It’s a study in contrast.
At Snug Harbor (between Eighth Street and Ninth Street), an excavator sits on a barge and scoops mud from the lagoon floor in a painstaking effort to remove 14,000 cubic yards of material one bucket at a time.
Two miles away, on the beach at the north end of Ocean City, a hydraulic dredge spews an uninterrupted stream of slurry in an operation that will dump about 700,000 cubic yards of sand over more than two miles of beach in just 45 to 60 days.
The difference in volume has to do with regulations.
While the beach projects move sand from the bottom of the ocean floor in an approved process, Ocean City continues to struggle to get permission to dump material dredged from the bay.
The current project at Snug Harbor requires to the material to be transported by barge to an area across the channel where it can be loaded on trucks and hauled to a landfill in Wildwood. Finding a viable and approved disposal site remains the biggest obstacle to bayside dredging in Ocean City.
City Council in August awarded a $937,900 contract to Wickberg Marine Contracting of Belford, N.J. to complete the job at Snug Harbor, which is completely dry at low tide.
The project will make Snug Harbor six feet deeper from the Bay Avenue bulkhead to a 150-square-foot box outside the mouth of the lagoon (leading to the channel).
