The City of Corpus Christi Parks & Recreation Department diligently works to maintain its beaches through Sand and Shoreline Maintenance Practices to better serve the community and visitors.
To accommodate the flow of traffic on beach roads, we maintain at least a 25-foot wide driving lane on all 7.9 miles of Gulf beaches. We must move soft sand off the driving path in accordance with our permit issued by the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE).
We begin by grading our beach driving lanes with motor grader equipment and then distribute the sand along the beaches depending on the area and the time of year in accordance with our USACE permit. This practice is overseen by the USACE and enforced by the General Land Office of Texas. The final step is to distribute water from our 4,000-gallon truck onto the sand to compact it and ensure visitors can drive on the lanes.
To maintain a clean beach, we have several issues to address. First, to remedy the accumulation of trash on the beach, we provide free trash bags to all beach visitors before they enter the beach so that they clean up after themselves and the area — to leave it better than they found it. We also provide over 200 96-gallon trash containers throughout the 7.9 miles of City beach which are emptied daily.
We also address the large amount of seaweed that naturally washes ashore to improve the experience for visitors that is also good for the environment! We leave most of it on the beach until it dies because it provides food for birds, turtles sea life and other wildlife on the beach. Once the seaweed dies, we bury it along the shoreline to build our protective dunes as part of our barrier islands which also help to prevent beach erosion in accordance with our USACE permit.
