Significant restrictions to beach-goers, pedestrians, boardwalk buffs and parking are about to change the complexion of two and a half blocks near the Flagler Beach pier as its demolition begins in coming days and for the next year and a half.
A precise starting date has not been set for project, but it is imminent: The city issued a Notice to Proceed on Wednesday.
The beach will be closed to the public immediately in front of the Funky Pelican, beneath the pier, and south of the pier for two blocks, nearly to South 5th Street.
The waters will be off limits to surfers and swimmers for a block on either side of the pier. The construction zone may provide a very narrow “managed” pedestrian crossover on the beach, from north to south under the pier and along the shore. It’s not clear whether the public will be allowed to use that crossover outside of emergencies.
The boardwalk will remain open north of the pier and up to the Funky Pelican—including to demonstrators–but will be closed from immediately south of the entrance to the pier, to South 5th Street.
A1A will maintain its two lanes of traffic even through the work zone in front of the pier. But it will do so at the expense of parking on both sides of A1A from South 3rd to South 5th Street. That means there will be no sideways parking on the east side of A1A, and no parallel parking on the west side of A1A the length of those two blocks, because that space will be needed for the lane shit required to accommodate the construction zone. Northbound traffic will shift to the southbound lane. Southbound traffic will shift to the parallel parking strip.
A “pedestrian construction bypass” route will take pedestrians across State Road A1A along the west side of the road to South 5th Street, at The Anchor restaurant, where–if they’re not inclined to stop for a martini with mussels and fries–they will be allowed to cross back to the east side and to the drune cross-over there, onto the beach. A temporary flashing-beacon crosswalk will be at South 6th Street.
The bathrooms under the A-frame will still be accessible to the public, as will be the Funky Pelican.
All other zones downtown will not be directly affected by the construction. That includes Veterans Park, which will remain open and will continue to host First Friday unimpeded. It includes State Road 100, and the entire parking strip and the boardwalk on the east side of A1A, north of the pier.
“As soon as everything gets going in these coming weeks, those are some changes that you’ll start to see, so just be cognizant of it,” said Gabriel Perdomo, senior project manager with Moffat and Nichol, the firm that designed the new pier.
Construction work will take place from 7 every morning until 5:30 every evening, in 10-hour shifts, five days a week. There will be no weekend work. There will be no night work, says Justin McKay, the project manager for Vecellio and Grogan, the Beckley, W.Va.-based contractor demolishing and rebuilding the pier.
It will be noisy.
“The good news is that as the construction progresses, we’ll be working further and further out into the tidal zones and the ocean,” McKay said. There will still be noise, especially as the hydraulic impact hammer drives the pylons into the seafloor. But “it’ll be much more comfortable for everybody, much less disruptive.”
Perdomo, McKay, Flagler Beach City Manager Dale Martin and others briefed the public on those changes in a town hall at Santa Maria del Mar church in Flagler Beach Wednesday evening. The town hall was intended to answer residents’ questions about all things related to the pier construction. But it was sparsely attended–a few dozen people at most–and the questions were not searching and did not reflect a particular level of anxiety.
That’s probably not surprising: After the Margaritaville hotel construction of the last 18 months, after the repaving of State Road A1A, after the construction of the seawall at the south end of town and the recurrent closures of A1A after major storms before that, Flagler Beach residents have become inured to major projects.
Nevertheless, the team of officials who’ll be leading the demolition and reconstruction of the pier fielded all questions. The team included Chris Novak, project manager on the city’s side (and the person most responsible for ensuring that the city got its Federal Emergency Management Administration funds and its permits), and Jason Cronk, the project administrator from England-Thims and Miller.
The project administrator will be fulfilling the role of a clerk of the works, reporting to Flagler Beach, not to the contractor, and ensuring that Flagler Beach’s expectations, including all code requirements and construction specifications, are met. (Casey Ryan, director of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, or downtown redevelopment zone, which includes the pier, coordinated the event.)
The First part of the construction, lasting six to eight months, will be the construction of a trestle parallel to the pier, from which workers will then dismantle the nearly 100-year-old pier piece by piece, pylon by pylon. That done, concrete pylons will be shipped in already cast. They will be dug into the sea floor, and topped with caps of freshly mixed concrete as the new, 800-foot concrete pier, with wood following and trim, is built. (The 1928 pier was originally built at that length.)
The old pier had been built at an elevation of 18 feet, roughly parallel to the elevation of State Road A1A. But it’s been repeatedly ravaged, not just because ot was made of wood.
“With that storm surge and these larger waves and these events that we’re seeing happen more frequently, that timber structure just hasn’t been able to survive,” Perdomo said. “We’re going to raise the deck elevation to plus 28, and so it will be 10 feet higher than the current elevation.” That’s how newer piers are being built–to account for more violent storm surges and sea rise. New piers in Pensacola Beach, Panama City Beach and Pompano Beach are at 26 feet, Jacksonville Beach’s is at 27.5 feet, and Navarre Beach’s, at 1,545 feet “the longest fishing pier in the Gulf of Mexico,” rises 30 feet.
Flagler Beach’s new pier will have the same shape as its old version. It will have a T-shaped head at its east end. Its first 100 feet will preserve the old wood and structure of the current pier, as a historical nod to its ancestor. Wooden planks removed from the pier will most likely be made available to the public for preservation. But that’s not certain: the contractor cautions that demolition may make that part of the salvaging operation difficult.
“We will make an effort to retrieve the memorial boards and return them to interested family members,” Martin said. “But please contact City Hall, and we will take your name and contact information in order to get those boards.”
Nearly two-thirds of the project is paid through a Federal Emergency Management Administration grant and another third by a $5 million state grant. Completion is expected in December 2026.
The new pier is expected to have a 40 to 50-year lifespan, Perdomo said, as salt gets into the reinforcing rebar. But he projects a lifespan closer to 60 to 70 years. And “as long as it’s monitored, the repair for concrete is not significant as long as you catch it before the steel begins to corrode. And there are tests for that,” with routine testing every 10 years.
Asked what category hurricane the pier could withstand, Perdomo said “that’s almost an impossible thing to say, because any given hurricane, depending on the track, is going to have different effects, whether it’s rain and wind and waves.” Category 1 hurricanes have had storm surges far higher than Category 5 hurricanes, and for a structure like the pier, the most dangerous element is a storm surge. But the pier is built for a 500-year storm, whereas previous piers were built for 100-year storms.
“It would take a significant storm event to have any impact at all, even on the decks or breakaway deck panels,” he said.
Separately from the pier project, Flagler Beach is planning to rebuild the boardwalk, the bathrooms, the radio station, and the bait shop, a three-phase “Beachwalk project.” But that project will not start for at least half a year or a year after the pier project starts so as not to create the appearance that the VEMA money the city received is being used for Beachwalk, Martin said.
Three city commission members and the mayor attended the briefing. “I’m pretty informed on the latest updates on the pier from the few people that I’ve spoken with,” Commissioner Scott Spradley said. “But now we have a panel that will have all of the answers to all the questions. So from my own personal knowledge base, I want to be completely current with what we’re getting ready to be told so I can pass it on to the constituents.”
If there was a recurring hope and advice from the speakers, Commission Chair James Sherman and City Manager Dale Martin especially, it was to stay away from social media and seek out information at the source. “Probably the best place for information that anybody wants to do is either follow the city’s Facebook page or the city’s website,” Martin said.
