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A crew began work this past week on a 120-foot long pier at Oriental’s Lou-Mac Park. Town Manager Wyatt Cutler says the pier could be finished within 2 to 3 weeks.

Cost of the project will be $33,900, he says. $24,000 is being paid via a grant from CAMA. The Town has said it would pay the rest, now slightly more than a quarter of the cost, with receipts from the town’s tax on hotel and motel rooms.

By Wednesday morning, Broad Creek Construction had already sunk a few pilings out at the 100-foot mark. A floating 20×20 foot platform will extend off the end of that. During the day Wednesday, the work crew was working to clear an area closer to shore, where rip-rap had been in place, in order to drive the pilings in there.

Wyatt Cutler says the pier will be about three feet above the mean water line or “barnacle line” as determined by CAMA. The railing along the sides of the pier will have to be regulation height of “about 42 inches.” That says Wyatt Cutler, is the “handicap code”.

While the letter of the Americans with Disabilities Act is being followed for the railing, and for the approach to the pier, the spirit of the ADA may be in question on another aspect of the pier’s construction: the openings in the concrete surface of the walkway.

Those concrete slabs are the same that are used in mass-production hog farms — the slots allow hog waste to pass through to a receptacle below. They have become popular in pier and dock construction because of their sturdiness, and because those openings allow water to pass during storms and make the structure less prone to damage.

But those slots in the concrete that are so beneficial to a pier during a storm could spell trouble for those who require a wheelchair to get to the end of the pier.

This summer, an inspector suggested that since wheelchair wheels could get caught in those long slotted openings the town should lay the slabs sideways. That upped the price of the project by 50% to roughly $48,000.

Wyatt Cutler says the county inspector later relented and said the town could build the pier with the concrete slabs running parallel with the sides of the pier – in a manner that could be more prone to having a wheelchair wheel fall in to the slot.

The town board voted at its October meeting to go with the original plan that could snare a wheelchair wheel but cost less financially. “The long way could catch a wheel,” Wyatt Cutler says, “but there’s no handicapped code” barring it. He says that “it’s the way most docks are built.”

Indeed, other local piers built with concrete slabs do have the slabs running in the same way as this new pier.

Proponents of the pier in the park say it will give a firmer footing for fishermen who now cast their rods while standing on the rip-rap along the Oriental waterfront. The town’s Tourism Board has said that it would attract tourists. Some proponents say the pier should go in the park because earlier piers, destroyed by hurricanes were there.

The pier project has sparked some opposition as well. Some who don’t want the pier in the park say it should go elsewhere on the Oriental waterfront rather than disturb Lou-Mac which has evolved in to a tranquil place. At a May 2006 Town Board meeting, nine residents asked the town board to hold a Public Hearing at which drawings of the planned pier could be presented so the public could offer informed comment.

The Town Board voted unanimously against holding any hearings where details of the pier could be debated. Several Town Board members say that a majority of the public wanted the pier at the park. Some opponents noted that some of the support for a pier comes from those who believe it is going in, several hundred yards to the east, where the vertical pilings from an earlier pier stick out of the water in front of the River Neuse Suites.

With the construction of the pier starting this week, residents of Oriental are at last getting a model — full scale — of what the pier will look like. By mid November the pier is expected to be complete.

Posted Sunday October 28, 2007 by Melinda Penkava