BETHANY BEACH, DE - DNREC held a community informational session on future repair and replenishment plans for the Indian River Inlet on Tuesday, September 24th.
Neighbors visited the information hoping to learn more about efforts to protect Route 1 from future flooding and repair the dunes from recent breaches.
"I'm very concerned about the beaches and the erosion, uh, you know the more I look at it I just really wanna know what they're gonna do," Joe Parent from Millville said.
DNREC Secretary Shawn Garvin told that the information will be available online for those who couldn't make it.
"We wanted to come out and provide background information. Provide kind of what's going on right now. This format and being able to kind of walk around at your pace helps to facilitate better information gathering," Garvin said.
In the short term, Garvin said crews will continue to repair the dunes with both sand and hardened shoreline remedies.
Garvin also said that DelDOT will be adding in sheet piles adjacent to Route 1 in the coming weeks.
In the long term, Garvin said they hope to begin dredging the inlet in November, and hopes that efforts to repair the sand by-pass system will begin around December.
Garvin said all of these projects rely on funding. He said the $10 million dollars they received in federal funding for the emergency repairs also have to be matched by around $15 million from the state.
All of this information was available at the session, which had mixed reviews from those who stopped by.
"I think it went very well and everybody seems very informative," neighbor Michael Reyen said.
"Im disappointed. We were not given any opportunity to ask questions in an open forum," another neighbor, Ed Montz, said.
For those who were not able to attend the session, the information boards presented can be found on DNREC's website.
