Orange Beach, Ala. – (OBA) – There are areas of the beach in Orange Beach that need new sand after deterioration from storms in the past few years but it’s unlikely the untrained eye could see it.

“Our lodging industry partners are probably going to see this operation disrupt their rentals and the beach won’t necessarily look like it’s that critical to the tourism and those who rent those properties for a week,” city Coastal Resources Director Phillip West said. “For us that’s another reason that we don’t want to do it in the summer.”

Most beach renourishments are planned during the fall and winter months but due to delays on getting the necessary permitting from FEMA to fund the projects both Gulf Shores and Orange Beach will have to put off the project until next year. Gulf State Park’s beaches are also included in the overall project.

“Anytime you can add sand obviously that’s a good thing and that’s more protection for the upcoming storm season,” West said. “But again, just because that beach looks really wide and ‘healthy’ it may need more elevation to really meet the design criteria for protection. Just because it looks wide doesn’t mean that it’s where it needs to be healthy-wise because maybe the elevation of the beach is not where we would like to see it and keep it.”

While Orange Beach may need some beefing up in places, there are critical spots in Gulf Shores where the shoreline has eroded so much emergency vehicles can’t get through. Gulf Shores City Engineer Mark Acreman said with permits expected in the summer, tackling a project this large during the busy season would present safety concerns.

“This is a project that we share with the city of Orange Beach as well as Gulf State Park and all three entities have agreed this is the best course forward for us to make sure that our beaches will be restored but also more importantly that we’re safe throughout the summer and we don’t have a major construction project going on when we have hundreds of thousands of people on the beach,” Acreman said at the Dec. 12 council meeting.

Even work on the beaches desperately needing rebuilt can’t begin until the final permits are secured.

“We are working with our Coastal Engineer to evaluate the current conditions of the beach, but cannot move forward with any restoration work until we have our environmental clearances from FEMA,” Acreman said.

Gulf Shores Deputy Fire Chief Melvin Shepard expressed his concerns about the “scalloped” beaches there in a presentation at the March 14 council meeting.

“When this beach is crowded it’s impossible to get through there,” Shepard said. “If someone’s having a cardiac arrest, we cannot drive down the beach. We have to access the road and then go through the parking lot then through the building to get to these patients. We’ve got to come up with some solution to where our people can travel east and west, the police can travel east and west.”

At the crux of this problem, West said, are those held up FEMA permits. With this round of renourishment, the federal agency added a new step to the process by requiring a historical and environment assessment of the areas where sand would be taken from the Gulf for the project.

“We got our Corps permit and our ADEM permit pretty quickly or in a reasonable amount of time,” West said. “FEMA’s review, FEMA’s environmental and historical preservation review is just unbearably long. They’ve gone through a process of what they call a supplemental environmental assessment that takes a lot longer. There’s really no rational reason other than they’re just slow.”

But, again, West says the beaches in Orange Beach may still look healthy but there are still areas where additional sand is needed.

“There’s certainly places that we need to beef up that could definitely use sand,” West said. “But as far as infrastructure the critically at risk or threatened due to an eroded shoreline, there’s not really any in Orange Beach.”