Fort Myers Beach Hotel

Fort Myers Beach gets bigger, better

Since May 13, Florida Dredge and Dock of Tarpon Springs has been pumping sand from the Gulf of Mexico onto the badly eroded beach as part of a $4.2 million renourishment project.

Lee County, Fort Myers Beach, the state and the West Coast Inland Navigation District are paying for the project, which will stretch from Bowditch Point to just south of Lynn Hall Park.

“We love this end of the island, but it was so disappointing as it got smaller and smaller and smaller,” said Barbara Orr, 79, of Fort Myers. “We think this project is wonderful. It’s just beautiful. We check every day to see what’s happening.”
Scheduled to be completed in early October, the project will place 420,752 cubic yards of sand onto the beach.

Renourishment projects are seldom without controversy, and a common criticism is that a renourished beach eventually erodes and disappears. The new beach on Estero Island is expected to last seven years.

That’s seven years of storm protection for buildings and roads, Lee County coastal engineer Robert Neal said.

“When Hurricane Charley came through, we were in the middle of a renourishment project at Lovers Key,” Neal said. “They’d put sand in front of the pavilion but not in front of the bridge. The pavilion was relatively untouched, and they lost 100 feet of bridge.

“If a hurricane comes through this season and wipes out the entire beach and not one hotel, we’d consider it a job well done.”

A renourished beach also provides a place for recreation, and that boosts the county’s economy.

“How else are you going to draw people out here?” Fort Myers resident Richard Spratt, 72, asked. “How are you going to get the economy going if you don’t have something to sell? We love it. It’s going to help the whole area.”

Humans aren’t the only beneficiaries of beach renourishment, said Keith Laakkonen, Fort Myers Beach’s environmental sciences coordinator.

“You can have an increase in numbers of sea turtle nests simply because there’s more beach for them to nest on,” he said. “The past couple of years, the north end of the island was so severely eroded that even if a turtle did nest, the chances of the nest washing away or flooding were pretty high.” Shorebirds, such as least terns, snowy plovers and Wilson’s plovers might start nesting on the newly renourished beach, Laakkonen said.

Moon Florida Gulf Coast

DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Florida

Moon Florida Beaches, The Best Places to Swim, Play, Eat, and Stay

OAG travel planner, hotel & motel redbook, the official lodging directory of the American Hotel & Motel Association

Frommer's Florida with Your Family