By MADDY VITALE
With patches of snow outlining the tops of the dunes and just enough of the flakes to roll into a diminutive snowman on a jetty at Fifth Street, summer didn’t exactly come to mind.
But in a few months, the season that so many relish will be back and Ocean City officials are ready to welcome guests to the sandy beaches.
Coastal storms over the fall and winter have been chipping away at the shoreline in the resort, as they have in shore communities throughout the state.
The Feb. 1-2 storm left moderate erosion on the Ocean City beaches. A report by the state Department of Environmental Protection dated Feb. 4 noted that some beaches were worse than others.
Fifth Street beach, known for its ideal surf conditions, “continues to experience accelerated erosion,” the report reads. Vertical beach scarping created mini-cliff-like cuts in the dunes. Some were three-foot-high chunks out of the sand. They were visible in multiple locations and most apparent in the area north of 11th Street, according to the report.
“Winter is never kind to the beaches and particularly not to the blocks near Fifth Street,” explained Ocean City Public Information Officer Doug Bergen. “But I don’t think the Feb. 1-2 storm was a major erosion event here.”
A major replenishment project last year pumped sand onto the beaches in the north and south ends to replenish what was lost to coastal storms.
The project went into the summer season of 2020 under the direction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
By Labor Day weekend, all of the city’s beaches had wide expanses of sand and plenty of room for families to stretch out on the shoreline.
Bergen said the city made sure to have added supplies in the way of a lot of extra sand just in case storms eroded the beaches.
“The city did purchase some extra stockpiles of sand when the Army Corps of Engineers was rebuilding beaches here this summer,” Bergen said.
He also said there is a lot of sand sitting just offshore.
“The beaches should rebuild naturally as the winds shift in the spring,” he added.
So, for summer of 2021, Bergen said visitors can once again expect to see sandy beaches.
“Crews will work to spread some of that out over the downtown beaches by spring,” he said.
