Repairs made last week to a 5-foot escarpment, or drop-off, on Wrightsville Beach were washed away after a storm packing heavy winds and rain hit the area on Christmas Day.
Staff from the Wrightsville Beach public works department had made the repairs on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, using a front-end loader to scoop wet sand from the lower portion of the beach and dump it onto the escarpment edge. The front-end loader then smoothed out the sand, lessening the sharp drop-off of the escarpment.
However, on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, the escarpment was back, stretching from about Fayetteville Street to the north and Stone Street to the south. It reaches about 1 foot at its lowest point, near Johnnie Mercer’s Pier, to more than 5 feet at its highest, near Raleigh and Charlotte streets.
“This is going to be an ongoing issue,” public works director Mike Vukelich said Wednesday. “It’s very difficult to control Mother Nature.”
Even though much of the repairs have been washed away, Vukelich said he was pleased with the town’s new process of using wet sand to make the escarpment repair.
“Based on what I saw last week, I am pleased that we didn’t take sand from the dry area of the beach and throw it into the ocean,” he said. “If it washes away, we’re just taking the beach away.”
The escarpment originally formed in early October, after a nor’easter skirted Wrightsville’s coastline at the same time that the area experienced abnormally high lunar tides. Escarpments are “normal beach features on every single beach,” said Spencer Rogers, North Carolina Sea Grant coastal construction and erosion specialist. “They’re more common in nourishment projects.”
Another byproduct of the spring renourishment project was black “mud balls,” which had appeared along the escarpment in November, and reappeared this week. The black balls measure about 3-4 inches in diameter at their smallest, and about 8 inches at their largest.
“What happens is, I don’t think they had as much sand available in some of the spots in Banks Channel that they usually use,” Rick Catlin, environmental engineer and chairman of the North Carolina Beach Inlet and Waterway Association, explained last month. “So they get a little bit of silt through the dredge, and as that silt and clay rolls down the pipe, it forms a ball.”
The mud balls were likely buried under layers of sand during the renourishment process. When the escarpments were carved into the beach by Mother Nature, the balls were dug up.
“I’ve seen the escarpments and the clay balls in every renourishment cycle,” Catlin said.
Due to the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, Vukelich said that the public works staff is stretched to its limits this week and will likely not have the man hours to repeat the escarpment repairs.
He did say that he would continue monitoring the situation, and if repairs are needed later, public works will perform them.
“Most likely, we’ll try to do something,” he said. “I’m not sure there is a whole lot we can do that will have a long-term effect. But we’ll keep trying.”
Public works posted signs warning of the steep drop-off on Nov. 8.
The signs remain in place between Stone and Fayetteville streets.
