TREASURE ISLAND - Take a trip to Sunset Beach and you'll see that the swimmers and surfers who normally swarm the area have been replaced by men hard at work.
Pipelines that look like a long, black hose splay along the sand as far south as the eyes allow, the words "keep off" displayed in neon orange letters.
Pristine blue skies and the lapping waves of the Gulf provide the backdrop to the gritty attraction du jour: dredging.
Now, the curious come not for the beach that's closed for 800 feet but to watch the work of restoring sand to the beach.
The last two months saw four hurricanes hit at the heart of Florida. Frances, Ivan and Jeanne, in particular, left nearly all of the gulf beaches lacking some serious real estate, said Nicole Elko, the county's coastal coordinator. "Every shoreline that fronts the gulf lost sand," Elko said.
Two areas gained sand - but not along the beach, she said.
The northern tips of both Caladesi Island and Shell Key gained deposits of sand to shoals - or sandbars - east of the islands, Elko said. In both cases, channels that existed there before the storms were closed by the shifted sand, but neither area is accessible to beachgoers. The shoals are now nearly 160 yards long, from north to south.
"The sand that is there is lost to the beach system," Elko said. "The shoreline didn't grow. The shoal did."
A few months shy of high-tourist season, the county is pushing to complete three renourishment projects: Sunset Beach, Upham Beach and Pass-a-Grille, in that order.
Upham Beach, plagued by one of the worst erosion problems in the state, was due to receive five sand-filled sausage-like tubes called T-groins to help stave off sand loss. On Sept. 1 - just days before Hurricane Frances struck - workers fattened up the shoreline by nearly 400 feet, Elko said.
"By Sept. 7, 200 feet were gone," she said, "Basically half the project."
Hurricane Ivan pummeled Pass-a-Grille, stealing 80 feet of shoreline and dunes. That prompted county officials to file an application for nearly $1.5-million of emergency renourishment, Elko said.
The state and federal governments answered the call. On Oct. 8, Gov. Jeb Bush traveled to St. Pete Beach to announce a $130-million federal plan to replenish Florida beaches bruised by the storms.
Roughly $3-million of that will go to Pinellas County beaches, Elko said. It will be used to fund the Pass-a-Grille project and the summer 2005 renourishment of the Sand Key beaches.
What's visible on the sand constitutes a tiny part of what goes into rebuilding a beach.
Math and global positioning systems, computer programs and calibrations all play a role, said field engineer Matt Dryden. Dryden is one of 41 workers from Norfolk Dredging, the Virginia-based company that that is contracted for the multimillion-dollar projects.
A GPS unit, mounted on the roof of the Sunset Chateau, sends a signal to a satellite, which then provides the latitude, longitude and elevation of the beach.
That information is plugged into a computer program, which creates a picture of the existing seabed based on the calculations, Dryden said.
The Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees the design and construction of the projects, compares its vision of what the beach should look like to the drawing, the two are reconciled and a final design is created.
Engineers use information from the GPS unit to calculate the volume of sand needed, Dryden said. Meanwhile, a hydraulic dredger sits offshore - 400 yards off Pass-a-Grille Channel, in this case - drilling the ocean floor or a sandbar and funneling it to shore. A submerged pipeline can extend for miles, with boosters propelling the material to the beach where workers place the sand based on the pictures created.
The workers have been here nearly two months working to reinvigorate the sagging shorelines. They plan to work all day, every day until the job is complete, said Tom Payne, the project manager and superintendent.
Sunset Beach should be complete in about one week, then Upham Beach is up next, said Andy Cummings, project engineer with the Corps of Engineers.
On Wednesday and Thursday, the waves bumping against the Sunset Beach shore meant the dredgers had a bit of rare downtime. To effectively dredge, they need tranquil water.
If the ocean proves too choppy, it can damage the dredging equipment that drags along the ocean floor or sandbar and slow the project down, said Dryden.
For now, Elko says the beaches are "still in decent shape in Pinellas County."
"We're welcoming tourists," she said. "Florida's open for business."
Maybe, but tourists don't necessarily realize that.
Wit Tuttell, spokesperson for the St. Petersburg/Clearwater Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, said a recent national survey of travelers showed that 34 percent of visitors thought Pinellas County received extreme damage from the storms.
Even though the area never received a direct hit, tourists from other areas don't know the geography well enough to realize Tampa Bay was largely spared, he said.
"It's almost been a perceptive hit we've taken that's hurt us more than the damage," Tuttell said. "...I don't think it's going to have a big impact on the winter season in February. I think we'll be feeling it in the fall for the next few years."
Among some local businesses, the attitude toward the dredging is pay now, get paid later.
The short-term effects of dredging - fewer customers, more complaints about the lack of beach access - are outweighed by the long-term benefits of renourishment, said Joanne Renaud, manager at Caddy's on the Beach, a Sunset Beach bar that backs up to the mouth of the dredging pipes.
"The bigger the beach, the more people we can put on it and the more people are going to come out," she said Friday.
"The inconvenience for the little bit of time they've been here is nothing to complain about. The beach is going to be absolutely beautiful when they're done - as long as another hurricane doesn't come and take it all back."
