Peat exposed by beach erosion at low tide at Floyd Bennett Field. (National Park Service)

NEW YORK, NY August 24, 2006 —You can’t really swim or work on your suntan at this beach, but an island in New York City is getting a make-over. In the federally protected Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, a group of governmental agencies is busy trying to fight its deterioration and restore the wetlands in the Bay. WNYC’s Richard Hake got a first hand look at the government trying to re-build an island.

REPORTER: From the end of Cross Bay Boulevard in Howard Beach a small Parks Department motor boat swiftly makes its way across Jamaica Bay. On the left, the causeway that heads out to the Rockaways. On the right, the Belt Parkway and a landfill, with its man-made mountains filled with garbage. But minutes away from shore it’s wilderness.

Here on Elders Point, a marsh island in the middle of the bay, there’s lots of activity going on.

ALVAREZ: You can see the Empire State Building, you see the airplanes flying from JFK and yet you are on this island sometimes they talk about having a Survivor show out here.

REPORTER: Melissa Alvarez is a biologist with the US Army Corps of Engineers and has spent almost every working day for the past one and a half years on the island.

ALVAREZ: It’s very interesting and I’m not complaining about spending so much time working right now.

REPORTER: Alvarez is part of a huge unprecedented, governmental, 13 million dollar construction project that is restoring the tidal salt marsh. Today, the island looks like a beach with sparse patches of sea grass. The project manager from the New York District of the US Army Corps of Engineers, Scott Nicholsen, says since the 1920s the islands in Jamaica Bay have been shrinking at an alarming rate, including Elders Point.

NICHOLSEN: A total of 70 acres, only 9 acres of marsh remain, right. And it’s all fragmented and when the ecology becomes all fragmented it becomes weaker and so that accelerates the deterioration.

REPORTER: As planes fly over head on takeoff from JFK, Nicholson explains that the marsh land's deterioration is partly due to nature and partly by humans. Jamaica Bay is surrounded by highways, a subway line, a landfill, four water treatment plants and an airport.

NICHOLSEN: In an urban environment like the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area, it’s been highly impacted by all of the infrastructure to support the 25 million people here.

REPORTER: And as part of the 1.6 billion dollar New York Harbor dredging project a group of governmental agencies including the Army Corps of Engineers, The Port Authority, The National Park Service and New York State decided to do something about the problem. They are pumping the sand from the harbor floor on to the island. Steve Zahn of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation says sand is only the beginning to restore the island.

ZAHN: Well, our hope is that the grasses that you see out here in patches…it’ll just be a carpet of these. It would be a meadow of salt marsh grasses that you would see out here. That would be a true success.

REPORTER: About one million individual shoots are being hand planted on Elders Point. They’re grown at a plant material center in Cape May, New Jersey. Chris Miller is a plant material specialist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and says it’s no easy task.

MILLER: Well, it’s a matter of collecting the seed at the right time in the fall which we did in Jamaica Bay and going through a cleaning process in a storage and salt water back in Cape May. And basically seeding out our flats of plants in February and then getting a nice seedling that may be 10 to 12 inches tall in a couple months.

REPORTER: The plants are then sent by truck to Jamaica Bay where you can see them from the mainland in meticulous rows in protective wood and wire barricades. The project biologist says horseshoe crabs and other invertebrates come into the site days after a section is planted. Barry Sullivan, the Superintendent of Gateway National Recreation Area says that is the sign that the restoration is a success.

SULLIVAN: This is the estuary or sort of nursery of our seas. All the fish, the crabs, the clams, all of the species that we as humans are dependent upon need these protective estuaries to breathe. Without them, without marshes like this to help stabilize these estuaries we would be losing those species and that’s why it’s so critical.

REPORTER: And it’s at a critical point for the shoreline. Without the islands and marshes the coastline and the surrounding property is vulnerable to flooding and erosion. Congressman Anthony Weiner, who toured the island, said the government ignored the problem for years.

WEINER: The residents of Broad Channel, whose backyard quite literary faces the marshes, they were the canaries in the coal mine early on, saying something is happening that is quite bad in the marshes. If I have a regret here on this day where we declare victory of having built this project, if I have a regret is that we didn’t start 15 years earlier when the community started to say that something was starting to happen.

REPORTER: And it’s still not certain the project will be a success. Scientists say it will take five years for the marsh to become stable. Biologists will continue to monitor it over that time in the hope that it will return to the same state as in the early 1900s. For WNYC, I’m Richard Hake.

Mayor Bloomberg and the City are also helping to protect Jamaica Bay. Yesterday he signed a law that will extend the Department of Environmental Protections watershed study for another year. It calls for a plan to restore and maintain the water quality in the Bay.