Posts Tagged Cancun Beach Recovery

We are sure that you have been avidly following our beach restoration coverage on this website and on www.royalresortsnews.com and as the Cancún project wraps up at the end of this month, we wanted to share some additional photos with you.
The beaches at The Royal Sands, The Royal Mayan, The Royal Caribbean and The Royal Islander have been completely restored and palapas and sun loungers have been reinstalled, ready and waiting for your next trip.
The global interest in this project has been immense and the Mexican Tourist Board has been proudly showing off Cancún’s pearly white beaches at the FITUR Travel Show in Madrid, Spain (January 18 - 22).

Cancún Beach Restoration Fast Facts

* 12 kilometers of beach restored from Punta Cancún to Punta Nizuc
* 4.5 kilometers of beach in Playa del Carmen
* Approximately 6.3 million cubic meters of sand were dredged from two sand banks - La Ollita near Isla Mujeres and Punta Norte off the coast of Cozumel - and pumped on to the Cancún shoreline.
* The Cancún portion of the project cost $650 million Mexican pesos
* Restoration was carried out by Mexicana de Dragados S.A. de C.V., an affiliate of Belgian company Jan de Nul, and coordinated by the Mexican Electricity Board (CFE).
* Two dredgers worked round the clock to restore Cancún’s beaches.
* Work advanced at a pace of 100 meters a day.
* A concrete barrier was erected between Punta Cancún and the Golondrinas Islet. Over 300 meters long and comprised of more than 13,830 concrete blocks weighing approximately 16,245 tons, the sea wall will help to reduce coastal erosion and sand loss.
* A 10-year monitoring and maintenance project is also planned.
* Sand pumping began in Cancún on November 1 and by December 16, beach project engineers had already reached The Royal Sands.
* Work started at The Royal Mayan on January 6 and was completed at The Royal Islander on January 14. Once the 12-meter-long pipes and heavy equipment were moved further south, resort staff reopened all the beach entrances.
* With only 400 meters of shoreline to restore, the Cancún project will be finished by the end of January and work is well underway in Playa del Carmen.
* Mexican President Felipe Calderón is expected to visit the area in February to inspect the beaches.

January 14, Beach restoration has now been completed at The Royal Islander and project engineers are moving heavy equipment further south along the shoreline, although the pipeline in front of The Royal Mayan and The Royal Caribbean has still to be dismantled.

There is access to the beach from The Royal Mayan, The Royal Caribbean and The Royal Islander. The installation of beach palapas has finished at The Royal Mayan and will continue at The Royal Caribbean on Friday. Shade umbrellas will be available at The Royal Islander until all machinery has moved out of the area.

Overall, beach restoration is 91% complete with work now underway in the Playa Delfines area. Edgar Ordoñez Durán, the Project Coordinator indicated that it will take another 10 days to restore the remaining stretch of shore. He also mentioned that the concrete wall erected between Punta Cancún and the Golondrinas Islet to prevent sand being washed further north along the coast will be finished by the end of the month.

The Beach Project crew has been working round the clock and we are pleased to report that they have now advanced to The Royal Caribbean. You can see the progress as you look at the most recent photos taken by the Royal Channel on January 7.
As work is underway at The Royal Caribbean and will continue at The Royal Islander, the beaches in front of the three resorts will remain closed for safety reasons until the authorities give the signal to reopen them. The floating tube through which sand is pumped from the dredger to the metal pipeline on the beach is currently located in front of The Royal Caribbean and is expected to remain there for several days, and diggers and other heavy vehicles continue to operate in the area. A temporary access to the beach has now been opened in front of Building M at The Royal Mayan. Additional updates will be published as we receive more information from the beach project coordinator.
According to the original calendar issued by the Mexican authorities in December 2009, the pipes and beach restoration vehicles were scheduled for removal at the three resorts on January 15 (estimated date, give or take one or two days).
The beaches to the north of The Royal Mayan are open and shuttle service to The Royal Sands is also available. Overall, the Cancún Beach Restoration project is now 77% complete.
Stay posted for a video and additional photos over the coming days.

January 6 and right on schedule, beach restoration is underway at The Royal Mayan. Project engineers ordered the closure of the beach in front of The Royal Mayan, The Royal Caribbean and The Royal Islander yesterday so that pipes and heavy machinery could be moved into place. We have just been informed that sand is now being pumped on to the beach at The Royal Mayan.
In other Royal Resorts beach news, the palapas at The Royal Sands have now been reinstalled.
Finally, representatives of the Beach Restoration Trust, the Secretary of Tourism for Mexico Rodolfo Elizondo, the Quintana Roo State Governor Felix Gonzalez Canto and the Mayor of Cancun Gregorio Sánchez met yesterday to discuss project progress, funding and future monitoring/maintenance. After some confusion over the New Year regarding a payment due from Cancún City Council, they announced that an agreement had been reached and that beach restoration will continue as planned. Over 60 percent of the Cancún shoreline has already been restored and the project is slated for completion in February.
We will be posting further websites as work progresses at the three Royal Resorts.

