Taking a Pier Into the Future

Aug. 19, 2015

Jordan Loran, director of engineering and construction for Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR), says he often felt a wave of anxiety whenever he saw anglers crawling over the loose stone and haphazardly strewn rubble to get closer to the water at the end of the quarter-mile-long jetty jutting out into the Chesapeake Bay at North Point State Park. In his mind’s eye he could foresee disaster at the end of the structure known as Bayshore Pier. As early as the 1990s, when DNR took over the site of the defunct Bayshore Amusement Park, it was evident that the Edwardian-era jetty and pier structure had seen better days.

Enduring nearly a century’s worth of ever-intensifying storms and battering winds and waves—and after being overwashed during Hurricane Isabel, which ravaged the mid-Atlantic region as a tropical storm in 2003, bringing $945 million in damage—the structure was a crumbling ruin, presenting hazards as opposed to Gilded Age charm.

When in the fall of 2013 crews from Coastal Design navigated a Link-Belt model 460LX excavator with a thumb and a live bucket attachment out onto the base of the jetty, it was the culmination of dreams and possibly the end of a few nightmares that had their start a century earlier.

Credit: COASTAL DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION
Finished site

The pier in Edgemere, MD, just east of Baltimore presented an image a far cry from the festive spirit that the landmark would have projected during its days as a major feature of what was once considered a top-of-the-line amusement park. Built in the early part of the 20th century and operated until the late 1940s, the park had provided residents of Baltimore with nearby outdoor entertainments in a spectacular setting, with roller coasters, fun houses, stage shows, a kiddie railroad, and a giant swing that carried revelers out over the water, the wind in their hair, for a brilliant change of pace from life in the gritty industrial reality of steel mills and factories that held sway in the heavily industrialized Baltimore of the time. The park was served by a privately owned trolley line from the urban core, and its hollowed-out trolley station still stands as a reminder of the era when infrastructure linked city and country to the benefit of both.

Unfortunately, Bayshore Amusement Park’s gates were closed to many citizens for no better reason than what some people thought of their heritage or skin color. Amusement parks all over the US faded in the heat of discrimination battles, suburbs sprang up over the prime real estate they had occupied, and television provided passive entertainment without requiring people to leave home. The fun ended at Bayshore, and the land was taken over by industrialists. After a stint as a dumping ground for slag from Bethlehem Steel, the land was acquired in the late 1980s by DNR and repurposed as a nature park. However, by 2008 it had tumbled to near obscurity as a meager attraction that barred no one, provided they had the trepidation to take on the readily apparent risks.

Nonetheless, as a ruin, the park seemed a magical place and slowly acquired a following among visitors with its allure of a saltwater beach within an easy commute from the city by car. Its charms are of a naturalistic variety; there are no more carnival rides, but occasionally an osprey will be seen diving into the bay to emerge with a delicious-looking catch to feed its young. The fish, on their own, sometimes break the surface on a warm day.

One False Move and You’re Done
Since 2000, the elevation sections of the pier had been eroded away from an elevation of 6 feet down to just 3 feet, and in some spots it was literally at zero elevation, with waves etching away at what was left. When I first visited the park more than 10 years ago, it seemed remarkable that there were no restrictions or even warnings on the deteriorating pier. Although the tumble into the water would not have been far, I remember once losing my footing momentarily and fearing I’d get a foot or leg snagged between haphazard piles of riprap and slag from Bethlehem Steel’s nearby mills.

However, one could imagine that for families with young children, older adults out for a stroll, or anyone who just didn’t want to take a chance getting dashed against the rock or taking a tumble into the lapping Chesapeake surf, the joys of a waterside view from the fishing pier were off limits. People with limited mobility would not even be able to imagine a safe pathway to get there over the rutted trail that led down the center of the jetty.

