About 50 percent of the dunes at Wrightsville Beach’s north end were destroyed by recent high surf, public works director Mike Vukelich said.
The weekend of Oct. 3 and 4, local beaches experienced high surf from Hurricane Joaquin spinning offshore and record-setting rainfall from another weather system.
What hit Wrightsville Beach “was pretty much a hurricane without the wind,” Vukelich said.
His public works employees took a front-end loader onto the beach strand Oct. 8 to smooth out escarpments at high-use beach accesses. They won’t do anything to the damaged frontal dunes, though.
“There’s not a whole lot we can do,” he said. “Long range, it will be looked at, but that’s a major undertaking, as much sand has been removed.”
