Rhonda Haag, Chief Resilience Officer for Monroe County, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the county.
Four big projects began about a month ago.
Haag said, “Even though they have deadlines until the end of June, there’s actually three of them that are wrapping up, and we’re going to get into that. They went really fast, they’re going really well, and I’m really happy about that, because it just clears up the work early and gets our grant requirements in, so the county can get reimbursed. The first one is called the Rock River Park Water Repair, that was being performed by our local contractor, Adventure Environmental, with WSP for the inspection service, that was repaired 100 feet of the jetty breakwater that was damaged from Hurricane Irma, and we’re also installing an air curtain, so there’s three canals behind that system, and they leave a log full of floating SARS during the summer. Not only is that restorative breakwater going to help slow down that in between sargassum, but the air curtain will then completely stop all of it. And so that’s wrapping up, they’re about at the 90% mark. There’s 104 truckloads of rocks and boulders brought in to rebuild that jetty, and so what that’s going to do is, when it’s rebuilt, it will help protect those low-lying homes down from the shoreline from storm surge. We started these projects, and that’s how I talked about in a long time, but I kind of reminded the commissioners, we started these almost five years ago, actually more than I applied for the grant, and back in ‘21 we got the notice of grant award, and here we are today, wrapping it up, that’s over the $1.3 million grant.”
No county funds were used in any of these projects.
Haag said, “So that’s always good to hear. It saves our taxpayers. There are big boulders, they’re not little rocks, they’re like 500,000 pound boulders that are brought in. You need these really big boulders to be on the bottom, so that when these big storm surge comes in from the hurricane, it can stop the wave action. That’s what this is, and it’s really beautiful. That rock wall will stop the storm surge and the floating sargassum things to get kind of a double purpose here. The problem with these marine projects is, and I’ve heard it from other vendors too, we’re running them on vacant lots. We always need a vacant lot. It’s always best to do the staging areas. It can bring in these rocks and fill and do whatever else you need to do, and it’s really getting hard to find. So, on this particular project, we actually had to go to a lot, because there weren’t any bank lots, so we had to go to a lot with the house on it, but it had an extra large lot, so we were on this skinny little side lot, bringing in these huge boulders, but that’s one of the complexities of these projects. It’s not just construction, it’s working with the neighborhood, and that’s a lot of trucks going and out, and try to be super careful and monitor the trucks and the traffic, make sure nobody’s hurt and everything is safe. So this has gone exceedingly well. And then, of course, we help these full-time inspections by our WSP engineering firm. Then our first Long Key living shoreline, that’s also going really well. They’re actually wrapping up the work on that. That’s another vendor, they’ve done dozens and dozens of these living shorelines. Our first one for the county, so this is a good pick for that. So that’s a 1,282 living shoreline out there by the intern station. You drive by it every day and see Long Key transfer station there. Well, there’s a really low spot there. And so what this is going to do is instead of building a hardened shoreline, it’s going to be a lean shoreline, and it’s been ongoing for five years. This was a $900,000 grant from Department of Environmental Protection. It’s really long in the low line roadway, just got the mangroves and things out there, so 1282 feet, it’s going to be rebuilt there. They look like little mini pyramids, and that’s our local concrete vendor out there, Monroe Concrete, pouring the concrete. There will be 480 of these. What happens is they’ll be placed in the water, and then when the water breaks against it, it falls down, and then they plant the native plains in between them.”
There’s also a project at Harris Harris park.
Haag said, “That’s a breakwater repair that is going to be 1500 feet, and there’ll be 160 truckloads brought in into that, so there’ll be quite another big project there, and we’ll be following up hopefully next January, so that neighborhood’s going to be really well protected, they’re going to get an air curtain and the whole shebang, and then finally the biggest one is Ducky Breakwater, that’s being performed by another local barrier, and that’s 10,000 linear feet of jetspan, so really bridge breakwater, and that was, and that’s all wrapped up with the rock work, they’re actually doing the plannings as we speak, and that was about 560 truckloads of rocks and boulders, and so that’s another big one, that’s $3.3 million grant. It’s protecting the entire Duck Key community there, because it’s so long and so large, and they’re very thankful and grateful for the project that we’re able to provide for them. It’s big boulders again, up to 1000 pound boulders just here, and we put this as a living shoreline area, a little channel in between the point out there, I guess, the lazy river, and so that’s where the plantings are going to be placed for the living shoreline piece.”
Where do the boulders come from?
Haag said, “They come from the mainland, so they truck them down, and it’s long drive down to Long Key, and Graphic Key, and Duck Key, and so they start at 4o’clock in the morning, they show up at the staging area about 5o’clock and then they go to bed at 7o’clock at night, and it’s just go, go, go, go, go. Now, Duck Key, we were lucky enough they didn’t have to go through the neighborhood of Duck Key because the vendor had a staging area on Grassy Key, so they were able to just bring it to the staging area on Grassy Key and barge it all out directly to the breakwater, so all that heavy truckloads didn’t have to go through the neighborhood. So that was really good. And so I heard from many people at Duck Key they’re very thankful for that project. It was one that we were just so lucky to get, and so here we are.”
Road elevation projects are also underway.
Haag said, “Those big three road elevation grants on Flagler Avenue, Big Coppitt, and Winston Waterways in Key Largo. That’s about two $50 million worth of projects. Those also finished their design, and this week all three of those design packages with the permits were shipped off to the State Department of Emergency Management. Now they work with FEMA on doing what’s called the cost benefit analysis, so they have to do this number crunching thing to determine if these projects meet their their guidelines for cost benefit analysis, and if they do, that’s something that then can move on to the next stage and go back to the neighborhoods and meet with them and take a vote on whether they want to move forward, but if they don’t pass that cost benefit analysis, that’s when the projects stop right then and there. So this is our first time going through this, so we’re really excited to get them off to it, and then we’re just going to be on tippy toes, waiting to see what happens when we hear from them. It might be several weeks or months, we heard it could be quite a while, because these are really big, complicated projects, so they have to go through those three packages of plans, so we’ll see.”
At the June 10 county commission meeting, the ordinance for the neighborhood improvement projects will be submitted.
Haag said, “We’ve been getting a lot of attention the last couple of weeks from different neighborhoods throughout the Keys. There’s one that’s interested in an air curtain project, and you have a couple of the plug canals, they’re interested in seeing if we can help them some road projects, so we have probably eight or nine different communities already interested in that, so they’re waiting for the ordinance to pass, and we can begin meeting with them to see if these are projects that might be able to move forward and that we can help them with.”