Sepehr Baharlou, owner of BayLand Consultants and engineer on the project design, says that when he saw it in 2013, the pier didn’t look to have much future at all. Parts of it were completely deteriorated. He estimated that in less than five years the whole thing would be beyond repair.

Loran, however, says there was a great deal of interest in the community in seeing the pier repaired. “It’s a favorite fishing spot, and there was pressure from the community; it’s in a historic area for Baltimore County.” It also marks history, close to the site of an important battle in the defense of Baltimore and Washington from British attack during the War of 1812.

“It’s one of a kind,” says Loran, and in the regulatory climate governing construction on the coastal waters, it would likely stay that way. “As an amenity, I don’t see anyone being able to build a pier 1,000 feet into the bay,” he notes. Bowing, not against its will, to the strength of the argument for preserving the pier, and with access to funding, DNR took on the mission of saving the landmark.

Rising Tide of Enthusiasm
As a fishing spot, the bayward end of the pier had an enduring reputation. However, with its elevation eroded down to zero in some places, it needed some significant shoring up if it were to hold on to its usefulness. It also has a bit of reputation for danger, and not just for taking a tumble.

A few years back I watched a group of anglers reeling in something that was a little bigger than average. Suddenly, one of the men screamed out, “Cut it loose. Cut it loose!” The fish that came to the surface turned out to be a stingray, flipping its barbed tail in a combination of instinct and malice. As they wrestled the line, the men argued over the wisdom of attempting to save the expensive lure that had snagged the dubious catch, or just cutting their losses and letting the prickly beast find its way back out to sea along with its indigestible prize. The cownose ray has the nickname “the bay marlin” because of the fight it can put up against being reeled in. I don’t know whether it was common sense or compassion that won out, but at the risk of a sting they’d never forget, the men brought the fish ashore, gingerly removed the lure, and got the creature back into the water, alive, without anyone getting impaled. If things had gone the other way, however, it might have been nice to have had a dock nearby where safety crews could moor an emergency vessel. That’s partly what DNR officials had in mind when they began thinking about how to restore the fishing end of the pier.

According to Tony Dietz, P.E., LEED AP, who was senior engineer and project manager for Century Engineering, the lead engineering firm on the project, it was Tom Brower, projects engineer for Habitat Restoration and Conservation, and his staff at DNR who had the idea of saving the pier by building a revetment high enough and strong enough so it would not be in danger of being overtopped and washed away. But there were other objectives. The park authorities wanted to improve access for anglers so they could cast into the deeper water 20–30 feet out into the bay without having to risk scrambling over crumbling stone and rubble to get close enough. What they didn’t want were bulkheads, says Dietz. Although bulkheads provide a ready-made, easy solution, DNR wanted as natural a look as could be achieved: “They wanted it durable and at the same time environmentally friendly.” To top off the wish list, DNR wanted to have easy access to the pier by boat in case of an emergency.

Against the Wall
With bulkheads out of the question, Matt Pearce, senior structural engineer for Century Engineering, began the search for creative solutions to meet the series of goals. For the seaward end of the jetty, the idea he came up with was to use a precast box culvert fabricated by Oldcastle Precast in Fredericksburg, VA. The box culvert would be inverted and filled with revetment stone so there would be no chance of it floating away. The assembly would be capped off with a concrete fishing platform that could double as small vessel mooring.

The core span of the jetty, stretching 1,000 feet into the bay, was just as degraded as the fishing pier at its apex. Sections of the original concrete revetment had collapsed, exposing ancient rebar and random piles of crushed concrete. Salvaged blocks of brickwork lay among twisted heaps of slag; its ambiance, if it had one, would best be described as post-apocalyptic.

Baharlou says one of DNR’s main goals was to keep the project as close to the original footprint as possible to minimize additional impact to the surrounding environment. Although Dietz says the original plans for the structure have “long since vanished into history,” another goal of the project was to remain as consistent as possible with that original design. That meant fabricating a durable project that conformed to the width, elevation, and slope of the original jetty.

