Warning! Totally unrelated to sailing and with a political bent!
The County's contractor will happily remove it for you (they're being paid by the load) if you will sign a release and right of entry. I declined to do so. They excavated my yard anyway, along with my front step, protected sea oats (my front yard was in much better shape than the back), and water meter . Just goes to show why they wanted the release. Since I hadn't signed one, I got a new water meter courtesy of the County. The folks with the water company are up in arms because (at last count) 62 water meters and 15 fire hydrants had been torn out in the contractor's zeal for sheer volume. I think more (or any) oversight is needed.
The County paid around $20 million for a beach renourishment project over the last two years, which extended the beach seaward about 100-300 yards in all the tourist areas. Most residents were not really in favor of the project. All that sand in the pictures is the poorly sorted, uncompacted stuff that was pumped up from the bottom to give the hotels more room to pack 'em in. My opinion (and I have some background in this area) is that we paid a premium price for a poorly executed job. Lessons learned from other renourishment projects in the state were apparently ignored. It is very tough to make a case for trying to manage a barrier island, which by it's very nature moves around a lot. If you choose to build or live on one, you need to be fully prepared to lose everything. That goes for residences, hotels and businesses. Ivan proved that spending money to add land to a barrier island at best irrevocably alters the natural system and at worst is simply futile. You have to agree to radically change the island by putting in baffles, breakwaters, jetties, spits, etc., or you have to accept that whatever sand you throw up will be washed away, probably pretty quickly, and you'll have the previous shoreline to look at again soon.
In any case, the County's contractor is staging all the sand it collects to be sifted, sorted, and put back onto the beach. There are great mountains of orange and gray tinted sand peppered with debris awaiting treatment. Ivan, like Opel nine years ago, exposed more of the purportedly illegal orange clay roadbed and building foundations that ostensibly don't exist on the white sand island.
Of course, a discussion of the cost of having unenforced laws on the books doesn't belong here any more than the rest of this rant. Hopefully, you stopped reading this at line one. This is the sort of post I hate to see on Cat Sailor, but at least you now know what the plan is for the sand. I am paying my contractor to carefully excavate my back yard to prevent doing any additional damage, and some of the sand I will keep on the property to begin a small-scale dune restoration anchored with sea oats. The rest is being moved to the right-of-way where it is enthusiastically received by a dump truck driver who hears the cash register chime each time he drives by my house.
