![]() Officials later determined that dredges pumping in fill from an area about two and a half miles offshore had inadvertently tapped into a munitions cache. The Surf City police chief kept several on his desk until the objects were identified as ammunition fuses, many still filled with black powder. Residents and beachcombers began finding oddly-shaped rusty objects about six inches to a foot long on the newly replenished beach. The munitions issue surfaced, so to speak, in March 2007, as the Surf City portion of the replenishment project was completed. More than 100 have been found this winter. In a project that is expected to cost $13.6 million and to continue until May, workers are digging 12 feet down in search of World War I-era ammunition fuses. Since January, backhoes, dump trucks and special sifting equipment have been deployed six days a week, 10 hours a day at four different points in Surf City and Ship Bottom, sifting the 880,000 cubic yards of sand that were pumped onto the beach in 20. On Long Beach Island, the beach replenishment project evolved into a massive hunt for old munitions and a dispute over what to do with the munitions discovered. The team will measure the rate of beach erosion, and record where the sand migrates, to help future projects. Herrington, an associate professor of ocean engineering and the assistant director of the institute’s Center for Maritime Systems. ![]() In addition, the Long Branch project will be monitored for the next 18 months by a group of students from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, under the guidance of Thomas O. The surfer organizations have hired a company to keep an aerial record of the beach over the next year. “This project’s far from perfect, but we got maybe 60 percent of what we wanted.” “When they first did beach replenishment back in the 1990s, they destroyed every good surfing beach in northern Monmouth County for years,” said Rich Lee, a Long Branch resident and member of both the Surfers’ Environmental Alliance and the Surfrider Foundation, another surfing and environmental advocacy group. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection helped pay for the work, which was finished by the end of February - a small project by the standards of the corps, but for surfers, a significant one. In Long Branch, beginning this December, workers with Weeks Marine, a Cranford-based company, pumped 700,000 cubic yards of sand along a quarter-mile stretch of beach north of Cedar Avenue to counteract storm erosion. The New York District of the corps oversaw the Long Branch project, while the Philadelphia District office has been overseeing the $71 million Long Beach Island replenishment project, which began at the end of 2006. This winter, the corps undertook two beach projects, one in Long Branch, the other on Long Beach Island, each with its own challenges.
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