Broadkill Beach north of Lewes is about to get an estimated $30 million gift from federal taxpayers that leaders of the sleepy bayside community have sought for decades: a massive infusion of sand creating a beach in places six times as wide as it is now.
Federal contractors working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will use giant pumps on dredges to scoop up sand from the Delaware River Channel and pump it onto Broadkill, where earthmovers will smooth it to perfection.
Using historic photographs, property records and corps surveys as guides, The News Journal estimates the dredging operation will turn back the clock on storm erosion and sea level rise 60 years or more.
While there are no public bathrooms and scant public parking at Broadkill, the work will give Delawareans a new public venue to enjoy the water – without navigating the crushing traffic of Del. 1 south of Del. 16.
Today, saltwater laps at the pilings of homes along the 3-mile-long strip of sand that in some places is barely wide enough to lay a towel for sunbathing.
But over the next year, 1.9 million cubic yards of sand will be pushed into the shallow water off shore, extending the beach another 50 yards into Delaware Bay.
The sand represents a pile equivalent to a football field 89 stories high. It will give the 600 homeowners along storm-battered Broadkill a beach rivaling the width of shores along Delaware’s ocean resorts – without spending a penny out of their own pockets.
The Corps’ 50-year project calls for ongoing dredging of the 103-mile channel between Philadelphia and the sea, increasing the depth from 40 feet to 45 feet to accommodate the ocean-going tankers that ply the Delaware River.
Sand, silt, muck and rock will be scooped up, most winding up in federal disposal sites. Under the current Corps’ plan, the best sand will go to Broadkill for the next 50 years.
This multiyear dredging project will cost federal taxpayers $63 million – an estimated $30 million of which will pay for the work at Broadkill.
“The contractor told me it’s going to be a mega-beach,” said James Bailey, a 35-year Broadkill Beach property owner and president of the community’s civic organization. He believes property values will rise after the work is done.
“I think it’s going to be very effective,” Bailey said, “and should last quite some time.”
Don’t count on it, said Orrin Pilkey, James B. Duke professor emeritus of the Geology Division of Earth and Ocean Sciences at Duke University.
“You can expect for sure that your new beach will erode at least twice as rapidly as the natural beach that preceded it,” Pilkey said.
Under normal weather conditions, Broadkill and its neighbors to the north lose between 2 and 10 feet of beach annually. Using that calculus, the replenishment project will extend the life of Broadkill Beach by 60 years.
But a big storm such as Superstorm Sandy, or even a powerful nor’easter, could wash it all away in one season, Pilkey pointed out.
“There’s no guarantee it will stay long,” said Pilkey, who has long argued that taxpayer money should not be used to hold back the sea.
After decades of struggling to get a steady stream of funding for beach replenishment like other Delaware beaches along the Atlantic Ocean, Broadkill finally secured a deal to combat erosion into at least another 50 years – so long as Congress continues to fund the work.
There is an annual debate among lawmakers about whether money is well spent to constantly repair sea level rise erosion on America’s shores.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Delaware’s beaches and others along the Mid-Atlantic are in a “hot zone,” where seas are expected to rise at twice the rate of most places on the planet.
Rising greenhouse gas levels – most from burning fossil fuels – will raise global air and sea-surface temperatures by 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit or more by the end of the century, multiple scientific studies predict.
Higher temperatures are expected to raise sea levels at an accelerating rate, with a global average rise of as much as 6.6 feet in fewer than 90 years – forcing retreat or rebuilding on a massive scale.
Bulldozers have already arrived at Broadkill. A tug tested the waters in recent days, and pipe that will be used to pump sand ashore is now staged at Lewes.
The beach at Broadkill will be wider than at any point since 1954, affording protection for the homes and building lots. And a protective dune will be created as tall as the one fronting the Rehoboth Beach boardwalk.
Repurposing the channel sand will leave no doubt that Broadkill is a public-access beach. It’s currently reachable only by one narrow two-lane road – and without public amenities for anyone who doesn’t live there.
Along the beach is a stand of telephone pole-sized pilings that rise up from the sand, remnants of homes that once stood there. Water from Delaware Bay swirls around the pilings at a normal high tide.
A mobile home, repeatedly damaged during storms, used to sit on top of the pilings. It was torn down, said the owner, Paul Hanneman, of Stevensville, Maryland.
Erosion has been so bad, he added, “I don’t have any land to speak of now, and I don’t know how I could build there.”
Hanneman had not seen detailed maps of the Corps’ plan to create a wide beach in front of his family’s storm-battered vacation property, but he remains optimistic about rebuilding.
