Martin County Celebrates Near-End of $15M Bob Graham Beach Renourishment

For days, Bill Gomez stood on the shoreline at Bob Graham Beach with a fishing rod in hand, watching dredge crews pour sand back onto Martin County's coastline. He expected the work to drag on for weeks.

"I was surprised," Gomez said. "It took less than two weeks for them to finish this area here."

Martin County officials, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and U.S. Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., gathered Monday at Bob Graham Beach to mark the near-completion of a $15 million federally funded beach renourishment project, complete with a ribbon cutting on a stretch of coastline that had shed sand for years. Work began April 13 and is expected to wrap by Friday.

The scale of the job is difficult to picture from the shoreline. Corps of Engineers Col. Brandon Bowman said crews deposited nearly 400,000 cubic yards of sand across a four-mile stretch — a volume he described as a football field stacked more than 200 feet high with sand. The work represents one of the more significant coastal restoration efforts on the Treasure Coast in recent years.

For Mast, who helped secure federal funding for the project, the work reflects the dual challenge facing waterfront communities like Martin County. "We are a waterborne community," he said. "Sometimes we're trying to keep it clean, sometimes we're trying to fight it back a little bit."

The completion comes after a frustrating delay. The Corps struggled to lock in a contractor last year, an obstacle Bowman attributed to a thin national market for large dredging equipment. "We had some challenges securing a dredging company within the awardable range that we could put on that contract, which caused some delays and caused those issues," he said.

Bowman said the agency plans to overhaul its procurement approach by scheduling projects earlier and coordinating with other Corps districts to compete more effectively for the limited U.S. dredging fleet. "We're just looking at revolutionizing how we've done in the past and make some changes to get better projects for better cost, scope and budget for the American taxpayer," he said.

A separate renourishment effort is underway at Jetty Park and Hutchinson Island in Fort Pierce following an emergency sand placement in February. The Martin County project's final completion date is expected to be confirmed by the end of this week.

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