Sand men finish $2.4M dredge and replenishment project

VIRGINIA BEACH

DeWayne Ward has never visited Virginia Beach as a tourist. He doesn't care much for beaches, in fact.

Still, for a few months this past fall and winter he helped ensure that the city, renowned for its sandy shores, lived up to its name.

On board the Richmond, Ward and a crew of about 25 completed a $2.4 million federal and local dredge and sand-replenishment project.

Ward, who rarely came to shore, did most of this work from a half-mile out on a 1960s-era dredge that despite several coats of orange and green paint could not disguise its age.

"I've never been one for the beach," Ward, 45, said. "As far as working on the water, that's all I've ever wanted to do."

In the busy Lynnhaven Inlet channel, where muscled-up yachts, pilot boats and fishing vessels zoom through, the boxy Richmond stood out like a bulldozer on a city street.

The barge bobbed in the waters off the Virginia Beach shore from October through the end of January. It s tentacle of connected pipes stretched to the Bayfront, and a small fleet of tugboats circled around carrying supplies.

It looked like a construction site. And it was.

In the end, they cleared about 160,000 cubic yards of sand from around the channel, said Mike Kay, the project manager for Chesapeake-based Cottrell Contracting Corp., the company that owns the Richmond.

The Army Corps of Engineers hired Cottrell to clear shoaling at the Lynnhaven Inlet, and the city agreed to provide the dump site.

"It was a tough one," Kay said.

During the Richmond's approximately three months in the inlet, it was battered by the November nor'easter, and blustery days posed a constant disruption. The work was supposed to be completed in early December but dragged into late January.

In the end, the Richmond's crew was able to fill the beach to just east of the Lynnhaven Fishing Pier. There wasn't enough sand to get all the way to First Landing State Park, as Beach officials had initially projected. The city has started hauling by truck 50,000 cubic yards of sand stored near Marina Shores to complete the replenishment.

"The beach that had been replenished was phenomenal," said Phill Roehrs, a coastal engineer for the city of Virginia Beach.

Success wasn't guaranteed for this project, which has a turbulent history.

The city went to court last year to condemn property for public recreational use and the replenishment. Beach officials had asked all the Cape Henry Bayfront owners to sign over public easements to the beach in exchange for the sand. The landowners who wanted the sand to protect their homes from storm damage turned over the easements. But those who wanted to maintain their private property rights, which date back to Reconstruction, refused and were eventually defeated in court.

"We're glad to see some distance between us and the waves," said Theresa Netherton, a resident of Harbour Gate condominiums. "We had watched our poor little beach whittle to nothing."

From her condominium window, Netherton became hooked on watching the massive operation unfolding before her. The dredge in the distance, the long pipes, the workers, the changing landscape.

"We were fascinated by it," said Netherton, who says she wishes she could have gone on the dredge.

From his seat atop the Richmond, Ward, a former commercial waterman, relied on the graphs and gauges at his dashboard and the subtle vibrations of the barge to keep track of the work.

"That's money," Ward said as he tapped a thick finger on the darkened lines created by a computerized graph. The cutter had hit a sand pile.

Twelve feet beneath the waves, a giant, metal drill loosened the grain. Sand and water combined into a brackish cocktail that was sucked into a network of pipes and eventually sprayed onto the beach. A bulldozer leveled the new beach.

Most of men, and they are all men, aboard the Richmond grew up in Brunswick County, N.C., a coastal community wedged between Wilmington and Myrtle Beach, S.C. They turned to dredging when the fishing and tobacco farming jobs disappeared.

It's a nomadic lifestyle, traveling from one job to another up and down the East Coast. But it has its own rhythm.

A few of the workers have family members on board.

Brian Middlemiss, the dredge's resident cook, and his son both work on the Richmond.

Just before 3 p.m. every day, Middlemiss started dinner. Steaks on Thursday. Fried chicken on Sunday.

The smell of french fries bubbling in hot oil wafted through the second-floor corridor of the dredge. It lured some of the still-sleepy night-shift crew from their bunk beds into the kitchen, where the table was set.

The crew can go through 150 pounds of potatoes a week, Middlemiss said.

In the evening, when the inlet quieted down, some of workers sat in the galley and played poker.

Once every few weeks some would venture off the ship and beyond Shore Drive for a trip to Walmart or to throw back a few drinks at nearby Kokoamos Island Bar & Grill.

The crew share an easy and necessary camaraderie, Ward said.

They spend almost all day with one another in close quarters and return home only for a few days every couple of weeks.

"You might say that's my family, and at home, I just come to visit," Ward said.

He started working on the dredge 10 years ago as a deckhand, and at one point he had both his sons on board.

"A friend at the dredge is better than one at the house," he said.

Before the crew of the Richmond collected all their pipe and left for their next project in southern Maryland, Ward walked onto the beach he helped build.

"I look at the dump," he said. "And I think God, we have pumped some sand."

Deirdre Fernandes, (757) 222-5121, deirdre.fernandes@pilotonline.com