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gineer for the Army Corps.

He said, “In the 1980’s I was responsible for feeding the aquarium’s Osborne Laboratory tanks and cleaning them on the weekends and during the summer.” He’s has worked for the

Army Corps for 35 years and today is the Chief of Civil Works

After Hurricane Sandy in 2013, the U.S.

Army Corps of Engineers, New York

Section, New York District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

District placed roughly 580,000 cubic

Weinberg added that they were expanding the aquarium while yards of sand on Coney Island Beach to he worked there and during the construction that took place on replace sand lost during the hurricane and the old Dreamland property, a lot of history was uncovered. also to restore the Coney Island Project to its original design pro? le from when the

He said, “I’ve always loved the history of Coney and during coastal storm risk reduction project was the construction many interesting things were unearthed in- originally constructed in the 1990’s. cluding old cups and bowls, a giant compressed gas tank that required calling the bomb squad, the foundation of one of the park’s towers, and perhaps most mysteriously - a small boat found in the middle of the beach! Was it buried by rum run- ners? I eventually learned that most of the beach was arti? cial and constructed in the 1920’s. Presumably the boat had sunk in the ocean and was buried when the city had built the beach.”

EXPANSION

Expansion of the beach continued in the 1960’s, when the

Parks Department extended the bathing area and boardwalk

Credit: Chris Gardner, Public Affairs further east into the Brighton Beach area and constructed a public restroom. Several years later more public restrooms, new lifeguard stations, and a shade pavilion were established.

Brooklyn borough president Howard Golden began replac- ing the boardwalk’s decking in phases in the 1980’s and this work continued over the next two decades.

In the early 1990’s the Army Corps began working on the beach in collaboration with the Parks Department and the New York

State Department of Environmental Conservation. They started the Coney Island Shoreline Protection Project to restore the beach that was eroding and was putting the coastal community at risk.

The Army Corps restored approximately 3-miles of the beachfront with dredged sand, increasing its height and width and created dunes.

Replenishing sand and creating dunes on a beach can help to reduce future coastal storm risks. A beach’s size, shape and sand volume help determine how well the beach can re- duce risk to a developed community during a storm. Sand and dunes act as a buffer between the waves and storm water lev- els and structures landward of the beach.

To slowdown future beach erosion, the Army Corps placed 600 tons of stone and approximately 35,000 cubic yards of sand adjacent to a groin located on the western portion of the

Coney Island peninsula in Sea Gate.

Groins are shoreline structures that are perpendicular to the beach that are designed to retain sediment from moving along the shore and help maintain the wide beaches by minimizing or slowing down erosion.

Placing stone and sand adjacent to the groin will help prevent storm induced waves from re? ecting off the sides of the groin sideways along the shore, causing the shore to erode further. www.marinetechnologynews.com 37

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