The resort area of New Smyrna Beach, located on central Florida’s east coast, had been battered by a series of hurricanes in 2004 and 2005. The fierce waves whipped up from the storms—powerful hurricanes that included Dennis, Irene, Jeanne, and Ivan—pounded at the old concrete seawalls protecting the city, some of which were built 25 and 30 years ago. Eventually, these walls crumbled and buckled, chunks of them washing out to sea and leaving New Smyrna Beach vulnerable.

The ocean took over from there. It reclaimed huge portions of the beach and sent its waters onto the land, surrounding the condominium buildings that house vacationers from across the country. Fears escalated that these buildings, built before 1976 and therefore not stabilized on pilings like newer buildings, could be lost.

Photo: Crane Materials International

That’s what Antinori, owner and founder of New Smyrna Beach–based Antinori Group, faced in the summer of 2005 after earning a contract to repair the seawalls, rescue the condos, and protect the beach’s shoreline from future tropical storms and hurricanes.

“We nearly lost half the town,” Antinori says. “We were looking at a disaster area.”

Fortunately, Antinori is not easily intimidated and felt confident enough to take a creative approach to reclaiming New Smyrna Beach. His crews—seven with five workers each—worked in shifts, like factory workers moving from one task to the next. One group built frames for the new seawall, while a second installed carbon fiber panels and a third installed tie rods. This approach helped ensure speedy construction of the new seawalls, a priority considering that strong waves still bombarded New Smyrna Beach.

But creating the new seawall was just one portion of a huge project. Antinori had to be creative, too, in his efforts to save the buildings that an eroding beach had threatened. He used anchors, heavy-duty screws, and 3- by 4-foot steel plates to raise the waterlogged condos off their moorings and then set them back down only after his crews fit them with sturdier foundations.

In his most creative stroke, Antinori purchased segmented walls originally used by the US Army to protect its troops from explosives and truck-bomb attacks. He used these walls as a major, if unlikely, weapon in his battle against the still heavy waves battering the New Smyrna shoreline.

In all, the project to build 4,500 feet of new seawall and slip stronger foundations under 10 threatened condominium buildings took four and a half months. The stress and hard work sent Antinori to his doctor, who diagnosed him with a bleeding ulcer.

“He told me I have to settle down,” says 60-year-old Antinori. “But I don’t want to. This is what I do. This was a big project, an important project. It was what I thought about for four months.”

Photo: Crane Materials International

Antinori isn’t the only contractor focused on protecting shorelines. Hurricanes and tropical storms—and not just the devastating variety that hit the Gulf Coast—pound at beaches across the country on a regular basis, battering protective seawalls, eroding chunks of shorelines, and threatening homes and businesses. Protecting these areas is a necessity when fierce weather threatens entire communities.

But shoreline protection isn’t only an issue for contractors called in during emergencies. There’s a less dramatic, but equally important, side to the business. Construction of marinas, resort areas, and riverfront urban renewal projects all require that contractors and developers take serious measures to protect shorelines.

Why? Waterfront land is some of the priciest acreage in the country. No one wants to see beaches and lakeshores eroded away to nothing. And no one who’s built alongside bodies of water, whether he’s erected modest cabins or sprawling resort areas, wants to see his efforts wasted thanks to encroaching waters.

“There has always been attention paid to shoreline protection,” says Mike Yeats, senior engineer with Atlanta-based Crane Materials International (CMI), a manufacturer of piling bulkheads that contractors often use in their shoreline-protection projects. “But I would say that in recent years we have seen the need and the desire people have to protect their shorelines increase significantly. The property values along the shore are getting so high. People are paying tens of millions of dollars for waterfront property. It’s getting less and less expensive relative to the property value to protect it.”

This increased focus is good news. With the owners of waterfront land—including municipalities, residential homeowners, and commercial developers—willing to spend more to protect their investments, contractors are free to approach their shoreline protection projects with a new sense of creativity. Like Antinori, they are devising new ways to battle an old problem.

