Channel's west wall damaged by winter storms, affecting health of Ninigret Pond
By Rob Smith / ecoRI News staff
Since 1952 the town’s 200-foot-long breachway has split the barrier beaches protecting Ninigret Pond in two, providing access into Block Island Sound and improving the water quality in the state’s largest saltwater lagoon. Now, state and local officials are homing in on a plan for the next 70 years.
“The goal is we’re only going to do this once, and we’re
going to do it really well,” Emily Hall, a coastal geologist working for the
Coastal Resources Management Council, said Thursday at a community update on
the breachway at the Kettle Pond Visitor Center.
It’s been a long 20 months for the breachway, which
Charlestown heavily relies on to maintain the health of Ninigret Pond. The
winter of 2023-24 was harsh on Rhode Island’s south shore beaches, as a series
of intense storms wiped out large portions of the area’s prized coastline.
In Charlestown, the storms tore a gap in the channel’s
western wall, sending sand from the breachway’s beach straight into the
waterway, making it shallower and more difficult for boaters to navigate. State
and local officials, CRMC, and the Salt Ponds Coalition,
well aware of the breachway’s role in the commercial, recreational, and
ecological life of Charlestown, sprung into action, making temporary emergency
repairs, which were completed early last fall.
(While Charlestown is the host community of the breachway,
the Department of Environmental Management is actually the owner and
responsible for it, working with Charlestown on maintenance and repairs.)
The breachway and Ninigret Pond are important economic and
recreational drivers for the town, treasured by boaters, anglers, swimmers, and
aquaculturists. About 40% of all aquaculture in Rhode Island is sited in
Ninigret Pond, and it remains a popular destination for anglers. Thursday’s
community update, which was well attended, was the third such meeting in the
past 12 months.
The emergency repairs cost $550,000, with $300,000 paid out
by DEM, with the town paying the rest. Over one week last October, a three-man
crew began the repair work, hauling in 600 tons of stone and reconstructing a
dune protecting the western wall with sandbags.
While officials describe the emergency repairs completed
last year as just a “Band-Aid,” the project went a long way toward protecting
the health of the breachway.
“You can see how even just the emergency repair has really
allowed the breachway to be intact a bit more,” said Casey Tremper, a coastal
resilience specialist from the University of Rhode Island’s Coastal Resources
Center. “It’s also started to naturally build back the beach on the forest side
of the breachway.”
Ninigret Pond has returned to being “flushed out” by the
breachway again after the temporary repairs, removing sedimentation and
restoring the original depth of the human-made channel, around 5 feet or so,
similar to what existed prior to the major storm damage.
In addition, a sand bar known as the ebb tidal delta, which
formed outside the breachway, has, thanks to the emergency repair structure,
almost entirely washed away.
With the repairs in place, officials have spent the past 10
months putting together plans for a more permanent restoration that, officials
are hoping, will last at least another seven decades.
There’s two major components to the breachway’s restoration.
The first is the actual reconstruction of the breachway itself, which will,
more or less, look a lot like the original canal built in the 1950s. The stones
used for the emergency repair will act as a foundation for the western wall,
which will raise the rock wall by at least 8 feet in height. Once the rock
walls are steady, the plan is to rebuild the beach by trucking in sand and
steeling it with vegetation and, more importantly, fortifying the dunes, with
some additional artificial dunes designed to be a line of defense for the
breachway.
“They’re being set up in a way that waves will hit the dunes
first before they hit where the breachway broke last time,” Hall said. “Dunes
are nature’s solution to energy and to storms. We’re trying to lean into that
resilient component of how we can work with a natural system to keep the tides
flowing, and the currents moving through the breachway.”
It will still be a decade before the dunes grow to their
original size, before the breachway was battered by winter storms.
The other major part of the restoration plan is dredging the
breachway. All the sand that washed into the breachway has to come out, and
Steve McCandless, the town’s geographic information systems coordinator, said
he expects, depending on the specific area, to dredge to a depth between 4 and
8 feet. That kind of depth will restore natural water flow and open the back of
the breachway for boating again.
The town expects to dredge around 100,000 cubic yards of
material from the breachway, much of which will be used to repair the town’s
beach or restore the dunes surrounding the breachway.
“We’ll put about 50,000 cubic yards of material on this
beach to rebuild the dunes, and the other 50,000 will go down to the
Charlestown Beach area where we always put it,” McCandless said. “It’s town
property and removes the issues of using federal or public funds to dredge
public waters.”
The total cost for the new permanent breachway is estimated
to be $8.4 million, with $5 million of the total coming from DEM’s budget by
way of a transfer to CRMC, with another $2 million coming from the coastal
agency for the dredging itself. The remainder, $1.4 million, will be paid from
Charlestown’s dredging fund.
Both DEM and CRMC are expected to approve final permits for
the restoration project sometime in the next two weeks, according to Hall and
McCandless. The Army Corps of Engineers, the federal entity that traditionally
oversees all dredging projects in the United States, has already issued its own
permits for the breachway restoration.
Prep work for the restoration project, once permits are in
hand, is expected to start as early as Sept. 15, once the local piping plovers,
a threatened shorebird species, migrate for the season. Once the DEM campground
near the breachway closes for the season, on Nov. 1, the bulk of construction
can begin, with the new breachway rock walls to be constructed in December,
with dredging to follow in early January. Dune restoration is expected to start
in March, and delay for six months in April when the plovers return to nest on
barrier beaches.
“All I can tell you for sure is that sometime between Sept.
15 and April 15, my thought is that we’re going to be 90% complete for this
project,” McCandless said. “As long as we can get some rocks going, we can get
it all going at the same time.”
