Just in time for hurricane season, buried seawalls are being constructed in order to protect the coast from powerful storms. AccuWeather's Leslie Hudson reports on the project from Ormond Beach.
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00:00The major project in northeast Florida is aimed at strengthening the vulnerable parts of Florida's scenic A1A road,
00:07which is underway and is nearing completion just in time for hurricane season.
00:11AccuWeather's Leslie Hudson joins us from Ormond by the sea in Florida with more.
00:18Beautiful morning. This is why you live in Florida, right, Leslie?
00:24Yes, Bernie, and welcome back. But it is so humid here.
00:29You have to remember it is beautiful, but the heat index, it's already almost crippled digits and it's only 8 a.m.
00:34So it's very warm, but very beautiful for sure.
00:37But look over my shoulder here. This massive 80 foot tall drill is the star of the show here in Ormond by the sea.
00:43So this is unbelievable technology.
00:46If you can see that giant drill that actually goes anywhere from 18 feet to 40 feet below the road here.
00:54And it fills in with these steel and fiberglass pillars.
00:59So this seawall that stretches along A1A here is about anywhere from 40 feet, 4 stories below to 18 feet below.
01:07They kind of alternate those pillars all the way down this highway.
01:11So it's really innovative what they're trying to do here.
01:14In northeast Florida, they have seen many hurricanes, weathered many storms over the years.
01:18And we have some drone video from up above where you can see kind of a bird's eye view of what it looked like as they were putting this plan in place.
01:28So this is a stretch that's about 2.6 miles in Flagler County and in Volusia County.
01:34I'm currently in Volusia County in Ormond by the sea.
01:37This is the project that is going to be completed by the end of the year.
01:40The one in Flagler Beach, which is just six miles north of me, is pretty much done.
01:45The only thing they have to do is actually landscape and put some local trees and grass and some floral and fauna, if you will, along the beach there.
01:55But right below the road and in that sand, people won't even know that there is a 40-foot deep seawall.
02:01It's called a secant wall.
02:02So it's not a typical seawall that you would see along a beach.
02:06It's underground.
02:07And the point is they don't want you to see it.
02:09They don't want you to know it's there.
02:11So when these storms come and there's such beach erosion, that hopefully this new seawall will reinforce the roads.
02:18Because A1A many times gets washed out during tropical storms, hurricanes, nor'easters, you name it.
02:24You know, just big rainstorms.
02:26We can get these big chunks of the highway that disappear.
02:29And we talked to the engineer that's in charge of this project.
02:31And he said there was one main reason why they started to get this done.
02:35And that was from the hurricane seasons just a couple years ago.
02:38This area gets hit a lot by hurricanes.
02:43And often we get a lot of damage of A1A.
02:47Parts of it are washed away.
02:49And that's been going back years, probably decades.
02:52In recent years, I remember almost a decade ago, we had Hurricane Matthew that took out parts of A1A.
02:58More recently, we had Ian and Nicole.
03:01And even we had Milton recently.
03:03While we were building these walls, we had Milton hit.
03:08So before this project, they were constantly coming out here to restore the road.
03:15And this project, actually to get it done as quickly as they're trying to get it done, they had to put an emergency status on it.
03:21Because, again, the roads here in northeastern Florida are very susceptible to the washout conditions.
03:27They had 20 washouts, that's where part of the road literally disappears, just in the last couple of years.
03:33So they know this is a big problem.
03:35This is a really big project for them.
03:38It's costing about $110 million that's being funded between the city of Ormond Beach and the city of Flagler, in Flagler Beach.
03:45So the two cities got together, they decided they wanted to try and get some more resiliency in this area.
03:51And they're hoping that this will be a true case.
03:55It has not been tested yet, but they do think that minimally they'll be able to sustain a Category 3 hurricane of some sort.
04:03If the washout comes through, there's a big surge, an onshore flow.
04:07They believe that it will withstand a Category 3.
04:10Again, not been tested yet.
04:11But when you think about that, those pillars, and remember, it's the circumference of that drill behind me.
04:15So that is filled with steel and fiberglass.
04:18And it's 40 feet down below the surface.
04:21So they believe that this seawall will be able to withstand the hurricanes in the coming years.
04:25But, of course, we'll have to wait and see.
04:27Reporting now live in Ormond-by-the-Sea, I'm Leslie Hudson.
04:30Back to you.
04:32Please, thank you so much.
04:33So many scenic drives there through coastal Florida, whether you're on the Gulf or the Atlantic side.