The Creative Approach
Antinori faced a problem. He needed to build more than 4,000 new feet of seawall to protect New Smyrna Beach. But the ocean wasn’t cooperating.

The summer of 2005 was a rough one for this resort city. A series of hurricanes and tropical storms had swamped the beach, eroding it severely. City officials had to condemn 10 waterlogged condominium buildings.

Most troubling for Antinori and his crew, the waves weren’t stopping, not even when his men were scheduled to begin construction of the much-needed replacement seawall.
That’s when Antinori got creative and turned to the US Army. He’d read about a product called the Concertainer, manufactured by HESCO Bastion. The Concertainer is a prefabricated, multi-cellular system made of galvanized steel weldmesh and lined with non-woven polypropylene geotextile. The US armed forces have been using the product for protection from bomb attacks since the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

If the Concertainer could protect the military from explosives, Antinori thought, it should be able to protect his crews from powerful waves long enough for them to install the new seawall.

Photo: Lyn Small Inc.

Antinori ordered 10,000 feet of the product. His crew members quickly dragged the Concertainer, in its flat form, into the water. The wall acts a bit like an accordion, so that when crew members pulled on it, they unfolded its segments, which looked like square boxes. They then joined these segments together with pins. Once they had arranged the boxes in front of the seawall construction zone, workers filled them with sand to give them some heft.

Crew members did this until they had stacked the sand-filled boxes atop one another in three rows. Then, whenever large waves rolled in, the Concertainer blocked them and allowed Antinori’s crews to continue building their seawall.

“We’d hide behind the boxes,” Antinori says. “They were portable and wouldn’t last forever. But they did last long enough for us to finish the job.”

Antinori relied on the Concertainer for two months, removing it once his crews had finished building the seawall, which was another challenge. Antinori’s crews needed to have it finished as soon as possible. Any delays would have meant more beach erosion and more damage to the buildings that sat on its sands.

That’s where Antinori’s factory line approach came in. Modeling the repair work after the successful and efficient production techniques popularized by Toyota engineers, Antinori divided his 35 workers into seven crews and then deployed them each to work on different segments of the project. The goal was to complete 40 to 50 feet of seawall panels each day.

Here’s how this worked: A first crew built the template, or frame, for the seawall’s panels. The second installed the wall’s carbon fiber panels. A third followed and vibrated those panels into the beach. The crew following this installed tie rods to the panels. The next group began forming 24- by 24-inch concrete caps. Still another crew poured the concrete into the caps once they were finished. Once the concrete cured, a new crew removed the caps, or forms, and one more filled and compacted the soil surrounding the newly built portion of seawall. A final crew, arriving while other crews started the process over again for the next 50 feet of seawall, performed landscaping around the newly built wall segments.

“We didn’t work 24 hours straight, but we did what we had to do to protect those buildings,” Antinori says. “Those northeastern winds, after the storms had come through, just never stopped, so the waves were always hitting the shore. You couldn’t walk on the beach here for two months. There was no beach. We had a pretty amazing four and a half months here.”

Antinori’s final challenge was to increase the protection for the buildings dotting New Smyrna Beach.

The 10 threatened buildings had been built before 1976. This meant that they had been built on typical monolithic foundations, ones that offered little protection from surging seawater.

Antinori’s crews raised the buildings, all of which were five or six stories high, and embedded huge anchors 15 to 20 feet into the ground underneath them. The crews installed steel plates under the buildings and sprayed quick-drying grout under the anchor and plate. They then lowered the buildings back atop this plate, essentially creating pilings to provide additional stability to the buildings.

“This was not a boring project at all,” Antinori says. “It was very stressful. The tension all around us during this project was unbelievable. I took it personally, because I knew I could help. It wasn’t good for my health, though. I did go a bit overboard. My doctor told me I had to chill out.”

