Progress Report
PR #6 - January 1999

Dear Friend of Three Bays Preservation:

The big news is that the long awaited dredging commenced on Thanksgiving Day, 11/26/98.

It started at the west end of Seapuit River channel in order to make room in the channel for the booster pump. A booster pump is necessary to get the sand dredged from the western channels of Cotuit Bay all the way down to the east end of Dead Neck.

Dead Neck will be restored to meet the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' 100-year storm design resulting in a berm approximately 13.5 feet high, 80-100 feet wide at the top, and 300 feet wide at the bottom at low tide. The side of the berm facing Nantucket Sound will have a more gradual slope than the Seapuit River side before reaching the top of the berm so that the Nantucket Sound storm waves will expend their energy in the shallow water before reaching the main part of the berm. Dead Neck's important bird sanctuary will also be restored and planted with grass.

As of December 30, we have placed 120,000 cubic yards of sand on Dead Neck. Approximately 1,000 feet of beach has been restored. The main channel into Cotuit Bay has been widened to 200 feet and to a depth of 11 feet at mean low water. We plan to place another 60,000 cubic yards of sand on Dead Neck, 24,000 of which will come from the West Bay channels.

Expensive but necessary engineering studies to obtain permits to dredge the Bays and Seapuit River channels were made in an effort to speed up our Bays flushing cycles. The permits we have been granted will allow us to do maintenance channel dredging and place sand on Dead Neck as required for a period of 10 years. We believe state funds for maintenance dredging are easier to obtain than for initial dredging projects.

We feel that our late summer outreach project was a success financially as well as in building membership and increasing the Town's awareness of our project.

We increased our membership to 372 who in total have contributed $1,700,000.

It is important to build as large a membership as possible to enable Three Bays to maintain our not-for-profit status as well as to help us make an impact on the Town, State and foundations.

We have started a program to request grants from private foundations. With Rick Wrightson's help, the grant writer at Bill Koch's Kansas City organization has given us a lot of valuable information to get us started. Sarah Toadvine, Lindsey Counsell, etc. will follow through on the program.

We feel we have built a good working relationship with the Town of Barnstable. They have made a commitment to help our Three Bays pollution problem by indicating they will hire a project manager to do the work necessary to end up with a recommendation as to the long range solution to our pollution problem. The latest word from the Town is that they will write a job description, determine a salary level, interview candidates, and select a person by March, 1999.

Everyone involved in the above projects and especially those who helped raise the $1,700,000 to make it all possible deserve a lot of credit for their interest, their own donations, writing letters, and making calls by phone and in person.

We have hired a publicity person who has been quite effective. He has arranged two articles in the Cape Cod Times and one each in The Register and Cape Cod Journal. In addition, he set up an eighteen-minute interview with Bob Gill and Lindsey Counsell on WQRC which aired twice.