Bailey believes Broadkill still has room to grow, and a significant number of undeveloped lots.
“Because it will be a rather large beach, we’ll see more day traffic, I’m sure,” he said. “Our closest neighbor, Milton, is growing, and with all the traffic going south and the development around Rehoboth and so forth, I assume some will decide to come here.”
Work will extend from beyond Arizona Avenue in the north to a direct connection with the 2-mile, state-owned Plum Island Preserve in the south.
Robert W. Parks, of Fairfax Station, Virginia, who owns a 11/2-story bungalow on pilings along the narrowest and most storm-battered stretch of Broadkill, said he was unaware that the Corps planned so wide a beach in front of his home, damaged by an intense storm as recently as November.
“I’ve had nothing but annual damage, so any help is appreciated,” said Parks, who recalled summering annually as a child with his family at Bethany Beach. He would later continue the tradition, first at Lewes and then buying a home in north Broadkill Beach, followed by a move to the southern end.
Parks’ home stands next to a new 21/2-story house literally built above rushing high-tide waters. Milford resident Wyatt Hammond’s family put up the new house to replace a small, damaged structure, without being sure that the Corps would repair the beach before the next big storm blew through.
The state owns four bayfront lots in this area, too. They were donated in July 2013 when the state was seeking easements to proceed with the Broadkill Beach project.
Parks and his immediate neighbors, however, will keep their homes, some with prohibitions on using portions of their lots covered by the Corps’ work.
“We don’t have the use of 50 feet of our lot now because of the agreement we had to sign with the federal government and Delaware,” Parks said. “It won’t affect the ability to build or improve because they’ve taken that away from us. The price of that replenishment for us is the use of the land.”
Parks, who founded and directs a nonprofit in Virginia called the Smart Outdoor Lighting Alliance, listed his three-bedroom home on pilings for $550,000 one year ago. Other houses along the same stretch can range higher, with one at the southern edge of the planned new dune currently listed at just under $1 million.
Beth and Wyatt Hammond rebuild their bayfront home at Broadkill Beach even as high tides wash up beneath the house. The Army Corps of Engineers plans to put in 3 miles of new coastline.
For decades, Broadkill Beach was in the running for a federal beach renourishment project, but wasn’t successful.
To put this project in perspective, Ed Voigt, spokesman for the Corps’ Philadelphia District office, said that widening Broadkill as a traditional, separate beach could have cost $30 million – obligating Delaware to pay as much as a third of the total expense.
Broadkill’s link to the channel deepening project has its roots in a 1997 public hearing, when the Corps planned to dispose of the sediments just offshore.
The late charter boat captain Jerry Blakeslee arrived at a meeting pushed by the late Sen. William V. Roth. Charter boat captains and fishermen were worried about the impact the sand dumping would have on important fishing areas.
Earlier in the day, Blakeslee took his charter boat Grizzly out to the dump site and collected some bottom samples. He came to the meeting at the University of Delaware’s Lewes campus armed with a small, white cooler.
When it was his turn to speak, Blakeslee opened the cooler and started pulling out samples – a big chunk of mud squirming with worms and a chunk of sand reef built by Sabellaria worms. Fisherman called the area “the Coral Beds.”
State and federal officials started talking about other options for the sand disposal, including pumping it on to Broadkill Beach.
Even now, all those years later, the project is not without controversy.
David Carter, conservation chair with the Delaware Audubon Society, said he is concerned that the timing of sand pumping should be managed to avoid the peak spawning period for horseshoe crabs and the lack of state and federal oversight.
Carter said there is “no meaningful data or analysis of the cumulative impacts” and state and federal officials are taking the position that this is a short-term problem that will lead to long-term improvements.
“My response remains … show me the data,” he said.
The project has been delayed multiple times. Now it is expected to stage at the terminus point of Del. 16 and the beach, where there is expected to be less impact on spawning horseshoe crabs, and then shift to the south end of the beach once the spawning season concludes, Bailey said.
Pilkey also sees environmental issues.
“This beach [sand] will kill everything on the beach and will change the ecosystem for a few years, including the end of the [food] chain offshore,” he said. “Grain size [of sand] is a problem. Some channels have mud in them.”
Broadkill will be the longest continuous beach renourishment project tackled in Delaware so far, including the Corps-maintained Atlantic oceanfront at Rehoboth Beach and Dewey Beach.
New Jersey-based Weeks Marine, which won the Corps dredging and beach-fill contract, recently posted a sign at Broadkill’s entrance declaring, “Coming in March: Weeks Marine” to advertise the planned start of work.
