Dear Friend,

This is the next in a series of letters from us at the Sconset Beach Preservation Fund to Nantucket community leaders updating you on progress of our new effort to control the erosion of the Sankaty bluff in Sconset. We last wrote to you in July just before the Nantucket Conservation Commission (ConCom) began its review of our proposed project. We are distributing this letter to a growing list of people interested in the project, many of whom we have had a chance to interview in person to elicit comments. We have tried hard to reach out to the Nantucket community and to incorporate these comments in our development of the project design. In addition, we are committed to keeping people informed about our progress.

Please see below under “History” for the background leading up to our ConCom filing.

Since August, the ConCom as held three hearings, each about 90 minutes long, reviewing the project in detail. Commissioners and members of the public have asked detailed questions and have received responses from SBPF, both at the hearings and in follow-up letters. The ConCom has also engaged the services of a professional coastal engineering firm to provide it with independent technical analysis. In addition, we have reached out to Selectmen, planning officials, fishermen, the Nantucket Land Council and other participants in the review of the beach nourishment project, requesting their detailed comments outside of the public hearings. We have met with NLC staff and their outside engineers and have prepared detailed responses to their questions. Much of the discussion has centered on issues such as: (1) whether the amount of sediment that would naturally erode has been estimated correctly, (2) whether the proposed replacement sand is compatible with the sand naturally found in the bluff and beach, (3) how quickly the sand would be replaced after a major storm if all the sand washes away and the mattresses are exposed, and (4) how resilient the system would be to major storms. Attached are our complete formal responses to these and other questions and concerns raised by the ConCom and others over the last months.

We have gone to great lengths to explain our efforts to anyone who is interested. We have held meetings with community groups around the island. We also maintain a web site located at www.sconsetbeach.org containing detailed material on the project, its design and specifications, questions and answers from the ConCom, NLC, individual members of the public, aerial photos and the history of erosion in the project area, and much more.

At this point in the process, we expect that the ConCom will complete its review of the project over the next few months. At that point it will vote on whether to approve the project and what type of conditions they desire to place upon it if it is approved. If the project is approved, the Board of Selectmen will then be asked to approve a license to allow SBPF to install the project because the area where the mattresses and gabions will be constructed is on Town-owned land. In addition, under the terms of a recently enacted by-law the BOS must approve a coastal management plan in order for the project to proceed. At a recent BOS meeting, after the selectmen heard a detailed report from the Town Manager and Marine Department on work being done to prepare a coastal management plan, the selectmen voted unanimously to ask the Town Manager to finalize a plan focused on erosion for their approval by the end of January 2012.


History
As you may recall, we formally filed our project proposal in April after informally discussing the idea with about 50 community leaders beginning in the fall of 2010. This project is our first new venture since withdrawing our proposal for a major beach nourishment project in 2008 in the face of overwhelming opposition from the Nantucket community. Our new project, which builds upon the approved terrace project, does not involve the same scope as the beach nourishment proposal.

The new project involves placing large containers of medium-sized rocks at the toe of the bluff in order to stop the coastal bank from further erosion. The containers, which are made of a heavy duty plastic geogrid material that remains pliable below freezing, come in two basic sizes and are called “gabions” and “marine mattresses”. The initial installation of the system would be located in front of six of the Sconset properties that are severely threatened and undermined -- in two groups of three contiguous properties. You can view a sample of one of the mattresses at the end of the Holdgate Partners’ driveway off the Milestone Road. The mattresses weigh many tons and are anchored into the bluff. The system will be covered and re-covered every year by a berm of beach-compatible sand that will allow storms to erode sediment in an amount equivalent to the quantity of sediment that would erode from the bluff if it were unprotected. In this way, adjacent coastal areas will receive the same amount of sand that would normally drift into their vicinity. The requested permit would authorize as many as 20 properties over a 2,000 foot length to install the system, although it is unlikely that all would do so.

Versions of the gabion and marine mattress system have been installed in a number of other locations, including Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, Plymouth, Logan Airport in Boston, and Cape May, New Jersey. Case studies of each of these installations are available on the web site.

If you have any questions of comments, please don’t hesitate to contact any of us either through email, by phone or through the website.

Sincerely,
Josh Posner
Caroline Ellis
Bob Felch
Doug Hendrickson
Kermit Roosevelt
Beth Singer
Helmut Weymar