2015-1113 Special City Commission Meeting

Home Browse Search

Summary Minutes:Special City Commission Meeting November 13,2015 City of Sunny Isles Beach,Florida the sand is jutting out a little bit, the beach is a little bit wider, that could be an effect of the structure but we see that sort of effect in other places along the shoreline where there are no structures. Similarly we are not seeing a similar effect in the shorelines on the west side of the southern structure, and so we really need to do some additional evaluation and survey those structures, see what the current elevation is because if they really subsided so much, they may not be doing their job to trick the waves. Waves break when the water depth is half their height and if they are too low, they are not going to have any effect. Ms. Cutt described planned projects with structures. Again we are talking about structures in the news,at 63rd Street the Corps of Engineers have permits to build a series of another three (3) structures similar to what was done at 32"d Street but they don't have funding from Congress to do it, and so that project has not been constructed but it has been designed and permitted. The Singer Islands in South Palm Beach Project, those projects propose a series of 11 to 13 off-shore breakwaters originally exposed structures and ultimately they were going back and forth between exposed and submerged structures because the Fish and Wildlife Commission and the Fish and Wildlife Service were both having issues with the effect to swimming and nesting turtles but both of those projects proposed basically City limits to City limits structured offshore, and they wanted an isolated solution for a targeted problem. They said we want to armor off the whole shoreline. The County spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and ultimately withdrew the applications. So if we go in for a targeted solution that we have modeled and designed and demonstrated the need for,we can, just like south of Port Everglades and 32"d Street, get permits for those structures. But first we really need to evaluate whether the project need is there,and whether the cost benefits are there. Ms. Cutt said their evaluation told them several things. Right now we are realizing less sediment movement in the City then we had before. In part we don't have those big sand waves from Broward County moving through, we have got a few other projects that are feeding us. But Port Everglades at the north end of our coastal south is in impoundment right now, and so once they start bypassing across Port Everglades which is in the foreseeable future and that sand gets to the City, we will have a source of sand. The wave energy based on some of the reports we have reviewed seems to be a little low right now. Is that due to climate related activities? Is that a geologic feature? Why is the wave energy lower, is it a pattern? We are not sure but we know that it seems to be a little bit less wave energy moving that sand south right now. The hot spots that we have documented in the past are still hot spots, they are still basically there. We have seen it in other similar studies we have done, hot spots that are there when we do one report,we do another assessment ten(10)years later and it doesn't seem to be a problem. We can't always answer the why, sometimes a hot spot is the result of a hundred thousand years ago there was an inlet there, and Mother Nature is trying to turn it back into an inlet again. Is there a wave break in the coral reef line offshore that is not tripping the waves in that location that is causing the wave energy to be focused on the shoreline there? There is a lot of reasons that can sometimes be derived to address why there is a hot spot in a particular location. Sometimes the coastal engineer can come up with a possible explanation. Ms. Cutt said that we all know that the modifications in the Newport Pier appear to be contributing to the erosion we are seeing, we can't say that all the erosion is because of the 7