North Wildwood’s Beach Issue Explained
It’s no secret that North Wildwood has a big problem with its beaches for the upcoming 2023 summer season.
Storms in the Fall and Winter battered the beach causing much of the built-up sand from 2023 to be washed down the coastline to the neighboring town of Wildwood.
North Wildwood’s Beach Issue Explained
While a back-pass, or beach replenishment project would have helped to restore the beaches to their summer norm, this year it is quite impossible to do.
[In the video at the bottom of the page, the Wildwood Video Archive breaks down what the main issue is and what the fix could be for the future. (plus a drone video)]
In a recent press conference, North Wildwood Mayor Patrick Rosenello addressed the pressing concerns of the community regarding the state of the beaches in the area. The mayor’s comments come in response to the increasing number of complaints from beachgoers about the lack of beach during high tide.
The Mayor reported that certain stretches of the beach, particularly between the 3rd to 7th Avenues and the 12th to 16th Avenues, have experienced a considerable loss in sand volume over the winter months.
During high tide, these areas have virtually no dry beach left, and the City’s installation of a steel bulkhead south of 3rd Avenue has prevented severe damage to both public and private property.
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It was their plan to instruct a new bulkhead that would continue up to the North Wildwood Beach Patrol Headquarters, 16th street. As of this week though, this project is off the table due to the pending lawsuit between North Wildwood and New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection.
For many years, the City of North Wildwood would annually undertake sand back-passing projects, utilizing sand resources from the beach of the City of Wildwood. This involved the extraction of sand, which was then loaded onto off-road dump trucks and transported along the beach to North Wildwood, where it would be spread out to form a beach berm.
This was already an alternative project to expanding the beach after dredging Hereford Inlet was deemed to be damaging to the marine life in the area.
The damage to the beach has caused back-passing to be an unrealistic solution.
In order to move the sand from Wildwood to North Wildwood, massive trucks would have to be filled with sand and driven in front of Morey’s Surfside Pier and Sportland Pier and dropped into place.
Twice a month the ocean, at high tide, would come all the way up to the piers making the trip impossible. Crews would then have to reconstruct that section of the beach after the high tide to get the trucks moving again. It was a small inconvenience for a big project.
This year, that process of having to rebuild the beach pass would happen almost twice daily causing most daylight hours to be taken up by just rebuilding the beach pass.
This has caused the city to look for other alternatives. Last month they submitted an application to the DEP for permission to dredge the Inlet, even though it has been rejected in years past.
The hope is the city can dredge that area and fill in the beach, a process that used to happen on our beaches regularly.
In the video below we show what the beaches look like now, and explain the bigger issues mentioned above.
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