SC - Grand Strand awarded $56M for beach renourishment to repair Hurricane Ian damage
City of North Myrtle Beach is one recipient city in SC for renourishment funds to repair Hurricane Ian damage (Credit: City of NMB)
NORTH MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. (WPDE) — The US Army Corps of Engineers is awarding $56 million to the Grand Strand for a full beach renourishment to repair damage caused by Hurricane Ian.
The funds have been allocated to the Myrtle Beach CSRM project.
The federal government plans to spend more than $13 million to conduct the periodic nourishment of the City of North Myrtle Beach Coastal Storm Risk Management (CSRM) project.
Wes Wilson, a project manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), announced the funding this week to North Myrtle Beach City Manager, Mike Mahaney.
The funding will replenish sand along approximately nine miles of the North Myrtle Beach coastline and is part of a larger USACE project to pump sand onto almost 27 miles of Grand Strand beaches.
Work will involve dredging sand from offshore borrow sites and placing it on the beaches to construct a full periodic renourishment.
The project will involve widening the beach, rebuilding new dunes, planting dune vegetation, and installing sand fences.
The start date for the renourishment project has not yet been announced, and will not be known until the Army Corps of Engineers can finalize the project's engineering and award construction to a contractor.
The City of Myrtle Beach will receive 650,000 cubic yards of sand, or the equivalent of 65,000 dump trucks.
The actual pumping of sand along the coast is not expected until later this year. The design-and-coordination phase will take six to nine months.
Myrtle Beach’s last renourishment happened in September 2018.
The state will receive a total of $97 million in federal funding to replenish South Carolina beaches.
