Contractors from Trade West working on the repair of the south jetty at the entrance to Tillamook Bay are making substantial progress putting the project several months ahead of schedule.
Project Superintendent Dan Bryner said that they had completed half of the work on the trunk section of the jetty and expected to complete the section soon before spending the rest of the year stockpiling stones for next year’s work.
Placement of stones began in late July with work on the beachside portion of the 600-foot section of the jetty’s trunk. Bryner said that the crew working to place stones had first had to excavate six to ten feet of sand at the base of the jetty to prepare for the work, which had taken just two weeks and two days.
With that work complete, the stone placing team is now working on the channel side of the same section and making good progress, placing an average of 40 and 60 stones a day. Bryner said that at the jetty in Coos Bay, teams have placed more than 100 stones a day but explained that the current work at the Tillamook jetty was more painstaking as there is less infilling taking place.
That means that there are more toe stones being placed, and the requirement that the placement team’s spotter log the locations of each toe stone using a GPS beacon slows the pace of placement.
Stone placement is being monitored on an ongoing basis by fieldworkers from the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), who ensure that the stones are properly situated to meet the project’s requirements. Bryner said that even as work has progressed at a good pace, USACE inspectors had found issues requiring the team to backtrack or “unzip” the jetty to replace stones on three occasions.
As work has progressed on placing stones, the flow of rocks from regional quarries has also continued apace, with more than 700 stones delivered as of early last week.
Bryner said that the process of offloading the stones at the Port of Garibaldi and transferring them via barge to Kincheloe Point is running smoothly. Once there, the stones are weighed before being marked as A-, B- or C-class and sorted and placed into a secondary staging area adjacent to the beach and trunk of the jetty.
So far, the largest stones delivered have been in the neighborhood of 15 tons, but stones up to 40 tons will eventually arrive for use in the head section of the project next year.
After work has wrapped up on placing stones on the channel side of the trunk section, Bryner said that the team expects to focus their energies on stockpiling stones during the winter months, as stone placement becomes too treacherous owing to high surf during winter storms.
After winter weather has subsided, workers will construct a temporary road on the top of the jetty to access the 800-foot section of the project at the jetty’s head next summer.
At some point in the spring, a different excavator will arrive via barge from Coos Bay, where it is being used this summer. That excavator will be roughly twice as large as the one currently working on the trunk section and will be able to span the longer gaps that will be encountered during work at and near the head.
Bryner pointed to his team’s experience in Coos Bay and Trade West’s willingness to use innovative solutions, like fabricating their own custom claw for the rock placing excavator being used currently, as the key factors in helping them pull ahead of their timetable.
Bryner also said that the project team is discussing what to do with the two jetty rocks that were signed by festivalgoers at July’s Garibaldi Days. Bryner explained that the rocks needed to be placed in the jetty as the company had paid for their delivery and said that they wanted them to be accessible without endangering members of the public who would seek them out.
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