Schedules have since slipped, however, partly because of ice buildups on the Delaware River and Bay that froze some of the 20,000 feet of pipeline needed to connect the main channel-deepening area with the shoreline.
Dredging is now expected to start in the second week of April.
A company hopper dredge capable of taking on 4,000 cubic yards at a time will work sections of the channel deepening, then move to a point offshore of Broadkill to pump sand onto the beach before returning to the channel.
Anthony Pratt, shoreline manager for Delaware’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, said once that work is done, Broadkill will in some places be wider than the “phenomenally wide” beach that emerged from a shoreline restoration at Rehoboth Beach and Dewey Beach in 2005.
Volumes required per foot of beach gained at Broadkill, Pratt said, will be more than 28 percent greater than the 2005 effort in places.
In 1921, when he purchased 7 miles of land along Delaware Bay, people thought H.P. Layton was nuts.
His father almost disowned him. Naysayers asked: “What can you do with a beach?”
Turns out Layton was far from being nuts. He and the next two generations of Layton family heirs developed Broadkill into hundreds of building lots, selling 50-feet-by-100-feet patches of paradise, a place along the shore with a million-dollar view and soft, sun-bleached sand.
Now, with federal taxpayers paying for a bigger beach, “it’s going to be unbelievable,” said H.P. Layton’s great-grandson, Laurence Burke.
The family, like the state of Delaware, has spent decades fighting sea level rise.
Delaware has been adding sand at Broadkill since 1957. In all, state officials have trucked or pumped in 1.15 million cubic yards of sand over the past 58 years.
Countless studies looked at possible ways to save the sand, including jetties, groins, bulkheads, geotextiles, tire breakwaters.
H.P. Layton built his field of groins – long structures built out into the water to trap and accumulate sand that would otherwise drift along the beach under the water – in the 1950s. By 1964, concrete rubble was trucked in to strengthen the groins from North Carolina Avenue to Alabama Avenue.
But erosion was unstoppable. In fact, it always has been.
The shoreline off Rehoboth Beach used to be 80 to 100 miles to the east. At Dewey Beach, during extreme low tides, one can see the remnants of an old cedar forest dating back to Colonial times.
Broadkill – like the stretch of beach from Bowers to Lewes – is especially vulnerable to 12 miles of open water, where waves grow large during big storms.
Coastal geologists believe sand flows north from Lewes to Broadkill, up to about Del. 16. From there, sand flows south from Prime Hook, Fowler Beach and Slaughter Beach.
All of these beaches sit atop an old marsh, and sand deposited there is shallow, ranging from 5 to 10 feet deep. Erosion washes away sand, exposing a layer of peat and mud.
Greg and Bonnie Miller are familiar with this world. Their beach home at Broadkill is the iconic A-frame with pillars now literally in the water – a survivor of hurricanes, nor’easters and routine high tides.
“We’ve been waiting for 25 years,” Greg Miller said. “We’re really excited.”
Since buying the home in 1989, the Millers have replaced the electric to it – most recently after Superstorm Sandy. They’ve twice lost use of the house.
While they always leave before big storms, once they were in the house thinking a hurricane would pass well off the coast, only to find waves slapping against the pilings, the house shaking.
They stayed five minutes and left.
When the Corps’ project is complete, the Millers will have a beach that is 100 to 150 feet wide in front of the A-frame, with a protective dune standing between house and shore.
These days, the house is so often surrounded by water at high tide that the Millers can cast a fishing line right into Delaware Bay.
“I’ll gladly give that up,” Greg Miller said.
Federal officials plan to retsore the storm-ravaged Broadkill Beach by pumping in sand to create a 3-mile beach with protective dunes. Broadkill will be an idyllic spot especially for families with young children looking for a gentle surf.
One of the biggest problems with a renourished beach is that it tends to promote development, Pilkey said.
“After all, you now have a safe beach in front of you,” he said.
Yet with higher-density development, there is less flexibility in responding to future sea level rise.
“And there is a larger population to holler at the Corps for more sand,” he said.
State officials acknowledge that they are unsure how much attention the new beach will attract, or how quickly it will become a destination.
“We’ll see what we have to adjust to,” Pratt said. “That’s part of the growing pains of doing these big coastal projects, the change in demands from tourism.
“That’s a good thing, as opposed to worrying about houses falling into the bay.”
Yet even some of those who live at Broadkill understand the full scope of change coming.
Although Broadkill is the largest and most affluent of Delaware’s bay settlements north of Lewes, with many houses serving as vacation homes, it stands well off the beaten path.
