 Thanks to some recent deliveries, the Littoral Society is ready to begin a project along Forked River Beach in Lacey Township, NJ that will help reduce erosion at the site, while also improving water quality in Barnegat Bay.
Thanks to those deliveries, which were delayed by several months due to supply chain issues, the Society has begun scheduling volunteer events. The first two will be held on November 3 and 4 (click here for more information or to register). On October 25, 28,000 pounds of HESCO lids, baskets, and accessories arrived at the staging site near Forked River Beach. Two more deliveries are coming and the material will be used to build seven, 200-foot long, double-rowed oyster reef segments. The reefs will be located offshore and run from the mouth of Forked River in the north, near Bayfront Park, to a lagoon located at the southern end of Beach Boulevard. This section has lost over a hundred feet of shoreline since 1995. Erosion rate is accelerating: abut 20 feet of shoreline were lost in 2017 alone. Children from Bradley Beach Elementary School environmental club came to their hometown beach on Tuesday Oct., 19 for a planting event as part of the American Littoral Society's Beach Grasses in Classes program.
About 20 students from grades five through eight planted 350 beach grass plugs near the entrance to the Brinley Avenue Beach in Bradley Beach. The Beach Grasses program has been running for nearly seven years at the elementary school, but the planting events were halted during the Covid lockdown. Bradley Beach has hosted a number of large and small beach planting events as part of ongoing efforts to restore and protect dunes on the town's beaches.  The last weekend of September was all about oysters at the American Littoral Society. Society staff attended festivals in Asbury Park and Red Bank at which we recycled shucked oyster shells by the bucket full. On Friday and Saturday, Sept. 24 and 25, we were at AsburyFest talking about the Society's Operation Oyster work, including our "Shuck It, Don't Chuck It" oyster shell recycling program, as well as how those shells are being used to help restore bays, estuaries and beaches in New Jersey. On Sunday, Sept. 26, we pitched our tent at the Red Bank Guinness & Oyster Fest for a crazy day of talking about our work in the Two Rivers area, while collecting the shells from about 8,000 oysters consumed by festival attendees. Shells collected from those events pushed our total shell collected this year from participating restaurants to nearly five tons. The recycled shell is trucked to our curing site on Sandy Hook, where they spend about a year in the sun before being used for living shoreline and reef projects around NJ. Click here to learn more about our shell recycling program, Operation Oyster, and reef building projects. |
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