Phase II Beach of The Royal Sands
View from deck of The Royal Sands Phase II
Phase II Beach of The Royal Sands
Pipe in front of The Royal Sands Phase l
Beach Restoration in The Royal Sands Phase l

Late yesterday, beach project engineers and government officials informed us that the beach in front of Phase II at The Royal Sands will reopen on December 23, not December 21 as we were originally told. It will take several more days for the beach in front of Phase I to reopen due to the continued presence of the dredging pipeline and the passage of heavy vehicles. In the interests of safety, project coordinators stipulate that the stretch of shoreline where work is underway must always be cordoned off. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience that this may cause.

The latest news from Cancun on the Beach Restoration project is that the dredgers have now reached the  stretch of shoreline where the ME and Park Royal hotels are located. The dredgers are working round the clock and can be seen during the day heading  towards Cozumel and the sand bank located off the north coast of the island which was selected to provide the rest of the sand required to complete the project.

The handling and progress of the beach project is being carefully monitored by the Mexican Environmental Agency (Profepa) and a host of conservation groups. A Profepa spokesman said today that the installation of geo textile nets in the Punta Nizuc area to prevent water-borne sediments from damaging the coral reefs is now urgent as restoration work continues to advance towards the south.

In other news, construction continues on the concrete wall between Punta Cancún and the Golondrinas islet which will help protect Cancún’s restored beaches.

On a recent inspection trip, environmental experts from Mexico, Argentina and France mentioned the global interest that the Cancun Beach Restoration project is generating and commented that it could be a model for Mediterranean countries, which are also suffering the effects of coastal erosion, to follow.

Stay posted, we hope to have more news on the beach project and the timeline for Royal Resorts soon.

Beach restoration is underway again in Cancun after a delay caused by the recent bad weather that affected the area on November 5-7. Faced with the prospect of high winds and stormy seas, the project coordinators decided to move the dredger Kaishuu to the safety of a Gulf coast port. It set sail for the Mexican Caribbean as soon as conditions improved and resumed work last week. Sand is currently being dredged from La Ollita sandbank near Isla Mujeres and pumped on to Chac Mool beach in the vicinity of Plaza Forum.

A second and larger dredger called the Terranova arrived on Saturday from Dubai and has also begun work, increasing the total dredging capacity up to 80,000 cubic meters per day.
A spokesman for SEMARNAT, the Mexican Environmental Agency, also commented that dredging could begin on the Punta Norte sandbank near Cozumel this week, despite the last-minute efforts of an island conservation group to prevent it by taking legal action. The group is concerned about the effect that dredging will have on marine life, particularly conch. During its larval stage, conch buries itself in the sand to hide from predators.

The Beach Restoration project was approved by SEMARNAT in the summer after years of studies by oceanographers, marine biologists and coastal erosion specialists and measures were included to minimize the impact on marine ecosystems. Moreover, the Cozumel sandbank and La Ollita have a collective volume of 42.5 million cubic meters of sand but only 6.5 million cubic meters will be dredged and experts are confident that sand will be replenished by natural marine sedimentation processes.
Environmental inspectors are carefully monitoring every step of the restoration process from dredging and pumping to the evolution of the beach profile to ensure that the project is fulfilling the conditions stipulated by the Environmental Agency.
Construction of the coastal barrier in the Punta Cancun area is also slated to start this week. The 350-meter-long breakwater will consist of concrete blocks measuring between 60 and 90 centimeters which will be shipped in over land once work is completed on this stretch of the beach.
Project engineers estimate that it will take about nine days for work to finish on the first stretch of sand in the Punta Cancun area and after that the dredgers will move along the shoreline, restoring the beaches south towards Punta Nizuc in the weeks to come. The Beach Restoration Committee is expected to meet tomorrow to discuss progress and as soon as we have more information and a timeline for when work will be taking place on the beaches in front of the Royal Resorts, we will post further updates.

Here is the latest information on the upcoming beach project soon to take place in Cancun, Playa del Carmen and Cozumel. In Cancun, the project will restore 12.27 kilometers of shoreline between Punta Cancun and Punta Nizuc and is due to begin on September 1. In a change from the 2006 project, this time it appears that pumping will begin at Punta Cancun and the dredging company will work from north to south. The sand will be dredged from sandbanks at La Ollita between Isla Mujeres and Contoy and from the area of Punta Norte in Cozumel and will be pumped on to the beaches and leveled. Some of the sand will be reserved for areas that are currently submerged in order to reduce the slope of the beach and reduce future erosion.

The project also calls for the construction of a concrete barrier to protect the beaches from erosion. Located between the coast and Islote Golondrinas, a tiny islet off Punta Cancun, the breakwater will be approximately 304 meters long and will weigh around 16,245 tons.

The Cancun component of the project will cost $650 million pesos and includes inspections and maintenance for ten years. In contrast, officials now acknowledge that the 2006 Cancun beach initiative failed due to inadequate monitoring and erosion studies after dredging took place.

In other news, when asked about the project and the fact that it is taking place during sea turtle season, Graciela Saldana, Director of Ecology for Cancun and Coordinator of the annual Cancun Turtle Conservation campaign, said that pumping should take place in daylight hours to minimize the impact on the sea turtles that come ashore at night to nest on area beaches.

As more details about this important project are released by the authorities we will do our best to keep you informed by publishing updates in Royal Resorts News.

Source: Semarnat, Noticaribe