Corps committed to inlet still but needs new answer

By Jack Chavez Staff Writer

(May 19, 2023) The Army Corps of Engineers kept pulling sand out of the Ocean City inlet, and it kept coming back.

It’s no surprise that fine sand moves as time passes, but the expensive rate at which the Corps was trying to keep up was one of the chief reasons it decided to abandon its major dredging project in the inlet, a Corps representative told the Worcester County Commissioners during their meeting on Tuesday.

“The Corps is dedicated to maintaining this channel,” said Daniel Bierly, chief of the Civil Project Development Branch. “We dredged this channel back in the (1930s), installing the jetties after (the Hurricane of 1933) that opened up the inlet in the first place. (We’ve) been here ever since.

“(It is) absolutely not the case (that we’re abandoning the inlet). It is our channel. It is our mission to maintain our channels.”

Bierly broke down the Corps’ project to address the shoal material — water and sediment that has gone through the inlet — by dumping it in Assateague Island’s surf zone to allow it to disperse naturally. The purpose, he said, deals with the fact that Assateague sits further back than Ocean City on the coastline.

“All that material that’s supposed to come to the south has been stopped over the years and it’s been starving Assateague Island,” he said.

It’s one of the few projects that the Corps sees to itself instead of contracting out, typically using special dredges when they’re available.

Bierly said there have been “profound” changes to the northern end of Assateague over the years, which could be connected to the worsening condition.

He also said that even most sophisticated and involved solutions did not reduce the need for dredging that much.

“The inlet is an extremely dynamic area. Material not only comes in and out of the inlet but also across the back bays and it’s very difficult to know what to do. Frankly, this (proposed) solution didn’t pan out and plus, it’s extremely expensive at over $16 million.”

Looking at the next steps, Bierly demonstrated that the problem area is not in the Ocean City inlet itself but in a concentrated area off the West Ocean City harbor.

“Currently there are two gaps there which were done on purpose back in the day, but the thinking is maybe we need to close them up to have an ideal effect,” he said. “It’s not a perfect solution even if it were to