Army Corps to hold public meeting Thursday

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will hold a public meeting at City Hall Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m., where it will present details of a post-Hurricane Sandy coastal protection project for the barrier island.

Last month, Sen. Charles Schumer announced that the Army Corps could begin work on the $180 million project this fall, after he received a commitment from the federal government to cover all of the plan’s costs. Schumer called it a major step toward protecting local communities from future storms like Sandy, which caused roughly $200 million in damage in Long Beach.

The announcement came nearly a year after the City Council voted unanimously to move forward with the corps’ coastal protection project in the aftermath of Sandy. The vote came after representatives of the corps met with city and town officials to discuss modifying a plan that had been authorized by Congress in the 1990s but was rejected by the City Council in 2006.

Last year, officials said that the vote authorized the city to partner with the state to move forward with the Army Corps. The city’s resolution to revive the project came after Sandy, when Schumer urged municipalities and the corps to move forward with projects that had already received federal approval and didn’t require years of planning.

According to the corps, the proposed Long Beach project calls for the rehabilitation or new construction of at least 22 jetty groins and the placement of roughly 4.7 million cubic yards of sand for the construction of a system of beach berm and dunes along 35,000 feet of shoreline in Long Beach and the Town of Hempstead.

The project includes 25-foot-wide dunes in Long Beach, rising to 15½ feet above sea level, in front of the boardwalk. The dunes would slope down to a 40-foot-wide berm at an elevation of 10 feet, and to a 130-foot-wide berm 2 feet lower, in what the corps described as a “flat beach.”