Walk the beach access at Mariner's Walk this week and the sand looks settled, wide, and finished. Walk two blocks inland along Waterway Boulevard and you will find a different kind of project altogether, one with a completion date that says November and means it. Both crews showed up on Isle of Palms this summer. Only one of them is close to done.
That gap matters if you live here, because the two projects are not variations on the same theme. One is sand, placed to a schedule that moves in cubic yards per day and gets redone every so often. The other is elevation, engineered in feet and inches, meant to hold for years without a repeat visit. Confusing them is easy this month. It is also the reason some residents think the island's construction season is nearly over when, for at least one stretch of pathway, it has months left to run.
Reach 1 Finished Two Weeks Early. Reach 2 Is Closing Out Now.
The contractor is Marinex Construction, out of North Charleston, and the numbers from the first stretch of work are specific enough to be worth repeating. Crews placed roughly 900,000 cubic yards of sand along the shoreline from Mariner's Walk north to Dewees Inlet, finishing that segment, known as Reach 1, in 35 days. According to a report published by Dredging Today on September 3, the work wrapped more than two weeks ahead of schedule, and crews mobilized to the next stretch, Reach 2, within 24 hours.
Reach 2 covers the shoreline near the Wild Dunes Property Owners Beach House down to 56th Avenue, with roughly 800,000 cubic yards of sand going down over an estimated 45 days. If that pace holds, the work should be closing out around the time you are reading this, which puts the island in an odd in-between moment: the first stretch effectively finished, the second wrapping up, and the third stretch still ahead.
Here is how the three reaches break down, along with who is actually paying for each one.
| Reach | Where | Timeline | Who Pays |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reach 1 | Mariner's Walk to Dewees Inlet | Early July through mid-August (finished ahead of schedule) | City of Isle of Palms 47% / Wild Dunes Community Association 53% |
| Reach 2 | Wild Dunes Property Owners Beach House to 56th Avenue | August through early September | City of Isle of Palms 47% / Wild Dunes Community Association 53% |
| Reach 3 | South end toward Breach Inlet | Mid-September through November | City of Isle of Palms 100% |
That funding split is worth sitting with for a second. The two northern reaches sit inside Wild Dunes, a private community, and the Wild Dunes Community Association is covering more than half the tab for its own stretch of beach. The southern reach, which serves the public county park and the more heavily trafficked stretch of Front Beach, is funded entirely by the city. Two different neighborhoods on the same island, two different arrangements for who writes the check.
It is also worth knowing that this renourishment is not blanketing the whole coastline. The project totals 2.5 million cubic yards along up to 19,200 linear feet of shoreline, concentrated at the island's two ends, the parts most exposed to erosion from Dewees Inlet on one side and Breach Inlet on the other. If you live mid-island, near the center of Ocean Boulevard, this particular project was never going to reach your stretch of sand. That is not an oversight. It is where the erosion modeling pointed the money.
The September Estimate That Slipped to November
When the city first announced this project earlier in the year, the public guidance was straightforward. Sand placement would start on the north end in June and wrap up on the southern end by September, according to comments from IOP Public Information Director Joshua Uys at the time. That framing stuck, and it is probably why some residents assume the whole effort closes out with summer.
The reach-by-reach schedule the city has published since work actually got underway tells a more specific story. Reach 3, the final and southernmost stretch, is now listed as running mid-September through November. The early estimate was not wrong so much as it was a spring approximation before Marinex ever moved equipment onto the beach. The operative schedule now, the one tied to a contractor who just beat his own deadline on Reach 1, points to work continuing on the south end well into fall.
Practically, that means anyone who lives closer to Breach Inlet, or who uses the county park beach access regularly, should expect equipment and staging through the back half of autumn, even as the Wild Dunes end of the island moves on to looking finished.
A Different Project, Two Blocks Inland
While the beach work has been getting the attention, a separate and unrelated project has been quietly running along Waterway Boulevard, and it has nothing to do with sand.
This is Phase 2 of the Waterway Blvd Multi-Use Path Elevation Project, a roughly 1.68-mile stretch of pathway between 21st Avenue and 41st Avenue that the city is physically raising to protect it from tidal flooding. According to Hillary Aton, the project manager with Thomas & Hutton, the engineering firm overseeing the work, portions of the existing pathway sat below 5 feet in elevation, with some sections as low as 4.27 feet, low enough that extreme tides had overtopped it repeatedly. The new path is being built to a 7-foot elevation, with new drainage systems and check valves installed beneath it to stop tidal water from backing up into the system during high tides.
"The tidal protection components have not yet been tested by a major coastal storm or severe tidal event."
That line from Aton is a useful piece of honesty. The engineering is done to spec, but nobody gets to claim victory over a king tide until one actually shows up.
The money behind this phase comes from a $980,000 FEMA Hazard Mitigation Grant paired with a $1.25 million state budget allocation, and it follows Phases 1 and 1A, a $1.5 million flood barrier completed last fall inside the Harbor Golf Course at Wild Dunes. Phase 2 is scheduled to wrap this fall, a timeline that, notably, runs on roughly the same calendar as Reach 3 of the beach project, even though the two have separate contractors, separate funding sources, and separate reasons for existing. One is restoring what the tide took. The other is trying to make sure the tide cannot take it again.
If your daily walk or bike ride runs along that stretch between 21st and 41st, expect some sections to still be riding on compacted gravel rather than finished pavement. As of mid-July, paving was complete from 21st to 29th Avenue, with demolition finished from 29th Avenue to Timber Lane and the original path still standing from there to 41st Avenue. The city has said most of the corridor stays open to walkers and cyclists throughout the process, so the inconvenience is more texture than closure.
What's Actually Open This Month
None of this has closed down the parts of island life that do not depend on a finished shoreline. The city's fall calendar is running on schedule, and a few dates are worth putting on the fridge.
- Farmers Market & Food Truck Jam, Thursday, September 17
- Sea Stroll & Learn: Stingrays, hosted by Barrier Island Eco Tours, Thursday, September 10
- Speaker Series: The Science Behind Site Water Runoff, Wednesday, September 9
- Speaker Series: The Power of Positive Painting, with artist Robert Maniscalco, Tuesday, September 15
- Free Lunch & Learn on the IOP Compost Program, with Zoning Administrator Duette Hart, Friday, September 18
None of these require the beach to be finished or the path to be repaved. They are happening at the Public Safety Building and around the island on their normal rhythm, which is arguably the more honest measure of whether a place is "under construction" in any way that changes how you live in it day to day.
The Point
Isle of Palms right now is running two infrastructure projects on overlapping but not identical calendars, funded by different parties, aimed at different problems. The sand at Mariner's Walk is close to a finished product for this cycle, and the Wild Dunes end of the island is close behind it. The path along Waterway Boulevard is still mid-build, with a completion date that lands closer to Thanksgiving than to the first cool morning of fall. Knowing which project you are looking at, and which one still has weeks of work left, is the difference between wondering why "the construction never ends" and knowing exactly when it will.
If you are watching this island closely enough to notice the difference between a sand crew and a paving crew, you already understand it the way we do. That kind of attention to what is actually happening on the ground, not just what the headlines say, is the same approach we bring to every property we help place, build, or manage across the Lowcountry. If a shift like this ever turns into a bigger question about owning here, King & Society is glad to talk it through.
