South Florida's beaches getting a boost. But it's temporary.

he thin sliver of sand on the southern end of Hollywood beach is getting wider by the day.

By Feb. 13, that 1-mile section of beach will be 50 feet wider and 2 feet higher than it was before the sand trucks came.

The battle against sand erosion never ends, experts say, and coastal cities across South Florida are waging an ongoing fight that costs them millions. The cities depend on the beaches for recreation, tourism and the maintenance of real estate values.

Projects that were recently completed or are in the pipeline include:

Bal Harbour Beach: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently dredged 37,000 cubic yards of sand from the Intracoastal Waterway near the Haulover Inlet and pumped it onto Bal Harbour Beach more than a mile away. “They took sand from where they didn’t want it and put it where they did want it,” said Paul Voight, interim beach program manager for Miami-Dade County. The project was completed in December.

Boca Raton finished a $12.5 million restoration of its central and south beach last April. Crews spread 514,000 cubic yards of sand along a 1.45-mile stretch from Red Reef Park to the Boca Raton Inlet. Another mile-long stretch from the inlet to the Deerfield Beach border got 134,000 cubic yards of sand. The central beach project is expected to last 10 years and the south beach restoration will last up to eight years, said Jennifer Bistyga, Boca’s coastal program manager.

Delray Beach: The last beach restoration was completed in 2014 and city officials are gearing up for another one in 2020.

Jupiter: The town’s last beach restoration was completed in 2015. It’s due for another in 2019.

Northern Broward County: In 2016, a 4.9-mile stretch of beach was replenished from Pompano Beach to Fort Lauderdale. The $55.6 million project was 20 years in the making due to concerns over potential damage to sensitive coral reefs off the coast. A year earlier, a $2.1 million project brought 70,000 tons of sand to Deerfield Beach and Hillsboro Beach after Superstorm Sandy eroded the shoreline.

Ocean Ridge: This coastal town just east of Boynton Beach had its last restoration project in 2014. The next project is planned for 2021.

Sunny Isles Beach: An $8.6 million project that just wrapped up brought 140,000 cubic yards of sand to 4,000 feet of eroded shoreline. The sand was trucked in from a sand mine near Lake Okeechobee.

Broward County’s southern beaches south of Port Everglades are next in line for a major sand restoration project.

The work will likely begin in late 2020 or early 2021, said Nicole Sharp, Broward County’s beach erosion administrator.

More than 150 truckloads of sand are being dumped on Hollywood beach daily as part of a $4 million renourishment project. 

(Michael Laughlin)

Fonte: SunSentinel