Shores to install geotubes next week - weather permitting - December 3, 1998

By Jeff BURLINGAME - Daily World Writer, The Aberdeen Daily World

OCEAN SHORES - As next week's scheduled beginning for geotube construction draws nigh, a multi-million dollar question lurks inside the somber clouds hovering above the city:

Will Mother Nature cooperate?

"Weather will definitely be the deciding factor for this project," says City Manager Jack McKenzie. "If the weather isn't good, the project doesn't go."

The city had initially planned to embed 540 feet of the dune-strengthening geotubes - huge sausage-shaped bags full of sand - in the dune north of the North Jetty by the first week of November.

But a myriad of permitting problems and legal roadblocks delayed the project by more than a month, eventually pushing the starting date back to the second week of December.

Now, after 21Ú2 years of non-stop battles with state and federal agencies and fighting protests from environmental groups, something as simple as weather becomes the city's biggest test.

It's a test that the city is amazingly passing. Despite the recent bad weather spell, the dune - which in some places is less than 20 feet wide - has remained unscathed.

More than 161Ú2 inches of rain have fallen on Ocean Shores since Nov. 1. The precipitation has frequently been accompanied by wind gusts near 70 mph. The combination of the two would typically spell disaster to the dune.

The saving grace, city officials say, has been the fact that most of those winds have come from the east. East winds travel through town and skip right over top of the dune.

Southwest winds - which create huge swells that would directly slam into and eat away at the dune - have not been common.

"The eastern end of town has taken a pounding," says McKenzie. "But with the dune, we've been lucky."

"There's been nothing substantial in the area where we're worried about the beach," adds city engineer Paul Richart. "We haven't yet seen the same intensity as the storms of last year. We haven't seen a major storm coincide with a high tide."

Those calamitous southwest winds are on the way, according to the National Weather Service in Seattle. The Weather Service is calling for 20-25 mph southwest winds for the remainder of the week.

If the wind and rain continue through next week's starting date, the project will likely be delayed until January.

"If we get to January, we'll have to reevaluate the situation," Richart says. He adds that no cut-off date has been made for the project. "But if we have a breach before the project is finished, all this work means nothing."

The city has chosen next week to begin the erosion-control project because of predicted low tides.

Embedding the geotubes - which will be done by Bellingham's IMCO General Construction - should take around two weeks, Richart says. During the two-week span from Dec. 7 to Dec. 21, the highest tide at Ocean Shores will be in the nine-foot range, which is suitable for construction, the engineer says.

The tides are a given, Richart says. The weather is not.

"Any wind over 25-30 mph and we are definitely not going to be out on the beach working," says Richart. "We need a lack of high winds and the lack of a storm swell."

Failure to place the geotubes in the dune north of the North Jetty will likely mean a breach sometime this winter, consultants say. That breach would flood low-lying areas in the southern end of town and jeopardize millions of dollars in municipal utilities and private property.

City officials have been working at break-neck pace to get the tubes in before the major portion of the winter storm season hits.

"We're doing this for protection," Richart says. "But it all depends on the weather."