MARTIN COUNTY — Work on the north jetty at the St. Lucie Inlet is on schedule and should be completed sometime around Aug. 1, Martin County coastal engineer Kathy Fitzpatrick said Wednesday.

“It’s going great,” Fitzpatrick said, adding the project is about 75 percent finished.

Work began in April, but high seas and rough weather that month delayed the $7.3 million project and no real progress was made until May. The $1.2 million local share of the cost is being split between Martin County and the Florida Bureau of Beaches and Coastal Systems.

The base of the stone jetty is being expanded by 14 feet and the jetty is being raised to 8 feet above the average low-tide depth. Almost 13,000 tons of rock is being laid in three layers and concrete pilings are being installed at the end of the new jetty and the end of the detached breakwater nearby.

The pilings will support lights to mark the navigation channel, which runs between the north jetty and the breakwater.

It will be the first time the channel through the broad inlet will be marked for boaters returning from sea.

“We’re very happy,” Fitzpatrick said. “I imagine there are people who avoid this inlet if they are coming in after dark and before dawn.”

With the new jetty to reduce storm waves and lights to guide boaters in, the inlet will be a much safer place, she said. Boaters will have a clear indication of where they need to be to stay in the channel and out of trouble.

Martin County ran into federal permitting hurdles when it tried to light the channel, Fitzpatrick said, so when the Army Corps of Engineers was contracting out the jetty work, the county asked to have the light pilings included in the contract. The corps, a federal agency, did not have the permitting problems the county ran into, she said, and the pilings are going in.
By Jan Lindsey, TCPalm.com

Kilroy is here.

At 12:30 p.m. Wednesday afternoon, staff from the Ocean Research and Conservation Association and volunteers completed installation of a remote-controlled water quality sensor, known as a “Kilroy,” on a post in about 6 feet of water on the south side of the inlet.

At 12:49 p.m. Wednesday, Kilroy started sending information about water speed, direction, temperature, salinity and the prevalence of key microorganisms to ORCA’s Fort Pierce office.

With sensors in a plastic case in the water and a solar power unit perched above, the device is called Kilroy because ORCA officials hope that one day it will be as ubiquitous in coastal waters around the world as its cartoon namesake was in the European Theater during World War II.

It could happen: The Kilroy installed Wednesday is the first of 25 ORCA plans to deploy over the next few weeks — weather permitting — between the St. Lucie Inlet near Stuart to the Fort Pierce Inlet near Fort Pierce. Later this year, a second network of Kilroys is scheduled to be deployed in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the United States and the country’s most imperiled marine ecosystem.

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