A contractor with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began closing Fort Pierce beaches on a “revised” schedule to address erosion there in recent months, according to a March 19 county release.
Manson Construction, the contractor, cut off access to Jetty Park and South Beach on South Hutchinson Island between March 21-27 as a new beach nutrition project begins.
The Army Corps, through Manson, intends to “place roughly 400,000 cubic yards of sand” throughout “one mile of shoreline immediately south of the Fort Pierce Inlet,” the release said. Manson would begin adding sand to the beach starting March 24.
Manson will source the sand from the Capron Shoal, an “authorized borrow” site found approximately 4 miles southeast in the Atlantic from the Fort Pierce Inlet, the release said, referring to county records. Their work will progress across a 24-hour/7-day-a-week basis “including weekends and holidays.”
The sand would be offloaded “from inside the inlet’s south jetty and move down the coastline,” from now until “mid-May,” the release said. Seaway Drive/State Road A1A along with the Fort Pierce Jetty and “adjacent beach” will endure “periodic closures” as workers from Manson complete the latest nourishment project there.
The project will use approximately $15.1 million in funds from the federal government and county Erosion District, according to the release. The Army Corps will pay “77.76 percent” (approx. $11.74 million) of these costs compared to the county’s “22.25 percent” (approx. $3.36 million) share.
In total, 2.3 miles of critically eroded beach occupy the area between Jetty Park and South Beach, both of which fall under Fort Pierce city jurisdiction, according to the county’s 2026 Unified Mitigation Strategy.
Released March 17, the 575-page document – itemized by IEM International, a Raleigh, N.C.-based disaster consulting firm – mentions the erosion-related vulnerability of beaches along South Hutchinson Island; most of it reiterated from assessments made by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
Both Jetty Park and South Beach, the document specified, were exposed to nine significant weather emergencies between 2019 and 2022. The landfall of Hurricanes Dorian (Sept. 2, 2019) and Nicole (Nov. 9, 2022), along with the storm surges they generated, bookended this timeline.
Hurricane Nicole inflicted significant damage to this beach that necessitated three nutrition projects since late 2022, including the one currently in progress.
The document, though, carried a warning of how “human-caused activities such as construction, altered drainage patterns and beach nourishment projects can either mitigate or worsen erosion impacts.”
A late winter chill lingered from storms overhead – already a contrast from record 89-degree Fahrenheit heat throughout the preceding week, according to the National Weather Service – as a Manson dredging vessel moored on the north end of Jetty Park March 17.
Jeff Bennett, a longtime science teacher at the Northport K-8 School in Port St. Lucie, stood above the moss-coated rocks of Jetty Park, where visitors seined for shells in recent, warmer weeks despite the hard-to-navigate escarpments.
He took phone pictures of the beach, now with Army Corps sandbag-earthworks built as early as 1971 exposed to the elements, with his wife, Nancy, standing next to him.
“This is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” Bennett said of the beach. “The last few storms have been pretty rough.”
Where once existed an opportunity to dig for fossils – usually from the “Pleistocene” period as recently as 11,000 years ago – the beach now bore scars that left Bennett “worried about climate change” and what associated sea rise might further inflict on Fort Pierce’s beaches, he said.
“(I’m) really surprised by how quickly it went up,” he said of past nutrition projects in the Jetty Park/South Beach area.