Some beaches to close as $15M beach restoration project begins in N. Wildwood

Storm-driven erosion has shrunk the beach at high tide on Seventh Avenue in North Wildwood to a skinny version of its former self.

A once 70-foot-wide dune has been wiped out.

Starting this week, the state of New Jersey will begin beefing up the stretch of beach, as well as others, in North Wildwood as part of an eagerly anticipated taxpayer-funded emergency replenishment project for the resort community.

“We’ve been coming down to the beach for years, and we’ve watched it go from larger to smaller,” Jim Brown of Clifton Heights said Monday as he walked the promenade in front of the beach with Jen Wark. “It’s been pretty considerable. If it’s high tide, you’re sitting on top of each other.”

It couldn’t come soon enough for Mayor Patrick Rosenello and state officials, who’ve been in a spat since 2022 over how and when to tackle the work.

Crews began moving equipment into place last week, including a half-mile long pipe that will take wet sand from the ocean floor and carry it to the beach.

Dredge vessels were on their way Monday, expected to start pumping sand within the next few days under a project managed by the New Jersey Department of Transportation’s Office of Maritime Resources. Work is being carried out by H & L Contracting and Great Lakes Dredge & Dock.

New Jersey has pledged $10 million to the project so far. North Wildwood will contribute $5.1 million. Crews will spread hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of sand onto the beaches, aiming to finish by July 4. About 1,000-foot stretches of beach will be closed at a time. They will reopen to beachgoers as they are finished.

The contractors will start this week by pumping sand onto the beach at Seventh Avenue and will then make their way north to the jetty at Second Avenue and John F. Kennedy Boulevard. Once that section is complete, the contractors will return to Seventh Avenue and continue dredging south.

The state on Monday said “the dredge was water-tested and is being prepped for its move through the inland waterway from Atlantic City to Hereford Inlet in North Wildwood. The dredge should be in place late tomorrow (Tuesday) and dredging is expected to commence on Wednesday.”

North Wildwood officials and the state agreed to the emergency dredging project in April. The deal is the result of a dispute between the resort town and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection that began in the summer of 2022.

At the time, North Wildwood’s beaches had been badly battered by a series of storms. So the town set out to grade and erect barriers on its own when the DEP stepped in to stop the work, saying the methods the town planned to use would only worsen erosion.

State officials wanted the community to wait for a long-term, multi-community project for years with the U.S. Army Corps to better address erosion. But that project isn’t expected to start until next spring, and there is no timeline yet for when crews would get to North Wildwood’s beaches.

So North Wildwood set out on its own to reshape its beaches, leading the state’s Department of Environmental Protection to step in and halt work.

But Rosenello said the beaches could not wait for that work to start and continued a public spat with the DEP that resulted in the town filing a lawsuit last year.

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The current dredge project is a temporary fix.

Rosenello, a Republican, lauded the Democratic Murphy administration and called the emergency project a bipartisan effort. He also credited State Sen. Michael Testa Jr., a Republican, with working with state officials.

“The governor and his team have engaged directly with the mayor and North Wildwood community to address this issue and will continue to work collaboratively to identify a solution to mitigate erosion in North Wildwood,” said Natalie Hamilton, Murphy’s press secretary.

Rosenello said the emergency work will leave a beach berm at Seventh Street 200 feet wide at high tide.

“Everything from here to there has been wiped out,” Rosenello said Monday, pointing south while standing atop a wooden handicap accessible platform that brings sunbathers to the Seventh Avenue beach. “There was a full dune system that is just completely gone.”

He said the town had been trucking in dry sand from Wildwood the past few years, but the new project will bring more erosion-resistant wet sand to the beach.

Christy Gamber, who is renting in North Wildwood, said the beach work is “absolutely needed.”

“They waited too long,” Gamber said. “Now we’re already getting into the summer months and people are pushing into smaller and smaller beaches.”

This story has been updated to reflect that the Seventh Avenue beach will be 200 feet wide at high tide, and that North Wildwood is contributing $5.2 million to the cost of the project.