Notes from an Environmentalist; Massachusetts, Storms break apart Merrimack River Jetty. Army Corps couldn't have done it any better!

        Did Nature Just Build a Weir in the South                                                    

                             Jetty?

                  An Army of Engineers

        Couldn’t have done it any Better.

On March 17, 2024 I drove to Plum Island expecting to see that the beach that the Army Corps of Engineers had built had washed away and expecting to see ocean waves crashing up against the houses on Reservation Terrace.

Instead I found that the beach had grown 200 feet, and there was so much new sand it had covered the remains of the old Coast Guard broadcast facility. That had solved one major problem; officials had been struggling to find enough funds to remove the dangerous eyesore.

But it still left a big mystery. Where had all that new sand come from? Had the Army Corps of Engineers slipped in under the cover of darkness and pumped in a hundred thousand more cubic yards of new sand while nobody was paying any attention?

Unable to solve the mystery, I trudged on to see how the Merrimack River’s South Jetty was doing.  But when I reached the top of the dunes I had my answer to the new beach mystery as well.

The high tide storms of December, January, February and March had jostled and broken the jetty’s multi-ton boulders so much they had settled along a 150-foot stretch, effectively cutting a natural weir into the jetty.

What’s more, I could also peer down through the boulders and see several natural sluiceways about five feet below the surface.  

Apparently each storm had washed about 6,000 cubic yards of sand through the sluiceways and then it had snaked its way along the jetty and around the spur of the jetty to renourish the beach.

In doing so it had also built up 700 feet of nascent six-foot high dunes directly in front of the houses on Reservation Terrace. An army of engineers couldn’t have designed it any better.

Local, state and federal officials had been working for years to get permits so the Corps could build such a weir. They had expected it would cost almost ten million dollars and take almost ten years to build. But apparently nature has done it for free in our four powerful New England winter storms.