Upham Beach project nearly done

After four months, the sand dredging and oil cleanup are done; now the huge piles of sand only need leveling.

By AMY WIMMER

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 10, 2000

ST. PETE BEACH -- This tourist season, Cyndi Bates has been cursed at, accused of false advertising and threatened with lawsuits.

In exchange, she's given away fruit baskets, bottles of wine and discounts.

"Here's my angry file," said Bates, the reservation manager at the Caprice Resorts at Upham Beach, holding an inch-think folder filled with letters from dissatisfied customers.

The visitors from the North paid as much as $1,225 per week at a beach where the sights and sounds included mountains of sand up to three stories high and the all-day roar of offshore dredges.

After four months, the unpleasant but necessary distractions are nearing an end. The dredges picked up their last grain of sand about 2:30 a.m. Monday, and now workers need only level more than 100,000 cubic yards of sand hills into a plain.

The dredges and the oil cleanup crews are leaving. Give the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contractors a little more time, officials say, and the city can have its beach back.

"A couple more weeks, three weeks at the most, and they'll be finished," said Jim Terry, Pinellas County's coastal coordinator.

Meanwhile, a dredge is returning to John's Pass, where sand for Sunset Beach is being collected. That dredge was sent to a project elsewhere in the state several weeks ago.

This year's renourishment at Upham, among the most malnourished beaches in Florida, was complicated and prolonged by the discovery of oil in Blind Pass, the sand source for the project. The mess was a remnant of a 1993 spill that dumped 352,000 gallons of oil and jet fuel into Tampa Bay.

So as the corps worked to pump sand from the bottom of Blind Pass to the shore of Upham Beach, the U.S. Coast Guard developed a procedure to separate the oil from the sand. The oil, encountered on the corps' first day of dredging work in January, forced the project to shut down for a month while government agencies decided how to proceed.

The oil cleanup slowed the work. The Coast Guard established a containment pond, where the oil was siphoned off the surface and the water was cleaned before being pushed back into the gulf. Altogether, the Coast Guard discovered and disposed of more than 30,000 gallons of oil.

Business people such as Bates say they are used to sand renourishment projects, which typically last a couple months and have less impact on the tourist season. The discovery of oil in Blind Pass, however, made things more difficult this season.

"We can handle the renourishments, but going into three months is different," Bates said.

She spent much of the tourist season relocating guests from ground- and second-floor rooms, where the sand in front of the windows blocked a view of the gulf, to fourth- and fifth-floor rooms.

That view, however, often included dredging equipment and the Coast Guard's containment pond.

The city of St. Pete Beach is urging the Corps to return the dredge to Upham Beach every couple years for smaller, less intensive renourishments. City Manager Carl Schwing said the city is awaiting word on that proposal.

"We should be scheduling a renourishment almost as soon as one is done," Schwing said. Upham's geography makes it especially vulnerable to beach erosion, and much of its sand generally ends up at Pass-a-Grille beach, just south of Upham.

Months before renourishment began this year, the city had to close its wooden dune walkovers leading to Upham Beach because the erosion made them dangerous to use. Beachgoers would have had to jump a couple feet down to the sand after walking on the small footbridge.

"We don't want it to get to the point where we have to close the beach, and where we're losing valuable sea oats that allow us to keep the beach in place," Schwing said.

Lt. Alan Tyndale, an on-site coordinator for the Coast Guard, said an oil cleanup should not be necessary in future renourishment projects. Oil deposits might still lurk beneath John's Pass, but the oil is not likely in areas that will be eligible for dredging.

"They should never, ever have to do this again for a renourishment project," he said. "This was just a unique set of circumstances."

In fact, Tyndale said, the corps discovered little oil in its last days of dredging the pass.

"For the past week they've been bringing up just sand and water" he said. "They haven't encountered any oil."

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