What DPW and the dunes are doing for us

As you may know, a few years ago the Bradley Beach Department of Public Works began cultivating dunes on our beach, by setting out a row of discarded Christmas trees in the sand, about 20 feet east of the boardwalk. The natural movement of the sand resulted in its piling up on, and eventually burying the trees, and the dunes we have today are the result of that. The Public Works staff works year round on maintaining walkable entryways between the dunes, and preventing the dunes from completely overtaking the boardwalk, by moving sand out from behind the dunes and back onto the beach. Some residents have expressed their disappointment that the dunes have blocked their view of the ocean, from the benches on the boardwalk as well as some homes on Ocean Avenue. There is no denying that this has been a very real loss to some people. On the other hand, the dunes are not only a line of defense against a storm surge, they also keep all that sand (that we taxpayers paid all that federal tax money for) on the beach, instead of on the roadway, lawns, and boardwalk. Which saves the town a considerable amount of labor and fuel, and allows us to keep recycling that sand back out onto the berm of the beach. I want to share some photos I took On October 20th, after a storm. It wasn’t the storm of the century, just a two-day storm with some wind-driven rain.

Here is a series of photos of towns to the south and north of us, and what they looked like after two days of the wind blowing out of the east and northeast. You’ll see how the sand not only buried boardwalks, handicapped access ramps, and benches, it also covered the road, the lawns, and even lawns on the opposite side of Ocean Avenue. Those towns faced a heavy burden for that cleanup, and then just last week experienced another big dump of sand on Ocean Avenue. At the end are some photos of Bradley Beach, by comparison, taken on the same day as the other photos. No sand on the boardwalk, no sand in the road. This is what it looked like 5 miles south of us:

This is what it looked like 4 miles south of us:

The man in the photo below was spending the entire day picking the sand up from one side of the boardwalk, spinning the machine around and dropping it on the other side. As I walked up on the boardwalk to snap a picture of this process, a woman coming off the boardwalk snapped at me, “They do a lousy job.” Huh? Because they didn’t form a human chain in front of the moving sand for the preceding 48 hours?

This is how it looked a few hundred yards to the north of us:

And by contrast, this is what it looked like here in Bradley Beach on the same day: