_{Thumbnail photo: Moffatt & Nichol representative Younes Nouri discusses the Citizens Dock and seawall reconstruction projects during a tour of Crescent City Harbor property on Wednesday. | Photo by Jessica Cejnar Andrews}

Though their tour of the Crescent City Harbor District meant to show its potential, Mike Bahr and Younes Nouri delivered unwelcome news on Wednesday — the port lost out on FEMA disaster dollars to shore up the storm-ravaged Whaler Island Groin.

Despite showing the federal agency images of damage the groin took during severe storms in January 2023, FEMA officials declined the Harbor District’s request for disaster assistance, saying the district couldn’t show enough records that it had maintained the structure before the storm, according to Nouri, project manager and coastal engineer with Moffatt & Nichol.

“They want to see what it looked like before that storm happened and then what it looked like after,” he said. “It’s like an insurance adjuster.”

According to Bahr, CEO of Community System Solutions, this news came just before the November 2024 election.

Nouri, Bahr, and Harbormaster Mike Rademaker led commissioners and members of the public on a tour of district-owned properties. According to Bahr, the tour’s aim was to give the Board and the public a “complete overview” of the various projects and potential grant funding opportunities available. The tour was also meant to help the Board of Commissioners prioritize what it would spend roughly $1 million in unspent Hazard Mitigation Grant Program dollars.

During the tour, members of the public made suggestions, from turning the former Fashion Blacksmith building into a “retro cathedral of illumination” that would draw millions of people to using the vacant lot near Redwood Harbor Village RV park for office space. 

Stops along the tour included a now-condemned seawall and Citizens Dock — both of which are slated to be replaced. Attendees visited the inner boat basin, ventured inside the cavernous former Fashion Blacksmith building and stopped by Bayside and Redwood Harbor Village RV parks.

The tour concluded with a visit to Anchor Way, Whaler Island Groin and the Harbor District’s sport boat area.

It comes about two weeks after the Harbor District Board approved a contract with CSS, tasking the firm with managing its remaining Hazardous Mitigation Grant Program dollars.

On Wednesday, when discussing the rebuild of Citizens Dock and the adjacent seawall — both of which are funded with about $15 million in U.S. Department of Transportation Port Infrastructure Development Program grant dollars — Bahr said he was planning a contractor day in the early spring.

“There are other project opportunities with other grants to look at,” Bahr said. “Can we combine [these projects] to get scales of economy and get contractors who will want to bid? It’s not a $2 million or a $5 million [project]. This is $16 million to $18 million [project].”

One challenge the Harbor District is dealing with is having to account for sea level rise. According to Nouri, normal wave action and storms of increasing strength have undermined the sea wall along Anchor Way between the Chartroom and Whaler Island Groin.

A groin, or groyne, is a low wall or barrier built into the sea from a beach to protect a coastline from erosion, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The Whaler Island Groin was built to protect Anchor Way.

During the tour, Nouri and Bahr pointed to a dip in Anchor Way and the adjacent parking lot near the boat ramp. According to Bahr, that dip is from water undermining the riprap underneath the road, which then forms a puddle cars have to drive through to get to Whaler Island.

Nouri noted that over the past two or three years, that dip has increased.

“That’s from waves dislodging armored rock and moving them around and then washing them away,” he said. “If you lose that groin and we have that gap widen then we’re going to get more wave exposure and ultimately more damage along this road and could, down the road, undermine the stability of this road.”

According to Nouri, the Harbor District had asked FEMA to reimburse them for damage repairs incurred from a declared disaster, but the CCHD failed to show records that they had been maintaining the Whaler Island Groin before the storms.

Moffatt & Nichol conducted three “down and dirty” engineering studies of the Whaler Island Groin and the riprap underneath Anchor Way following the storms in 2022 and 2023, Bahr said. Each estimate indicated that it would be more than $1 million to do the repairs, he said.

Repairing Whaler Island Groin would cost about $2.2 million, Bahr said. Rebuilding the seawall to withstand sea level rise would cost about $5.2 million, and repairing the dip in Anchor Way would cost about $1.5 million, he said.

“It’s some hefty work and the damage is continuing with every storm,” Bahr said. “You see the puddles form here. You see the water come across.”

Related to the Whaler Island Groin project is a pilot study the Crescent City Harbor District and Moffatt & Nichol hopes to do using the dredge material from the inner channel as well as its piers and docks, particularly near Fashion Blacksmith.

The goal is to determine if the Army Corps will allow that dredge material to be put onto the beach near Whaler Island Groin, according to Rademaker.

“When the Army Corps dredges the federal navigation channel, they get coarser material and when you have coarse material, you can put it back on the beach because it’s the same material that’s in the system. It’s OK,” he said. “What the Army Corps doesn’t like is if you get finer material. They don’t allow you to put it back on the beach and that means there’s more cost for the Army Corps to get rid of that material. That dredge pond is full now, so the Army Corps is looking for ways to basically move that material somewhere else.”

Rademaker said depositing that fine silt and sand on the beach would be more cost effective than disposing it 3 miles off shore or at the Humboldt Open Ocean Disposal Site near Eureka.

Bahr pointed out that the sand on the beach at Whaler Island was fresh dredge.

Another option for the dredge materials in the Harbor District’s ponds is use in construction projects, Rademaker said.