North Wildwood Mayor Addresses Beach Issues

North Wildwood Mayor Addresses Beach Issues

North Wildwood’s Mayor, Patrick Rosenello, has taken to social media to address the issues that the city is currently facing with its beaches. In a Facebook post, he provided an update on the current beach situation and unfortunately, the news is not good.

According to the Mayor, certain areas of the beach, specifically 3rd-7th Avenues & 12th-16th Avenues, have lost a significant amount of sand volume this winter. At high tide, there is little to no dry beach left in these areas, and without the steel bulkhead that the City installed south of 3rd Avenue, the destruction to public and private property would have been catastrophic at this point.

For years, the City of North Wildwood would conduct annual sand back-passing projects using sand resources from the City of Wildwood beach. The sand would be harvested and then placed into large off-road dump trucks and transported along the beach to North Wildwood, where it would be spread out to form a beach berm.

However, this year the high tide is up to one or more of the piers twice per day, making it impossible to use this route for the back-passing.

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The Mayor and his team also looked at using street-legal vehicles to move sand either from Wildwood or a quarry onto the beach, but this option is not feasible due to the massive amount of sand required.

Last year, they needed to move 350,000 cubic yards of sand to provide the narrow beach they had. That equates to over 20,000 truckloads of sand. This project would require 60,000 loads of material since the street-legal trucks would not be able to operate on the beach. This number is impossible to accomplish considering the time frame and infrastructure.

The City has asked the New Jersey Legislature to make a special appropriation so that the NJDEP (New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection) could conduct a hydraulic dredge project this year using sand in Hereford Inlet.

However, the request is still pending, and the Mayor does not believe that there is a high likelihood of it happening this year. The larger Hereford Inlet to Cape May Inlet Army Corps/NJDEP project is finally moving after being stalled for ten years, but construction of that project is at least 18-24 months out.

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The Mayor encourages New Jersey residents to contact their local State Legislators and the Governor’s Office and the NJDEP Commissioner’s Office to demand to know why the Wildwoods have only received 3/10 of 1% of all the Shore Protection Funds spent in the past ten years in New Jersey.

As summer approaches, the City will be raking and grading the beach as best as they can. The inlet beach has grown tremendously and can easily accommodate large numbers of people. However, the Mayor cautions everyone against swimming in areas of the inlet beach that do not have lifeguard coverage.

In the coming days, the Mayor will post another update about the status of legal battles with the NJDEP. In the meantime, if you have specific questions that he can address, he asks that you email him at [email protected], and he will try to address your specific questions.