Birch Bay berm construction questions answered

With Birch Bay berm construction restarting last month, the Birch Bay Chamber of Commerce hosted a meeting via Zoom on September 24 for residents to ask the project’s contractor questions.

In the meeting, Gairrett Orelup with Granite Construction, Whatcom County Public Works department representative Roland Middleton and Whatcom County engineering manager Jim Karcher gave updates on the project, officially called the Birch Bay Drive and Pedestrian Facility Project.

Whatcom Public Works staff said the pedestrian pathway south of the Bay Breeze Restaurant & Bar is ready to be paved but the material they planned to use was not working well in Washington weather. Paving will be postponed until public works finds a new, more sustainable material. Orelup asked for people to stay off the path for three to four days once it is paved.

Granite Construction crews will continue to work north of Bay Breeze heading toward Cedar Avenue, Orelup said. They will be placing stormwater basins along the west side of Birch Bay Drive. High-density polyethylene pipe sections will extend from the basins under the berm into the water to drain stormwater treatment swales above the berm.

“Crews are 100 percent focused on importing berm material,” Orelup said, which will likely be finished by the end of December or early January.

Public works staff said there will be single lane closures on Birch Bay Drive while crews work on the berm. Wait times should be less than five minutes.

The south end of the project will start to have a finished look soon, Orelup said, as they will begin planting in three weeks or so. “There is light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.

Middleton and Orelup warned residents that this is an active construction site, and asked for walkers to stay on the east side of Birch Bay Drive when passing construction areas. Orelup said it does wonders for the crew. They are operating heavy equipment that obstructs their view. “The last thing we want out here is to have an accident,” he said.

The chamber plans to host the “Coffee with the Contractor” meetings on the last Thursday of every month.

Below are some questions and answers from the September 24 session, edited for length and clarity.

Will the sea walls be taken down? And what will be done with the materials?

Orelup: All seawalls south of Cedar Avenue will be taken down six inches below the new beach grade. We haul them to one of our pits in the county and they crush the material up and recycle it and reuse it for new concrete.

So you’re not burying it under the berm or anything like that?

Orelup: Well, we remove a portion of it. We don’t remove everything. We only remove the portion that’s extruded out of the ground. And then once we can break the concrete off to where it’s about six inches to a foot below the new beach grade, we’ll just bury it and leave it in place.

What happens to the existing stormwater outlets?

Orelup: Yep, those will also be removed – similar process. We’ll demolish them and chuck them out to one of our existing pits. Then they get ground up and recycled and put back into new concrete later on. Where the concrete outfall is now, we will be replacing it with an HDPE plastic pipe, which has a much longer surface life than a concrete pipe in these conditions.

What about the groins (small concrete walls running perpendicular to the beach)?

Karcher: Most of the groins will be covered. Those are historic, and I think the condition that we worked out with the permitting agency is that those groins would be covered by the berm material.

The issue with the groins is that if we start removing those off the beach, we don’t know what else we will uncover there, and think it’s best to let those stay in place.

What type of recreation amenities can be placed on the berm, like benches and trash cans?

Middleton: We did not purchase right of way for the whole berm, so that is not public property. We have a construction easement, and people are allowed to walk along the berm but it is private property. If you want to put a bench up there, you need to talk to the property owner. You know, across from Gold Star [Resorts], that’s Gold Star’s property. Down from Mr. Vogt, that’s Mr. Vogt’s property. Across from the [Birch Bay Vogt Community Library], that would be dealing with the library. All that beach area is privately owned, and any kind of amenities, whether it’s benches or trash cans or that sort of thing, has to be dealt with the property owner.

Any kind of improvements, park-type improvements, to the berm, that’s really up to the individual property owners. If the park and recreation district would like to move forward with talking to all of them and putting up park benches and that sort of thing, that’s fine. That is totally up to you and the property owners. Public works will not be maintaining those, Whatcom County Parks Department will not be maintaining those, because we don’t have any jurisdiction. It wouldn’t be any different than us maintaining the bench on your front porch.

Will the rock riprap be reused in the berm?

Orelup: A lot of it’s being buried into type 1 material, since we are building the grade up so much so it won’t affect the beach itself. But if there are rocks that are too large to cover, we will remove them.

Is type 1 material the bigger rocks that the crew is pulling in now close to the road?

Orelup: The type 1 material is the larger rocks that you’ll see. Then we have another material that will cap in place on top of that type 1 material that is more consistent with the material that you’ll see on a beach. But to build the grade up, we use the larger size rocks first. It’s all local rock.

For more information, visit the county’s project website at co.whatcom.wa.us/522/Birch-Bay-Drive-Pedestrian-Facility-Proj.