State Will Dredge Three Boat Channels Near Barnegat Inlet
Project Goes to Bid This Week
Aug 19, 2015
By: Maria Scandale
www.thesandpaper.netPhoto by: Maria Scandale
Upcoming state dredging of three bay channels near Barnegat Inlet is good news, including to the borough of Barnegat Light, which now won’t have to pay for the segment that it was going to pursue.
The borough had been in the process of applying for a state permit to dredge the area around the 10th Street boat ramp and northward where Superstorm Sandy aggravated shoaling.
Now, that is one of three waterways the state Department of Transportation has applied to dredge. The other two permits requested from the state Department of Environmental Protection are for Double Creek Channel and High Bar Harbor Channel.
Borough Councilman Ed Wellington passed the news along at the Aug. 12 monthly meeting of council.
“We received notification in the mail at Borough Hall a couple weeks ago that the DOT had filed an application with the DEP to do three channels, one of which was Double Creek Channel, from the inlet south toward Loveladies,” Wellington reported.
“The second is the High Bar Harbor Channel, which feeds off of Double Creek Channel into the High Bar Harbor section of Long Beach Township.
“The third one is what they call the Barnegat Light State Channel, which is the project that we in Barnegat Light were concerned with,” Wellington outlined in a telephone interview after the meeting.
On Aug. 12 Wellington got notification that the DEP approved the DOT application and the state will bid the project this week.
Boaters and associated business owners know that the shoaling has been worse since Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
“Double Creek is almost impassible, except for the very small boats, since Sandy,” said Wellington. “That’s going to be a great benefit to everybody who heads south from Barnegat Inlet.
“The High Bar Harbor channel is also shoaled over from Sandy, and that’s going to be a great benefit to all the homeowners in High Bar Harbor to have that dredged.
“So, this is really a big project, and it’s going to be very good for the fishing and boating people on the north end of the Island.”
(The Oyster Creek Channel lies on the westward side of the island, and that is deeper.)
Mayor Kirk Larson and other council members at the meeting remarked that the state will be “saving us a lot of money” by dredging the section around the municipal boat ramp.
Wellington said it would be difficult to estimate how much the project might have cost in total.
“They are moving a whole lot faster than we would have been able to move on the project,” said Wellington, chairman of the council’s docks and harbors committee.
“If we had gone through the process, we would have had to get the application, and we would have had to bid out for a contractor the same way they do, and once we went to bid we would have had to budget for it. We don’t have that kind of money in the budget right now – maybe it would have been for 2017. So this is great news for us that we won’t have to spend the money and go through the whole process.”
— Maria Scandale
mariascandale@thesandpaper.net
http://thesandpaper.villagesoup.com/p/state-will-dredge-three-boat-channels-near-barnegat-inlet/1397150
