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| The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredge Currituck pulls sand from the shallow entrance to Rudee Inlet on Friday. To the right is part of the jetty on the south side of the inlet. STEVE EARLEY PHOTOS | THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT |
The Virginian-Pilot © September 15, 2007
ABOARD THE DREDGE CURRITUCK
All they’re doing is fighting Mother Nature.
Turns out, the natural life cycle for most of the sand that makes Virginia Beach a resort city involved riding the surf north from Sandbridge, straight up to Cape Henry.
Then, men built an inlet named Rudee.
“An inlet screws everything up,” said Gregg Williams, a project manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “It interrupts the flow.”
Dredges get the flow going again.
So it was Friday as the diesel-powered Currituck chugged its 150-foot-long hull through the inlet and did what dredges do: trim the sandy ocean floor, allowing boats to pass without fear of running aground.
 The dredge drains the water and dumps the sand through its hinged split hull off of the Virginia Beach Oceanfront on Friday. |
How does the sand build up in the first place?
The answer starts in Sandbridge, said Phillip Roehrs, the city’s coastal engineer.
Every time sand drifts north, that’s less sand for Sandbridge. That’s why every three years or so, the city adds more to the beach line between the Fleet Combat Training Center at Dam Neck and Little Island Park.
Roehrs said this year’s replenishment was a $9.7 million job that began July 1 and should end Tuesday. The city paid $8 million, and the Corps of Engineers paid the rest.
The work pumped about 2 million cubic yards of sand, enough to stack three feet of sand on top of 400 football fields, FEMA once calculated.
The new sand is more hurricane protection than anything else.
It doesn’t take that sand long to begin its pilgrimage north. Unblocked, millions of grains would naturally settle offshore, somewhere between the Oceanfront and Cape Henry.
Except for that inlet.
The same inlet that protects boats coming out of Croatan and the marinas along Winston Salem Avenue also causes sand to pile up where it should’t. The build-ups make the inlet more shallow and more dangerous for boats.
Dredges owned by the city and Army Corps of Engineers siphon that sand and deliver it to the other side of the inlet, where the natural flow starts again.
The guys getting it there are Marty Willis and Weldon Davis.
At the helm of the Currituck on Friday, they ran the ship’s two outboard propulsion drivers and its two mechanical boom arms.
Willis was in charge of direction and speed. He cupped two, hand-sized steering wheels and swiveled them back and forth as he moved the so-called hopper dredge through the inlet.
Davis’ hands flitted between toggles for the boom arms and the gear shifts that run their clutches.
The process was really quite simple.
Each 30-foot arm had a steel grate on the end that acted like an underwater Dust Buster.
It sucked up slurry, pushed it through pipes and then spat it into the “hopper,” the gutted out bin that takes up most of the dredge’s bow.
“They’re like little vacuum cleaners,” Davis said. “And we’re a big dump truck.”
It took about an hour to fill that truck.
Willis navigated out of the inlet and then made a U-turn toward the Oceanfront.
He pulled up within a few hundred yards of the shoreline – on a good day he can get within 50 yards – and then the ship broke in half.
On purpose.
The Currituck is a split-hull vessel, meaning the ship has hinges on either end of its 315-cubic-yard hopper.
One pass down. Hundreds more to go. Each trip from the Currituck lasts about 10 days – at roughly $10,000 a day – and the dredge is usually at Rudee Inlet three times a year.
“It’s just like cutting your grass,” Davis said. “You know you’ve got to go back and maintain.”
Richard Quinn, (757) 222-5119,
richard.quinn@pilotonline.com
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