The Sebastian Inlet will be bustling over the next several years, and not just with surfers crowding famous surf breaks north and south of inlet and competitive fishermen on shore and in boats.
There also will be cranes, barges and pumps and pile drivers as the approach to popular north jetty gets a major repair, the inlet sand trap is dredged, the beach to the south renourished, and the bridge over the inlet replaced.
The $2.5-million jetty repair started in mid-November and is slated for completion in July 2025.
The big sand dredging project will get underway in January, according to the Sebastian Inlet District, which raised its tax rate and doubled its budget this year, from $10.8 million to nearly $22 million, to pay for the two projects and other expenses.
Six months or so after the jetty repair wraps up, just as the pelicans and ospreys have gotten comfortable again, the Florida Department of Transportation will roll heavy equipment and dispatch hard-hatted engineers and contractors to replace the 1548-foot-long bridge that connects Indian River and Brevard counties.
The rebuilding work now underway will replace 190 feet of revetment, or shoreline armoring, and the concrete walkway above it that leads to the fishing grounds people come from all over the state to visit.
The repair section sits below the dining deck of the Surfside Grill restaurant and beach shop, stretching along the north side of the inlet to the edge of the beach.
The stilted concrete structure that extends hundreds of feet out into the ocean on the north side of the Inlet, which most people think of as the North Jetty, will remain untouched for now, though it will be closed until construction is complete.
The section that is being replaced is an accretion of materials and methods that started as a low coquina seawall more than 100 years ago.
“The district was granted a permit on Aug. 31, 1920, to dig the inlet,” says Inlet District public information officer and social media manager Ed Garland.
“We have photos showing barges carrying coquina for small jetties during the period of 1920-1924. There were also major improvements throughout the 1950s. A complete overhaul of the north jetty took place between 1968-1970 by the Cleary brothers.”
New materials were piled up on top of old ones, creating a hodge-podge structure of rock, concrete and rusty steel that began to fail in recent years as limestone rocks and boulders that protected it wore or washed away due to wave action and sand movement during hurricanes and other big storms.
“We had to do emergency repairs two years ago, after Ian and Nicole,” said Garland. “They were temporary fixes with concrete and sandbags meant to last until this project could start.”
The elevated concrete walkway leading to the jetty was still intact, with fishermen walking back and forth in early November, but the archaic foundation its piers rested on was worn out.
The hodge podge is being totally replaced by what looks like a very durable modern structure on engineering drawings shared with Vero Beach 32963 by Inlet District executive director James Gray.
After tons of rubble and fragments of the past are removed, two lines of heavy, interlocking steel sheet pilings will be driven into the earth and seabed until they hit marl. The space between them will be filled with sandy, soft-concrete material, creating a thick buttress that will be topped by a wide, heavy duty concrete walkway leading to the jetty.
That formidable structure will be further armored with a stone buttress composed of four-foot granite boulders from a quarry in Georgia that will slope 25 or 30 feet out into the water and rise 5 feet above mean high tide at the base of steel seawall.
When complete, the new revetment will be way better than loose piles of coquina stone and is projected to last for decades.
Planning and engineering were by Environmental Science Associates, a major player in complex coastal projects with 21 offices in Florida and on the West Coast of the U.S.
An example of the company’s heft is the Chase Center on the shore of San Francisco Bay. ESA was a main partner in developing the 18,000-seat arena where the Golden State Warriors and Golden State Valkyries professional basketball teams play, handling much of the planning and permitting for the huge, eco-sensitive project.
Miami-area Shoreline Foundation, Inc. is building the new revetment. The company has an impressive track record dating back to the 1980s that includes building the Atlantis Marina on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, a 74-slip marina at the venerable Biscayne Bay Yacht Club, and installing the gargantuan infrastructure at the Derecktor mega-yacht shipyard in Fort Pierce.
That job included “installation of 286 auger cast piles, each 18 inches in diameter and 65 feet in depth, driving 526 lineal feet of steel sheet pile 45 feet in length, the excavation of 11,000 cubic yards to create a slip for use by the world’s largest mobile hoist with a lifting capacity of 1500 tons … and the enormous relieving platform built with over 70 tons of steel rebar and 820 cubic yards of concrete … to support the load of the mobile hoist and its precious mega-yacht cargo,” according to the company.
On Inlet District plans, the current project is labeled as Phase One. Other sections, including the 500-foot stilted concrete extension that projects out into the stormy Atlantic, will have to be replaced in coming years. The concrete jetty where fishermen and fisherwomen cast their lines was completed in 1970, making it more than 50 years old.
The Inlet District has not announced a timetable for future jetty projects, but it did tell Vero Beach 32963 that the big sand dredging and beach repair project will begin in January.
“We are going to dredge 215,000 cubic yards out of the sand trap and deposit on it on about 2.5 miles of beach south of the Inlet, starting below the state park,” Garland said.
That 500 million pounds of sand will be supplemented by another 85,000 cubic yards from local sand mines that will be delivered by truck to help the Inlet District meet its statutory requirement of placing 75,000 cubic yards annually on beaches south of the Inlet.
The sand trap is a pit that was blasted and dredged at the lagoon end of the Inlet a century ago at the insistence of the Army Corps of Engineers, which did not want ocean sand shoaling in the Indian River navigation channel.
Enlarged over the years, it now covers 42 acres and captures huge quantities of sand that come into it with the tidal flow and during storms.
The Inlet District dredges it every four or five years, according to Garland, as part of its ongoing Inlet maintenance and to catch up on its beach sand placement requirements.
In past dredgings, the dredged sand has been transported down the beach to the replenishment area under pressure in large pipes as slurry.
The sand work is scheduled for completion by April, so that equipment will be off the beach before sea turtle nesting season begins.
The steeply arched “James H. Pruitt bridge, commonly known as the Sebastian Inlet Bridge, was built by Cleary Brothers Construction Company, West Palm Beach, Florida, and was completed in 1964,” according to the Inlet District.
It has been reconditioned twice and now is at the end of its useful life, deemed structurally deficient since 2018.
FDOT will commence replacing the worn-out span in early 2025 at a cost of $103 million, a $25-million increase from the $78-million budget announced in 2021, according to the agency.
The project will dwarf any other work underway at the Inlet and result in two 12-foot car lanes, two 8-foot shoulders, and two 12-foot shared use paths. There will be two fishing pier/observation walks, one under the bridge from the south shore and one under the bridge from the north shore.
In conjunction with building the new bridge, which will run slightly to the east of the current span, FDOT will rebuild the state park entrance north of the inlet and repave A1A in Indian River County from the bridge to a couple blocks north of route 510 in Wabasso. Bridge and roadwork are scheduled for completion in 2030.