Loran says DNR chose to employ natural stone revetments. The agency has used stone revetments in the Chesapeake Bay for decades. “It will last virtually forever if done correct and sized correctly,” he says. For instance, says Loran, installations at the top of the bay facing 100 miles of open water would require revetment stones in the range of 800–2,200 pounds. For the pier itself, facing less than 50 miles of open water, DNR specified stones in the range of 600–1,800 pounds.

The wall is designed with a toe cut about a foot into the bottom with an 8-inch thickness of bedding stone and select fill built up to an elevation of 7 feet in height and a with a slope of 1:1.5, 18–20 feet wide. In its totality, the pier itself measured 36 feet wide, with the ground elevation varying greatly due to decades of erosion.

Because overtopping was one of the main issues that had brought the pier to this state of disrepair, predicts Baharlou, based on his analysis of sea level rise for the region, that overtopping will be a reality far into the future. He advised that the jetty restoration and armoring would need to take into account not only storm surges and battering surf but also the possibility of water scouring and washing over the surface during exceptionally high tides and storm surges.

The job, as Loran describes it, was for the contractor to “come in, clear out the old concrete and slag down to a clean bottom, get in the toe stones up to 2 feet in diameter, and then backfill the structure while building it up to the specified elevation of 6 to 7 feet mean high water.”

Coastal Design’s Link-Belt excavator provided the capability of grasping the boulders and laying them in place with precision. Greg Gardy, estimator and contract manager for the firm, says Coastal Design and Construction prefers Link-Belt equipment for its durability and reliability. In his 25 years of marine construction work, he cannot always guarantee the equipment will always be operated under the optimum recommended conditions, but he says it does a good job standing up to challenging environments.

High But Not Dry
Crews started from the landward end of the jetty and worked their way out toward the pier, always taking care to work inside areas contained within the perimeter established by sediment control measures. They deployed a turbidity curtain arrayed around the work site to keep sediment from affecting the broader aquatic environment.

“We had to do some excavation and build up to a certain point above the mean high water, then we’d take the curtain and flip it around to contain sediment for the next 100-foot increment,” says Gardy.

According to Gardy, the job proceeded like clockwork for most of the project, partly out of necessity. “There was limited storage area for the quarry stone, so we placed the material almost on the same day it came in.” However, he says, there were a few times when work flow got a bit out of phase. “We were hauling stone 80 miles or more, and sometimes they had different weather where they quarried the stone and we had to adjust.” He said weather presented the biggest obstacle; that winter, many workdays were lost to snow “so deep you couldn’t see what you were working on.”

Additionally, there was a period of exceptionally high tides that threw a curve at the crews, but he says overall it was a job done with a cheerful attitude, as the entire crew on the project resided in the Baltimore area and were happy to be able to have a job so close to home. “They worked as much as possible when they could and stayed on schedule,” he notes, delivering and installing an estimated 7,400 tons of armor stone, the vital component of the 2,200-foot restoration.

Preparing the Way for Nature
Differentiating the restored pier a bit from the original design, a naturalistic wetland feature, which would not have been imagined in an industrial-era jetty, was added where the structure ties into the shoreline. Although stone sheet piling armored most of the structure all the way around, says Baharlou, “We were trying to create a softer transition between the revetment and the beaches. We added two small, detached breakwaters where the structure meets the shoreline. DNR wanted to create a living shoreline habitat to replace the bulkheads that previously existed at the junction of the jetty and the shoreline,” allowing the jetty to blend naturally with the adjacent beaches used for swimming and recreation.

“One of our concerns was to limit impacts on the tidal waters,” he says. “We shortened the revetment and removed the concrete rubble and used the natural stone to create a breakwater with sand fill added behind it to create habitat that had been missing at the water’s edge.”

