VENICE — Hurricane Helene was a storm like no one in Venice had seen before.
And it revealed something no one in Venice today had seen — the pilings and bulkheads from the original construction of the South Jetty nearly 100 years ago.
The jetties were built not as part of the Intracoastal Waterway project completed in the 1960s but under the federal River and Harbor Act of 1935, according to an article by Mark Smith, the county's former archivist, on SarasotaHistoryAlive.com.
The act authorized two 660-foot-long jetties and the dredging of an 8-foot-deep, 100-foot-wide channel between them, to ensure that Casey's Pass, the natural waterway from the Gulf to Roberts Bay, remained open.
Each jetty consisted of 19 steel sheet pile cylinders and creosoted wood sheet pile bulkheads to connect the jetty with the shore, the article says.
Work was completed on Oct. 18, 1937, it says.
No hurricane in the intervening years ever had exposed elements of the original construction, said Justin McBride, executive director of the West Coast Inland Navigation District.
He was one of a number of representatives of agencies and businesses participating in a joint effort to clean up the main channel of the ICW post-Helene who spoke at a city media event Thursday at Higel Marine Park and Boat Ramp.
The park is closed to the public because it's being used as a staging area for the cleanup.
The bulkheads aren't just exposed, McBride said; they were severely damaged by Helene's storm surge.
The North Jetty also suffered significant damage and is closed, as is Humphris Park at the South Jetty, which was shut down as a precaution before Helene approached.
The Army Corps of Engineers, which has jurisdiction over the jetties, had engineers in Venice this week to do an assessment, he said.
He said he's waiting on a report of their findings so WCIND can work with the area's congressional delegation to try to get supplemental funding for repairs.
However, Venice will be in line for money with governments to the north that were even harder hit, he said. Areas in Sarasota and Manatee counties fared worse than Venice, as bad as it was here, he said.
He's hoping the fact the ACOE was already working on a plan to harden the jetties might expedite the city's project.
The ACOE builds projects to last about 100 years, he said, and the jetties aren't far from the end of their useful life.
Be alert on the water
Although Helene was a very different storm from Ian in 2022, a lesson the WCIND learned from Ian still applies, McBride said: Debris will continue to show up for months.
The entire area is a tidal basin, he said, and as tides rise and fall and storms come and go, debris will be set loose and make its way into waters that flow into the Gulf.
"The debris just keeps coming," he said.
And the longer it's in the water, the more waterlogged it gets and the lower in the water it rides, if it's visible at all.
There's also a risk of new debris entering the water accidentally, he said, as supplies and crews come in by boat to repair waterfront structures.
All of that is why people who don't need to be on the water should stay off it, Venice Marine Patrol Master Officer Paul Joyce said.
Between the risk of hitting debris, the uncertain quality of the water and the risk of running aground because shoals have shifted, people who do venture out should be more careful than usual, he said.
He recommends having someone on board just to be on the lookout for hazards.
He said that while on patrol he spotted a piece of wood sticking a few inches out of the water about 200-300 yards offshore south of Caspersen Beach. If a bird hadn't been sitting on it, he might have missed it, he said.
When Sea Tow Venice pulled it out of the water, it turned out to be a piling about 6 feet long with concrete at its base. It had been resting on the bottom in about 3 feet of water — where it's usually 15 feet deep, Joyce said.
As far as debris goes, "whatever was in your backyard or in a park is now in our waterways," he said — decks, picnic tables, benches.
It could be a week or a month before all the big items have been collected, he said.
Jonathan Laronge, of the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary, said his agency has pulled out trash cans, dumpsters and trees.
It's also busy identifying and repairing or replacing damaged and missing channel markers — another reason to be extra-cautious on the water.
"There's just about any kind of debris you can think of," said Craig Marcum, owner of Sea Tow Venice, which is collecting it from Osprey to Placida.
His company has recovered a number of boats, too, to be returned to their owners or their insurance company, he said.
Although Helene displaced a lot of boats, McBride said, it appears the count will be far lower than for Hurricane Ian, which resulted in 4,000-5,000 derelict vessels.
He doesn't have a figure yet for Helene, he said, but thinks it will probably be well below 1,000.
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