Protecting the Marinas
Lyn Small has made his living on the shores of North Carolina’s beaches. His firm, Kitty Hawk, NC–based Lyn Small Inc., specializes in building bulkheads, boat ramps, piers, jetties, and docks—anything, Small says, that is shoreline- or water-related.

Photo: Lyn Small Inc.

Because of this, he is acutely aware of how important it’s become to protect the country’s shorelines. This area of North Carolina, after all, relies on tourism dollars. Without usable beaches, those dollars will dry up.

“The largest single portion of my business is in repairing existing bulkheads, usually ones built 30 years ago or so and made of concrete,” Small says. “We’ll go in and refurbish it or do some rebuilding work, depending on how bad a shape the bulkhead is in. People today are very aware of the condition of the bulkheads that are protecting their shorelines. What I do is a permanent part of the property when we are finished. It is intended to combat shoreline erosion. It’s not something that in six months you come in and remove. It is something that is left behind to stop shoreline erosion.”

Small and his firm are now taking on a new shoreline-protection project, the renovation and repair of a 30-some-year-old bulkhead that protects an upscale marina in Shallowbag Bay on Roanoke Island, just off the coast of North Carolina.

The owner of the marina is converting it into a residential boating community. Plans call for two new hotels, condominiums, and retail shops. The owner is also expanding the marina to allow for more boat slips. It’s little surprise that the owner has contracted Small to shore up the old bulkhead. He wants to do everything in his power to make sure that his investment is protected from the sea.

Photo: Lyn Small Inc.

Small and his crews, who started working on the project in early March, will during an estimated six-week period work on 1,600 lineal feet of concrete wall, fixing leaks and rebuilding portions that have been severely damaged.

“Enough of the bulkhead is in good enough condition to keep them from tearing it down, but it has been neglected for the past 10 to 15 years,” Small says. “It needs some serious maintenance to last another 20 years.”

The work requires a number of strategies. Small’s crews must first excavate the backside of the bulkhead and install filter cloth behind its walls to fix small leaks that have developed over the years. They are also inspecting, and replacing when needed, the rods and anchors that hold the wall in place.

Some of these rods are still in good shape, and need no attention. Salt water, though, has rusted others severely enough that Small’s workers will need to replace them.
It’s an interesting project because Small doesn’t yet know how much work he’ll have to perform on the wall. He won’t know until he and his workers finish inspecting the old structure.

Photo: Lyn Small Inc.

“These anchors and rods will typically be spaced, in a normal situation, every 6 to 8 feet,” Small says. “That’s if you were building from scratch. As far as this project goes, I have no idea yet how many rods and anchors we’ll be replacing and installing. We haven’t finished the excavation behind the wall yet.”

This project, though, is a small one compared to the work Small’s firm did at Hatteras Village, a tourist town located on Hatteras Island located off the North Carolina coast.

Here, Small’s firm was contracted to tear out an existing bulkhead protecting a large marina in the village and replace it with a newly built version. The job required that Small’s firm build 1,200 feet of new bulkhead, while not slowing the tourist trade in a village that relied on its summers to provide a good chunk of its operating expenses.

Small worked on the project for four consecutive winters, starting it in the winter of 2000 and finishing it as spring of 2005 rolled around. His firm did no work during the busy summer tourist season.

“We had to work around that summer tourist season,” Small says. “They rely on getting a lot of their income during that summer tourist season and couldn’t have the marina shut down. We understood that. It’s just one of those things that you have to work around. We worked on it from September through Memorial Day, got the project to a closed-off point, packaged things up, and made sure that they could use the marina during the summer. We’d then go back the following year. It worked out well. It was steady work throughout the winter, which is usually our slower time.”

Photo: Lyn Small Inc.

