Flagler Beach’s New Concrete Pier Will Be 10 Feet Higher to Account for Sea Rise and Violent Storms

That’s what the team from Moffat and Nichol, the firm Flagler Beach hired to design the replacement pier, told a throng of city residents and officials Tuesday evening. They turned out to get their first look at what the new pier will look like, from a very conceptual perspective, when it will be built, and what it will cost. They’d also turned out at Moffat and Nichols’s invitation, to weigh in on the design.

“What we’re here to do is to design your pier, because this is your town and you will be the one using this pier,” Gabriel Perdomo, a coastal engineer who’s been with the firm 18 years, told the crowd at the Wickline Senior Center on South Daytona Avenue.

The plan is to complete the design, have all permits in hand and put the project out to bid in one year–January 2024. It would be under construction in the summer of 2024, and completed by the end of 2025. “It’s ambitious, but we’re always up for a good challenge. It’s doable,” Perdomo said to murmurs in the crowd. Whether the murmurs were delight or disbelief was unclear. Probably both.




Less clear are the costs ahead. The city had secured $10 million in Federal Emergency Management Agency for Hurricane Matthew repairs, almost lost it–because of delays in getting the project going–but managed to reassure the federal agency. The new pier is expected to cost between $17 and $18 million. So the money in the bank won’t be enough to build the new pier, and additional funds have not been secured. On the other hand, FEMA takes account of inflation and increasing design costs, so that original $10 million may end up being larger, if still not quite enough to build the whole thing.

The length of the pier will affect cost, and vice versa. “We definitely are going to push for the 800 feet,” City Manager William Whitson said.

The three project goals are to replace the outer 700 feet of the pier, which has been made of wood for almost a century, with concrete. The first 100 feet would be preserved as wood, for its history and character. The goal is also to minimize environmental impacts and impacts on area businesses, especially as the city witnesses the soon-to-begin building of a 100-room hotel downtown, and, at least a year from now, a beach renourishment project south of the pier.

But those goals must be accomplished within the new challenges of rising seas and angrier storms.

Perdomo and especially Jackie Brower, the assistant project management on the project, combining the stark numbers and consequences of a now chronically more violent climate with bright images and the self-confidence of reassuring science and technology to show the crowd how adaptive design and concrete can cope with the new normal.

Brower did not sugarcoat that new normal.




While there’s been storms throughout the life of the pier, it’s now important to look at the kind of storm events that have been happening in more recent years, including, since Hurricane Matthew in 2016. Brower described them as “several more very historic events that really have statistically changed how we approach designing these piers.” Even if storms have not been increasing in frequency, “we do know that the intense storms are becoming more frequent.”

There’s been eight major storms where FEMA has allocated funding in the last seven years. That contrasts sharply with the lower number of previous decades. But that’s what Flagler BEach should expect in the future. “Actual statistics are changing,” Brower said, to the point of intensifying the kind of “wave events” that strike the shore. “This design that we’re doing for your pier is going to account for those changes.”

The way to withstand “these large storm events that are coming is to up our design,” Brower said. She showed two piers in Broward County that were damaged by recent storms. One of them was severed at its midsection. The other was not. Both were concrete piers. The difference? The one that survived getting sliced in half was higher, affording protection from “wave energy.” Expect a higher pier in Flagler Beach as well. Also expect wood paneling on top of the concrete “bone structure” that can “blow off” when it’s struck by waves.




The team is taking it as a given, at least for its design purp[oses, that the sea level will rise a foot and a half to two feet over the next 50 to 100 years. “We want to make sure that we consider that because the water depth affects the wave height which affects the forces that are imparted onto the pier,” Brower said.

That’s why, while the existing elevation of the pier’s deck is 17.8 feet above the mean sea level line, the new pier’s deck elevation will be 28 feet. “That considers sea level rise,” Brower said.

When the floor was open for questions, those had to do with preservation of existing pieces of the pier, the sea floor’s changes below the pier, whether it’ll still be largely just for fishing. It will not: the city is hoping to make it wider: “we see it as an event space,” Whitson said.

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