OCEAN CITY, Md. — The beach isn’t just a place to relax in the sun. The sand on the coastline in Ocean City actually protects the houses and businesses along the boardwalk from severe flooding. However, it requires upkeep, which means money.
With Ocean City under a Coastal Flood Warning as remnants of several coastal storms hit the region, the Verify team looked at the process behind maintaining these beaches.
THE QUESTION:
What is the process for upkeeping a public beach, and how much does it cost to replenish Ocean City’s beaches?
THE SOURCES:
WHAT WE FOUND:
The sand on the beach acts as a buffer. It absorbs the energy from the crashing wave, and the dunes act like levees or dams, according to McGean.
“If we just had the seawall without the beach in front of it, then that wave action that the beach actually absorbs would scour away at the base of the seawall and actually and you would, you would have problems with the seawall toppling over," said McGean.
The city has to replenish the sand by pumping about a million cubic yards of it using a large dredge in the ocean.
“To give you an idea of what that is, a big dump truck holds about 10 cubic yards of sand so it's about 100,000 Dump trucks worth of sand that will put on the beach roughly every four years," said McGean.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says the last beach replenishment project in 2021 cost $15.7 million, but the average price tag is around$10 million, every four years, according to McGean. This process has been happening since 1988, and it’s paid for by the federal government, the state of Maryland, Ocean City and Worcester County.
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