Small and his workers excavated and removed the marina’s old bulkhead in 300- to 500-foot segments. They then immediately replaced those old portions with new construction. During the job, Small noticed that because the bulkhead had leaked so much, the entire marina was filled with silt. When Small started work, in fact, the water depth at the margins of the bulkhead measured just 2 to 3 feet, a sure sign that the bulkhead had been failing.

When Small and his crews finished, the water depth around the edges of the bulkhead had increased to a more acceptable 6 to 8 feet.

Small guarantees his work and says that his company’s bulkheads will stand firm for at least 20 years. That warranty is all-encompassing, save for manmade problems.

The warranty was put to the test during the construction at Hatteras Village. In September 2003, Hurricane Isabel struck the village. Small’s bulkhead, though, stood up to its force. The blast of nature, in fact, didn’t even slow the project.

“There is no reason why a bulkhead can’t be built to last 20 years,” Small says. “If done properly, if backfilled with enough earth, a bulkhead will have lots of strength in terms of wave energy. We had some luck, I’ll admit, but we also did things right on construction. We didn’t lose anything.”

Photo: Lyn Small Inc.

The Power of a Portable Dam
A major marina project in Naples Bay in Naples, FL, involved plans to transform an old marina into a glitzy new retail project with 30 condominiums, an 85-unit hotel, restaurants, retail stores, and a 2.3-acre yacht basin with about 100 boat slips.

Early in the project, construction crews from Naples-based Gulf Shore Site Development first demolished the existing Boat Haven Marina. The company then had to deepen the marina’s basin by several feet. Otherwise, the basin would not be able to handle the bigger boats that would certainly be docked at the sparkling new project.

Crews first had to clean the basin, and to do so they had to isolate it from the rest of Naples Bay and empty it of water. How to do this? Gulf Shore turned to Portadam and its portable cofferdams.

Photo: Gerry Mann/Portadam

Photo: Gerry Mann/Portadam

Gerry Mann of Portadam appreciates contractors and developers who aren’t afraid to be creative when it comes to shoreline work. Portadam manufactures portable cofferdams. Contractors rent them to eliminate water from their construction sites. The rented dams also provide protection from erosion, turbidity, and scour. Installing the portable dams has become a science to Portadam, says Mann. Portadam crews will dive into the water and probe the bottom every 5 feet along the perimeter of the dam’s future footprint, driving a steel rod into the earth as far as they can. This helps determine the stability of the ground. If the bottom is soft enough, the portable dam will settle for proper stability.

“Normally, there is no site preparation,” Mann says. “The bottom of the body of water usually does not have to be addressed in any way. We can build the system in any configuration. We can do 90-degree bends. If a contractor is trying to de-water the area, typically you get a long run of 300 to 500 feet, just enough to allow him to do any excavation work.”

In Naples Bay, the contractor installed one Portadam to isolate and remove the water from half of the basin initially. Gulf Shore then installed a second dam to do the same to the rest of the basin.

Building the dams was, again, a rather routine process. Crews first built the dams’ steel frames on land and then used a crane to set the pair into their positions. Workers placed the dams’ frames on a prepared base of stone, which they then placed under water and smoothed with an excavator bucket.

Crews next unfolded the dams’ liners and, using a crane, pulled them into their correct positions as they floated along the surface of the water. Workers attached the tops of the liners to their frames, and then divers sunk the liners down along the frames’ surfaces, attaching them as they went.

The project was a lengthy one, with Gulf Shore requiring the use of portable dams from July 2004 until early 2006.

Crews also built a large catch basin out of the same frames they used on the company’s portable cofferdams, Mann says. When Gulf Shore pumped water out of the yacht basin, they sent it into Portadam’s temporary basin. This basin was equipped with standard turbidity barriers and weirs, all of which worked to reduce the turbidity of the water coming from the original basin. The water passed through chambers in the basin, getting cleared a bit more as it traveled from chamber to chamber and, eventually, into a river.

“As the water passed from one compartment to the next, it began coming out pretty clear,” Mann says. “By the end of the line, it was looking awfully clear.”