The community’s main entrance sign stands about 4 miles east of Del. 1 in the Milton area, a bayward jog off the main highway about 7 miles before southbound motorists reach the Five Points intersection near Lewes that serves as a kind of ocean resort gateway.
Once visitors arrive, they find that Broadkill is an idyllic spot for young families with children who appreciate gentle surf and seashore treasures such as baby horseshoe crabs, mermaid’s purses and fossilized rocks.
Marshland straddles the wide-open eastern edge of the only public-road bay approach, subject to flooding and erosion. Delaware Department of Transportation repair crews were working to restore and stabilize portions of the road as recently as last week.
No clearly designated public parking lot is available for visitors, and car intrusions on private lots along narrow roads are a regular source of friction.
“There’s only one store at Broadkill, only one commercial venture, no restroom facilities,” Pratt said. “There’s no place to change clothes, no lifeguards – most of the amenities that folks are looking for.”
The rustic Broadkill Store opens seasonally and sells necessities such as bait and tackle, bug spray and chilled soft drinks.
It used to be that Broadkill residents marked the season by the insects pestering them, and the store had an enormous fly swatter on display. There was deer fly season, mosquito season, greenhead fly season.
Still, it is increasingly popular.
On July 5, Bailey said, there were so many people in the community, he was out directing traffic for one of the highlights of the summer season: a folksy Independence Day weekend parade.
The worrisome side of that equation: There were so many cars it would have been very difficult for an emergency vehicle to pass through.
Bailey said he has already warned people that visitors who come must be allowed to park on the streets. Access to the beach is a given. Property owners already have signed easements.
“It gets into accommodating the public,” Pratt said. “Do you anticipate? Is it, ‘Build it and they will come,’ or do you wait and see?”
The Burke family, anticipating the influx of new visitors, already approached the state with the offer to sell two blocks of land just north of where Del. 16 dead-ends at the dune.
The land is one of the last, centrally located, undeveloped, large parcels left in Broadkill.
Laurence Burke’s father, Sam, said it is plotted for 24 building lots.
Sam Burke said state officials weren’t interested in buying the land, although the offer is still out there – at least until the beach renourishment project is underway.
“The time frame is getting short,” Laurence Burke said. Throughout the community, “the property value will increase dramatically.”
Townsend-area resident Susan Sodor, whose family has had a home at Broadkill for more than three decades, said she was happy about new protection for her home.
“I can understand why it’s going to be a public beach. There’s public money going into it,” Sodor said. “Parking is always the concern most residents have. Facilities are really not available, restrooms and things, and that has to be understood. It’s carry in, carry out.”
Broadkill property owners such as David L. Rehkamp, who with his wife’s family have operated the Broadkill Store for 25 years, said the project is needed.
“I have no doubt anything they do will be better than what they have out there now,” Rehkamp said. “I’ve been flooded three times since I’ve been here. The last time was Sandy.”
Last week Sam Burke stood at the edge of the family property at Broadkill and envisioned a boom.
“We’re going to have some growing pains,” Bailey said. “No ifs, ands or buts. … We’ll see a major influx of people. It’s a great family beach. There’s going to be some help required.”
Contact Molly Murray at (302) 463-3334 or mmurray@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @MollyMurraytnj. Contact Jeff Montgomery at (302) 463-3344 or jmontgomery@delawareonline.com. Follow him on Twitter @JMontgomery_TNJ.
Broadkill Beach residents assess damage from Superstorm Sandy. (10/30/12)
Although Broadkill Beach will get sand indirectly, as part of a Delaware River shipping channel deepening, other recent projects hint at the potential value of the 100 percent federally funded work to Delaware.
Broadkill Beach: 3 miles, 1.9 million cubic yards
Oakwood Beach, N.J. (Delaware Bay, opposite Chesapeake Delaware Canal): $9.9 million, 2 miles, 346,000 cubic yards, $28.6 per cubic yard
Ocean City, N.J.: $57 million, 2.6 miles, 1.6 million cubic yards, $35.63 cubic yard
Long Beach Island, N.J., and nearby: $128 million, 12.2 miles, 8 million cubic yards, $16 per cubic yard
One year after Superstorm Sandy, Delawareans struggle to adapt. This Sunday The News Journal begins a three-day series on the lasting impact of Hurricane Sandy. (10/23/13)
• Full coverage of Superstorm Sandy: stories, photos and videos
• Lessons learned from Sandy: stories, videos, photos and graphics
• Climate change on the coast: stories, videos and graphics
• Sand wars – Atlantic coast states weigh options along beaches: stories, videos and graphics
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