Boracay and Southern Ocean County News Magazine

Pat Johnson | November 24, 2021

what happened? : Andrea Dinkowitz asked JPT construction supervisor Frank Branagan why he did not notify his neighbors.

Soon after the construction company JPT Group began mobilizing dredging equipment in a quiet neighborhood of Atlantis, Little Egg Harbor, neighbors called the town and complained that they had not been notified.

First, the trees and flowers planted by residents to beautify the edge of the Country Club Lagoon were demolished and the ground was cleared. When a huge construction crane unloaded seven 50-yard containers onto a barge floating in the lagoon, the stones were dumped to absorb its weight. A push boat is moored on the barge.

Soon, Andrea Dinkowitz, a resident of Atlantis, summoned about 25 of her neighbors and held an on-site meeting with committee member Ray Gormley and township engineer Jason Worth on Friday, November 19.

Worth and Gormley also joined the ranks of JPT Construction Director Frank Branagan.

"No one was notified," Dinkowitz said. "Suddenly, all these devices appeared."

When Dinkowitz asked him a question, Worth tried to answer. Worth said that knowing that the area is small, the town initially wanted to use a larger site as a staging area near Great Bay Avenue, but as negotiations with the owners came to a stalemate, the area next to the Country Club Avenue golf course was allowed. The end of the lagoon was owned by the county, and the township was granted easements.

"As homeowners, we are worried about leaks and smells," Dinkowitz said.

Worth said that large barges with disposal containers will move from the lagoon to the creek, while smaller floating barges will bring one container at a time to the end of the street, where an excavator equipped with a clamshell bucket will load the excavated The mud enters the waiting dump truck. If everything goes according to plan, there will be almost no leakage.

There will be no storage space and no smell," he said.

Dump trucks will exit Country Club Boulevard on Radio Road towards Thompson Avenue, where they will unload mud in the shoreline gravel pit. Gormley said they could also go to the Silva Pit in Eagleswood. He said that both sites are allowed as closed disposal sites.

Branagan said the area at the end of the street will be moved from barge to truck and will also be equipped with turbid curtains.

"During dredging has changed a lot in the past five years," the supervisor said.

The company re-measured the bottom of the lagoon; the size was sent to the dredger by GPS, so the workers knew exactly where and how much mud they were removing. A 40-foot-wide channel will be dredged in the middle of the lagoon to a depth of 3 to 3.5 feet at low tide.

The lagoon leads to Big Thoroughfare and Tuckton Harbour, which will be dredged by the state to a depth of 6 feet at the turn and under the first bridge. This dredged material will be dumped on Story Island along with mud from Tuckton Creek.

Gormley said the state will start on Monday, November 22.

"The timing is perfect," he said.

The original price for seaside residents was estimated to be US$20,000 and could be paid within 10 years, but as the state government dredged the channel under the First Bridge, it is estimated to have dropped to US$11,500.

The price of JPT for the partial dredging of the lagoon in the town of Atlantis is $1,275,000-no dredging has been carried out since the 1960s.

Gormley said the price for homeowners may be lower because they only use trucks to transport the mud for about 5 miles. For the first dredging project on Osborne Island, the mud had to be trucked to Cardiff in Atlantic County. But for the Osborn project, the mud is first "dehydrated" (leaved on site to drain some water) and then loaded, while the material from Atlantis will not be dehydrated.

Dredging is scheduled to start on Monday, November 29, and will be completed on January 20. Two push boats and barges with disposal containers will travel back and forth on the lagoon, so the boats of seaside residents must be on that November 29th date.

Branagan said that operations will start at 7 am. "And I won't lie to you. You will hear the backup beep (of the dump truck), but we can't do anything because this is OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Act) regulations. But the truck will not emit any The tailgate slammed."

The Country Club Boulevard will remain open during operation.

At the end of the meeting, as the night was getting colder, the residents seemed to be satisfied with the answer. Dinkowitz even said that she would bring coffee to the workers.

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