The stone sills up to an elevation of 4 feet were planted with a mixture of aquatic vegetation such as salt meadow cordgrass. “The idea is that any pollutants that run off are washed back and forth with the tidal action, so it’s not a direct discharge into the bay; there is some water-quality benefit by creating this man-made marsh along either side of the pier,” Baharlou explains.

“We were bound by the height of the original jetty,” he adds. “That’s one of the reasons we decided not to go with a grass surface. We were hardening the surface as we get a lot of saltwater splash; we wanted to make sure the surface remained stable.”

DNR considered that the structure would get inundated, so it is designed to be overtopped and still remain stable.

“At the same time, we wanted to build something that was environmentally friendly. We’ve got a kind of belt and suspenders kind of approach to this,” adds Dietz. “We had to comply with DNR stormwater management and sediment control regulations; they weren’t allowing us to place a paved surface out there.” As an alternative to sod or concrete, he says, “We went with porous pavers. To back that up are soldier stones on either side that lock them into place. We’re in a fill environment on top of rubble.” To account for any heavy thunderstorm activity that would surcharge the capability of the pervious pavers to infiltrate the rainfall, he notes, the design called for 10-foot filter strips on either side that would allow water to bubble up and through the soldier stones and then to go through to the reinforced turf to promote the growth of grass.

“At more than six feet, it’s high enough that even if the bay rises another 18 inches over the next 30 years or so we’re still going to be stable and structurally sound,” says Baharlou. “Our intention was to build it so it can withstand more of the erosion.”

To achieve a stabilizing influence, Century Engineering opted for porous pavers to construct a new promenade that would tolerate the predicted periodic inundation. Dietz says the pavers were installed on a bed of #2 stone undergirded by #8 stone with a #57 beneath that, on top of a base layer of #2 stone. Technicians from Imperial Paving completed the installation using ECO Pavers, manufactured by EP Henry. “We didn’t want the water just standing on top; we wanted to get it into the stone underneath. Our assessment was that because it is tidally influenced, it’s going to have a fairly high groundwater situation, so the idea was to get the water off the surface into the groundwater.”

However, says Dietz, it was not quite a standard practice. “It’s a weird situation that anything out there is a man-made soil. Normally, we don’t promote doing that kind of thing [infiltration] into a fill, but it’s been there for close to 100 years. But what we tried to do was make sure we were getting everything at least down into the existing ground.”

Century Engineering further specified US Fabrics Inc.’s turf reinforcement mesh for the grass shoulders.

Ready for the Future
“There’s always the possibility of a once-in-a-lifetime storm, but it certainly gives it lot better chance than it had before,” says Dietz. The $1.368 million project has a design life of at least 50 years. But Baharlou says the newly implemented design could last a lot longer than that, perhaps extending the pier’s life into the next century.

On any given day, where a mighty roller coaster once cast its shadow over parasols and high starched collars, rather than the aroma of popcorn and roasted nuts, one is likely to catch on the breeze a whiff of a South Asian tandoori chicken favorite turning on the grill, or that of a Carolina barbeque following a recipe so secret it’s never been written in words, as families set out a feast befitting royalty on a picnic bench. A couple grills burgers, hot dogs, and vegan patties for a party of smiling nature lovers while a small fishing party returns from the pier with a catfish, proposed for grilling according to a traditional Central American recipe.

Young children giggle as they try to outrun the waves in the bay’s modest and temperate surf, while the faint strains of party music waft ashore in the wake of a Carnival Cruise ship headed to the sea from Baltimore’s marina, carrying the newest wave of tourists to Bermuda or the Caribbean, likely unaware of the natural beauty just beyond them. The ship’s wake, however, softly tosses the sea grasses along the shore, adding a gentle flux to the communities ensconced among the reeds. The most magnificent fortune tellers of the old Bayshore Amusement Park would have been hard pressed to imagine the scene as it unfolds today. 

About the Author

David C. Richardson

David C. Richardson is a frequent contributor to Forester Media publications.