ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla — "Come over here and let me really show you," Dee Parker said as she walked near a beach dune in southern St. Johns County.
She is with the group Friends of the Summer Haven River. Parker says she's excited to show how sea oats – she helped plant last year -- helped protect the north part of the nearby Summer Haven River from Hurricane Dorian.
"This is what’s holding our dune together, these long roots that come out," Parker said. She showed a root that was ten feet long.
The state and private funds helped restore this northern part of the Summer Haven River.
"It did its job, it stopped the erosion," she said.
Those newly restored dunes keep the waves from getting into the Summer Haven River.
In 2008, during a tropical storm, sent water from the ocean onto the beach. The waves broke through a dune and sent water into the Summer Haven River. But now, this beach is looking more like what it used to look like before that breach.
But just a mile further south, Hurricane Dorian created a separate breach impacting the southern part of the Summer Haven River.
There, hurricane Dorian pounded the coastline, waves breached the beach sand, and surf flowed into the southern section of the Summer Haven River.
"Everybody gets the two ends confused," Parker said. "They say, 'There’s the breach. All that work down the tubes.' But no! Our (dune), where we did the work, it held. Where the work hasn’t been done, there was a breach."
St. Johns County has plans to heal the breach in the southern part of the Summer Haven River.
That breach is getting bigger, according to St. Johns County Public Works Director Neal Shinkre. He says this southern part of the beach calls for an emergency measure. The county will spend $500,000 to speed up the bidding process to just 48 hours, start work next week to pull sand from the river, and to close the coastline gap. It’s not to help the river, he said, but to provide access to the half dozen homes in that area.
The project will most likely help improve the flow of the whole river.
And maybe the county will take note of how well the restored coastline a mile north held up, aided by those little by mighty plants.