Caught in the middle and taking the heat of the 30-year jetty fight 

 are Corps engineers Bill Dennis (left) and Tom Jarrett. 



money from Congress. Who would relish 

 that fight? No wonder I expect in Jarrett a 

 gruff character with a hardened heart and 

 an unequivocal disposition toward 

 journalists. He waits in a white sedan 

 with state plates, chatting with Bill 

 Dennis, the Corps' project engineer for 

 the jetties. Jarrett wears a white hat 

 emblazoned with the Corps logo and 

 reminds me a bit of novelist Tom Clancy. 

 Through 30 years of bickering, he has 

 remained a lighthearted fellow, quiet and 

 fond of a crook-stemmed pipe. He is 

 quite open about the controversy that has 

 occupied so much of his time and energy. 

 When Dennis jokes that "some people 

 have pictures of their grandkids in their 

 wallet, but Tom's got pictures of Oregon 

 Inlet in his," Jarrett grins at the jab. 



Jarrett leads the way up a few sofa- 

 sized boulders as we gingerly climb a 

 rock groin built to protect the southern 

 foundations of Bonner Bridge. Mergan- 

 sers paddle in the calm waters as Jarrett 

 explains how the jetties would work. 

 Two ridges of rock would extend into the 



ocean some 3,500 feet — their original 

 length shortened by 1 ,000 feet to reduce 

 environmental impacts — and anchor to 

 the mainland with a submerged tail of 

 stone thousands of feet longer. Jetties 

 trap sand that would normally drift down 

 with the littoral currents, replenishing 

 distant beaches, so the Corps designed a 

 sand-bypassing mechanism to stem 

 erosion south of the jetties. At Oregon 

 Inlet, shoreline currents would deposit 

 sediments in a basin on the south side of 

 a low section of jetty, a weir built like a 

 notch in the rock wall. Each year, ocean 

 pipeline dredges with 10,000-horse- 

 power pumps would suck up an esti- 

 mated 862,000 cubic yards of trapped 

 sand and move it across the inlet, where 

 it would be distributed as needed to the 

 downshore beaches. This sand-bypassing 

 mechanism would spread accumulated 

 sediments during the fall, after the sea 

 turtle nesting season. The jetty structure 

 itself would have three layers of stone: a 

 foundation of rock 1 to 18 inches in 

 diameter; a middle layer of stones 



weighing from 100 pounds to 

 1 ton; and the final sheathing 

 of armor stone, each rock 

 weighing up to 30 tons — 

 think of a boulder about 8 feet 

 through the middle. All told, 

 1.2 million tons of rock 

 designed to blunt the sea's 

 waves. 



And help stem the inlet's 

 southward march. This 

 migration is dangerously 

 narrowing the navigation 

 channel, chiefly because in 

 1989-90 the state of North 

 Carolina built the huge stone 

 groin that encloses the 

 northern end of Pea Island 

 like a rocky parenthesis. Now 

 that boundary of Oregon Inlet 

 is locked into place, and the 

 shore of Bodie Island creeps 

 ever closer. When the state 

 built that groin, it drew a line 

 in the sand. The possibility of 

 variability "has effectively 

 been eliminated," Jarrett says. "You have 

 fixed where the channel is going to be." 

 In some respects, perhaps, that variability 

 was eliminated with the construction of 

 Bonner Bridge or even N.C. 12. But what 

 are you going to do now, Jarrett asks. 

 Let the bridge fall in the water? Pull up 

 the road? 



He knows what he is going to do: 

 wait for yet another round of public 

 review. "The Corps does what it is 

 directed to do," he says. "And the reason 

 we've been at this for so long is that 

 local officials have been very effective 

 at keeping the project alive. This latest 

 round of review could be the final answer, 

 but we've been here before. The Depart- 

 ment of Interior simply doesn't want the 

 jetties on their land. They've made it 

 clear that nothing can be done to make 

 the jetties acceptable, period. They liken 

 them to putting a McDonald's beside Old 

 Faithful. And that's something that goes 

 beyond science." 



But according to the jetties' most 



Continued 



COASTWATCH 11 



