Littoral Landscape at Work: Dredge Engine
Individual Work, 09-12/2020, Academy
Instructor Amy Whitesides, awhitesides@gsd.harvard.edu
Institution Harvard GSD
Dredging constitutes a sedimentary infrastructure essential to coastal landscape functioning, as beach nourishment and habitat restoration. In the Cape cod canal and Buzzards Bay area, clean dredged material from the Canal and PCB contaminated dredge from the Bay are critical resources that are currently taken off site to far offshore dumping grounds.
The project focuses on the cape cod canal dredge maintenance capacity and its catalytic potential for revitalization and coastal protection through the proposal of The Dredge Engine, a local aggregates business catalyzed and diversified by localized dredged materials management.
Site A is an in-situ quarry. Divided into six zones, the quarry works under a mining-and-restoration cycle that incorporates both clean and contaminated dredge. In three-year cycles, two zones of the quarry would be at work remediating contamination and generating clean soils and timbers.
Site B is an ex-situ site, a representative of the dredge beneficiary uses when transported offshore. An offshore storm damage reduction dune belt is built with the material. The belt is built by marsh defense on the seabed and the nourishment on the existing beach frontier. Both placements are built on the dredge construction and enable a natural sediment accretion process.
