TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

No Cliff Hanger At Apollo Beach

ADVERTISEMENT

By SUSAN M. GREEN, The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 7, 2007

APOLLO BEACH - The white cliffs of Dover have welcomed travelers across the English Channel for centuries, but some smaller land shelves that cropped up recently at Apollo Beach Nature Preserve didn't give park managers a warm and fuzzy feeling.

Time and tides eroded sand on the beach at the park's north end, creating cliffs up to 6 feet high, said John Brill, spokesman for Hillsborough's Parks, Recreation and Conservation Department.

Crews moved in two weeks ago to shore up the shoreline. Workers from Seagrass Recovery of Ruskin and Indian Rocks Beach teamed up with Agrecol Corp., an environmental-restoration company based in Madison, Wis., to bolster the beach with terraces of sand and native plants.

"We're trying to eliminate an erosion problem over there," Brill said. "It's been there at least a year."

The project design has been used successfully in Agrecol's back yard in the Great Lakes area, said Richard Sullivan, who is overseeing the job for the parks department. But it's a pilot project for Hillsborough County and the state.

"It's the first time they've done anything like this in the South," Sullivan said. If it's successful, he added, it could serve as a model for other environmental restoration sites.

"It's a living sea wall," Sullivan said.

The design intersperses sandbags filled with a mixture of sand and soil with native grass such as paspalum, spartina and dropseed, and replaces the cliffs with a gradual slope.

"In a year or two, you won't even be able to see the sandbags," Sullivan said. "It will be all green vegetation."

Workers scraped coastal sand from dunes at the site and mixed it with soil from an environmental-restoration project at Balm Scrub to fill the sandbags, he said.

Workers also installed rock and rubble riprap along the north side of the property, Brill said.

The $50,000 project was limited to the north end of the nature preserve, so the park remained open during construction.

Reporter Susan M. Green can be reached at (813) 865-1566 or sgreen@tampatrib.com.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT