The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New York District, has completed contracted emergency dredging of an interim 200-foot-wide deep-water passage of ten feet through the highly dynamic Moriches Inlet.
This out-of-cycle emergency work was done to remove the hazardous sand shoals that were closing the inlet and preventing U.S. Coast Guard Search and Rescue vessels from using the inlet to respond to lifesaving missions within Moriches Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, following a series of four unusual Nor’easter storms in March of 2018.
“On April 17th, New York District received an Emergency Declaration from its North Atlantic Division higher headquarters to perform minimal emergency dredging of the Moriches Inlet to restore safe passage for U.S. Coast Guard Search and Rescue vessels ,” USACE said in its latest release.
The expedited work involved dredging and removal of an approximately 120,000 cubic yards of sand to create the 200-foot-wide, 10-foot-deep passage thru the inlet.
The dredged sand was placed five miles west of Moriches Inlet within Smith Point County Park to avoid the Federally-listed endangered bird species’, Piping Plover, shoreline habitat within Smith Point County Park. USACE said that this placement was one mile east of the park pavilion.
The work was accomplished with a contracted cutter-head suction dredge and 30,000 linear feet of pipeline submerged along the shoreline in the Atlantic Ocean to transfer sand five miles westward where bulldozers shaped the sand to match the adjacent areas and provide additional coastal storm risk reduction measures by keeping the sand in the westward moving coastal system.