rss
mobile
Feeds
That renourishment project would be similar to two others the community has paid for during the past decade, said plantation general manager Peter Kristian.
Pine Island, actually a peninsula, is a popular place for residents to sunbathe and walk their dogs, he said. If the land bridge connecting it to Hilton Head washes away, Pine Island will "truly become an island, and that amenity will be lost," Kristian said.
The land bridge also protects more than 15 acres of wetlands to the south and west of Pine Island, separated from Port Royal Sound by the narrow strip of sand.
"The marsh is an estuary for all manner of wildlife and protects homes along it from erosion," he said.
The spit also shelters a creek Hilton Head Plantation uses to receive most of its stormwater runoff. A breach in the spit could stagnate the creek and create drainage problems throughout the community, said Chris Creed, an engineer for Olsen Associates, which will oversee the renourishment.
The project, scheduled to begin in fall 2011, would be funded through the capital transfer fee levied on property sales in the community. The fee brings in about $250,000 a year, Kristian said.
The renourishment is expected to cost $200,000, and permitting and environmental studies will cost another $40,000, Kristian said.
"We have been fighting Mother Nature for quite some time, and we throw a lot of money at Mother Nature," he said. "It's such a special amenity and fragile ecosystem. It needs to be protected."
The land between Pine Island and Dolphin Head has long been prone to erosion, but the rate accelerated after the community garrisoned the shoreline with boulders in the 1970s to protect waterfront homes, Kristian said. The boulders changed erosion patterns at Pine Island.
The Pine Island renourishment is small compared to renourishment projects the town does, such as one planned this winter at the island's heel near Port Royal Plantation, Creed said.
The Pine Island project is "1 percent of the size of one of the town's beach renourishments," he said.
Nonetheless, Hilton Head Plantation must undergo the same state and federal permitting process as the town, Creed said. That includes an analysis of any effect it would have on endangered species, such as loggerhead turtles and the piping plover.
The smaller scale and reliable information about the erosion rate at Pine Island make other expenses easier to manage, Kristian said.
The sand Hilton Head Plantation will use for the Pine Island project will come from an area close to the island and can be retrieved by local contractors with standard backhoes, Creed said.
"This project is just a simple earth-moving exercise," he said.
