Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina — Wrightsville Beach’s shrinking shoreline is in desperate need of sand.
“We can’t get our ocean rescue vehicles from point A to point B in some places, simply because there’s not enough beach,” said Mayor Darryl Mills.
The reconstruction that usually happens every three years is behind schedule. Authorities said they have faced numerous challenges since the beach was last filled with fresh sand in 2018.
Wrightsville Beach has been getting its sand from nearby Masonboro Inlet since the 1960s, but a new interpretation of the Coastal Barrier Resources Act (CBRA) dictates that using federal dollars to move sand from a CBRA-protected area is prohibited ( Masonboro Entrance) to a non-CBRA zone (Wrightsville Beach). The Wrightsville Beach renovation project is funded 100% by the federal government, according to local records.
Those restrictions pushed the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with planning and executing the Wrightsville Beach renovation, to seek an offshore “loan source,” making the project much more expensive and time-consuming.
After finding an area with sand compatible with the beach, the Army Corps discovered some 300,000 tires in the sand bed. Those tires appear to have come from an artificial reef created by the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Marine Fisheries, the agency tasked with protecting the state’s marine and estuarine resources.
The Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF) said it placed more than 600,000 tires off the North Carolina coast in the 1970s and early 1980s, but said it discontinued the practice in 1983.
“We don’t know the exact number of tires that were deployed back then,” said Patricia Smith, director of communications for the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries. “Basically, the Division just doesn’t have reliable deployment records from that period.”
The closest artificial reef to the potential sand collection location for Wrightsville Beach is Meares Harris Reef, located about 2.5 miles offshore and encompassing 649 acres. That site includes other artificial reefs made of concrete pipes and tugboats that serve as habitats for fish, but the aging tires are proving problematic.
The researchers said the corrosive saltwater breaks down the cables and chains that connect the reef faster than the tires themselves. The DMF says it has recovered some 100,000 tires that washed up on beaches, mostly after the storms, at a cost of more than $1 million. Smith said the DMF does not have a plan to recover tires that may have migrated from the reefs.
“Simply put, we thought it would be cost-prohibitive,” Smith said. “We just don’t see a feasible way to do it.”
Daniel Rittschof, a professor of environmental sciences at the Duke Marine Laboratory, says that leaving tires in the ocean can harm the ocean’s ecosystem, because they contain organotins and other toxic compounds that can be endocrine disruptors to marine life.
“They leach sex-changing molecules from snails and molluscs very easily and the molecules are toxic at higher concentrations,” Rittschof said.
As the timeline and shoreline continue to shrink for the Wrightsville Beach restoration, officials agree that continuing the current tire-laden loan site is the best way forward.
“For us, it’s actually better to find that out now in our initial investigation, so we can put a good plan together to mitigate those tires,” said Dave Connolly of the Army Corps of Engineers. “We think we can find areas within that loan source where we can work on tires, which would be a better option than going back to the drawing board to find another loan source that is potentially further away and more expensive and could delay the project for another year.”
Environmental assessments are currently underway to determine mitigation plans that would then be open to public input. If approved, the Army Corps expects to begin work in March 2023.
Wrightsville Beach leaders said they are frustrated with where they are.
“As far as cleaning up the mess that the government created, I never thought about that, because I knew that would never happen. This is not how the federal government operates,” Mills said. “They leave it to us.”