CAROLINA BEACH, NC (WWAY)– All day long dredging is underway on the Carolina Beach Inlet.
Dredging projects play a major role in maintaining both beaches and inlets.
The Carolina Beach Inlet is in the middle of a three day project, crews are capturing sand and dumping it elsewhere.
“This is an important project because this really, the inlets of North Carolina are a life blood to the folks who need those inlets to help support and grow the economies,” project manager Jim Medlock said.
The state and county are paying for this $83,000 project.
Right now, The Carolina Beach inlet is shallow. It needs to be deeper to make it easier for boats to get out to the Atlantic Ocean.
“It’s like a vacuum cleaner that sets down on the bottom of the ocean or the inlet and we, like a vacuum does, it sucks up material, comes up through a pipeline and then goes through a bin in the middle of the boat. We’re capturing right now, both water and sand,” Medlock said.
The sand from the bottom of the ocean is being moved to make the channel deeper.
Which is important for residents and commercial usage.
“When you have deep water in the inlet it will break outside of that where the shallow is but, you have a nice channel in the middle where the surf isn’t breaking, no surf zone basically and that’s what you want to have,” Captain Barry Stull said.
The sand that is being removed from the channel its being dumped near the Carolina Beach inlet, where it will eventually be used for beach re-nourishment.
It has been three months since Carolina Beach’s last dredging project.
They hope to make this dredging maintenance happen four times a year, if funding is available.