and lower the drag of the. Jet high pressure water. Lets off the material and they go slowly and pump it into the harbor. Which raises it to a pub but we. Will go. Through a loading hose. And pump the short. Half way through the two week long project. Bob llama made his second trip out to the dredge

ship to check on the team's progress. That's very good. The. Lighter brown sand. Little. Tickets on the beach and make out. Someone. Very. Good. Medium. Or stand. And a very good living. Off of me. And. Now. Matter of. Fact. This emergency beach repair project was a bonanza for an army of seagulls feeding on the wealth of food gushing forth from the pipes. Biologist could take both sides of this. This equation and some people might say where you're dredging you're destroying them have it and other people you say were you placing it

near acidly one of your prating. And. I look at it as a creation of heaven for sustaining of the natural habitat which is there. And I. Just feel like we're just letting nature I'll say. Detrimental impact. One hundred forty three thousand cubic yards of sand humped on to the beach. Like mechanized sculptors with mounds of play. Bulldozers pushed and he the wet sand into a berm on the edge of the ocean. We're not trying to bend the Iowan to our wish to air our desire. We're trying to eliminate. The influence that people had on it to date. And try to restore if we can. One of the most fundamental processes which

drives a barrier island which which is responsible for its expression and how it functions. And that's the sand supply to the island that's been cut off by those jetties. After nearly two weeks the Army Corps completed the emergency project. Carlos Zimmerman was policed. So if you look out towards the ocean you'll see that we're about the same height now. As that Ocean Bar. If you look off to this side of the island you can see basically the before very very low. A lot of standing water down there. We weren't out here trying to create a down. We're basically trying to replace the sand that was lost by those storms and recreate that elevation. We didn't want to have an artificially high barrier. Basically just to give us some sand out here in the hopes that during in a future storm the energy of the storm would be absorbed by the sand and prevent the ound from raging in this area. The park has more extensive plans to restore much of the eroded beach by adding more

sand over a five mile area actually widening the beach on the ocean side by about 100 feet. And then each year pumping more sand into the surf to keep up a steady supply. There would still be overwash which the rare piping clover needs for nesting but it would be much less severe allowing this section of the island to stabilize. But to do it and be effective and really try to solve the problem it's going to be a multiple year effort it's going be a forever kind of effort as long as we expect as a dig to try and function as a natural barrier island there. We're going to have to work to get the sand to the island. That's only the barest little fix just a Band-Aid. So if we don't do anything other than this it's going to be a Jonah from rural land form that's not going to be here more than a couple years at most. Funding for these proposals has not yet been approved by Congress but the restoration projects have been widely applauded by key legislators in Maryland's congressional delegation and

most county and city officials in the area. Many scientists support the beach repair project as well here. Yes the love birds here like local ecologist Judith Stribling a professor at Salisbury State University she's been studying the marshes on the western side of acetate Island with her students in a typical salt marsh. What happens is you may get a really high tide that brings in salty water and then sits there for weeks and evaporates for days anyway. Stribling and her students have been looking at the harmful impact of overgrazing by the island's wild ponies. The city horses have a tendency to come back to the same areas to graze over and over again. They tend to graze right along the water's edge very heavily cut that grass down to very little. And I think. Over time. Erosion because the grass isn't as able to stabilize so well. The overwash events were much more severe the storms were very severe the ocean would come crashing across

the entire island and really kind of take out everything in its wake so the marshes weren't able to survive that to withstand that onslaught of really heavy waves. The tidal marshes are prime feeding areas not only for the island's ponies but for birds. They're also a fertile nursery for young fish. More needs to be done Stribling says to build up a city's marshes and general you know as far as I'm concerned the more marshes you have the better. The only way those marshes are going to restore themselves to be able to recover is if the stability is restored. The stabilization of the north then by constructing this berm with the replenishment program. Should allow for a more stable habitat for the SOT much so that if the salt marshes were able to reestablish itself it would be you know a healthier environment for it. But there are some critics. Several state wide environmental groups are opposed to the beach repair

projects. So is Ilya for how low growing plant was beautiful and bring it out of. Here. There is a member of the acetate coastal Trust an organization which has been working to preserve acetate gallon for nearly 30 years. The trust supports the park speech repair project but she does not. I think a lot of people on the mainland asked as a barrier to keep them protected in the event of a storm they think this is the year that's going to see the ocean from lapping at their doorstep but this is only sand at it's going to get washed through while we get a big enough storm the whole island is in the blocks and all the things you see around here have acclimated to the fact that temporary landform. Here is part of the acetate road.

Points to the see better Graham Ange of an old paved road built on acetate Garland by developers some 40 years ago as proof that the park's beach restoration project would last. This road has been devastated by storms. It was a storm of 1962 that. Started to break it off and since then subsequent storms have been. Showing the power of the ocean and why it's anything. Permanent sought out of barrier island. 4000 years ago a city Guyland was several miles further out to sea in perpetual slow motion the island has rolled over itself. Century after century moving westward even has higher sea levels have eaten away at the mainland. The park says it's not trying to stop Mother Nature or tamper with the forces that drive a barrier island.

Everything that we've done here at the national seashore in the past decade has been geared towards trying to be compatible with the basic nature of this island that it is a changeable dynamic place. So we really don't see ourselves in a battle with nature but trying to do our job we're like one of the jobs which is to provide an area for people to recreate and enjoy this island do in a way that's compatible with the island and how it wants to function. We're not trying to drive the island to a particular condition. Or make it stay the same or or have a look at a certain way. We're trying to reestablish that sand that's no longer getting here. And and once that's done. The island's going to be completely free to respond however it will as dictated by those other forces of nature storm or sea level rise winds and tides. 60 years ago when a big storm carved out the Ocean City and one man interfered with the forces of nature by building the jetties to keep that narrow waterway navigable and

protected. It worked. But there was a price. The battered beaches of Northern Assoc are. Now a man is trying to restore those beaches in a struggle to redirect the flow of sand at the edge of the sea to save a barrier island.