Wiggins Pass dredging possibilities

The choices for future Wiggins Pass dredging projects have been narrowed down to three ideas.

This week, an engineering firm and Collier County committee decided to focus on the three ideas for future study. Coastal Planning and Engineering, in Boca Raton, is now working on those three ideas and plans to make a more detailed presentation in October.
The ideas being studied include:
• Getting rid of the natural S curve, by straightening the channel both inside and outside of the pass and by filling in the S curve with sand.
• Digging a straight channel inside the pass, but also leaving the natural S curve channel too.
• Keeping the natural S curve channel, but narrowing it from 250 feet wide to 150 to 200 feet wide and going to depth of 11 feet instead of 13 feet.
Collier County residents and officials say a new plan is needed because right now Wiggins Pass needs to be dredged every 15 months at a cost of about $750,000 per dredge.
Finding a solution for the rapid filling in of the pass is nothing new. Studies, ideas and lots of money have been invested to find a way to keep the pass open.
The 2004 study by Humiston and Moore stated that dredging exacerbated the erosion. That study recommended going back to an 8-foot deep dredge, dredging a flood shoal, making the channel shorter and straighter, doing nothing or adding groins. The 2004 study never got any further than being presented to the Coastal Advisory Council.
A $130,000, 2007 study by the engineering firm Humiston and Moore reported that the pass worked best before it was ever dredged. The study stated that the best solutions would be to return the pass to the way it was in the 1970s. Recommendations included: no action, reconstruct a shoal without structures, a jetty, t-groins, breakwater or a combination of breakwater and jetty. Each of those plans was then further studied.
One of the forerunners in 2007 was putting temporary t-groins by the pass to capture the sand and rebuild the shoals like there used to be naturally before dredging first began in 1984. The idea would be to remove the t-groins once the pass was stabilized.
"One of the leading things we are looking at are some type of structure," Coastal Projects Manager Gary McAlpin said in 2007 when the idea was being proposed. "I am in favor of temporary structures."
Now, he's changed his mind. This week McAlpin said he hopes to find an alternative that does not need structures in the pass.
"We are looking at doing something without structures," McAlpin said. "We can do it."
McAlpin said he does have a favorite yet among any of the three plans now being studied, by the Boca Raton firm, Coastal Planning and Engineering, and he doesn't want to comment on them until he has more information.
"We are not going to make any decisions until we look at these options," McAlpin said.
Donna Caron lives near Wiggins Pass and has been following plans for the waterway for years. She says it's hard to find a plan for such a dynamic environmental system as Wiggins Pass.
"The one the engineers like best is to take out the shoal in the inner channel and change the configuration of the outer channel. It will totally make everything straight in and out," Caron said.
"I believe that the theory is that if they take out that shoal and they put sand into the natural shoal, they think that the velocity that will happen by it going straight out will make the dredging period less. What they are trying to get to is a four or five year dredge cycle."
Caron said she'd like to see longer times between dredges.
"I live here by Wiggins Pass so I am very concerned about what happens here," she said. "My concerns are that the dredging that we have been doing is not working. It fills in faster and faster every time. We keep digging deeper and deeper and it keeps filling in faster and faster. We have not been looking at the environmental side of things. We've just been looking at getting bigger and bigger boats in and out. It needs to get back to as close to Mother Nature as we can get it."
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