Living seawall installed in Sarasota Bay

SARASOTA — An innovative “living seawall” the city hopes could help combat erosion and restore marine life along a depleted area of Sarasota Bay has finally been installed, after years of planning.

The city last week installed a $200,000 living seawall in front of 250 feet of an existing vertical seawall along the edge of Bayfront Park at O’Leary’s Tiki Bar & Grill, with the hope of creating a home for more sea life, regenerating seagrass and hopefully reducing wave action to combat erosion. Instead of a traditional seawall’s flat concrete construction, the living seawall will form a series of underwater structures — with crevices called reef balls — to mimic coral reef to provide new places for creatures to grow and thrive. Without the reef balls, organisms typically experience difficulty attaching to traditional walls and deflected waves could prevent seagrass growth, which is vital to a healthy bay, city Sustainability Manager Stevie Freeman-Montes said, adding that the wall, made of 34 large concrete modules, was paid for by funds the city was awarded in a Deepwater Horizon oil spill settlement.

Freeman-Montes cited "two major benefits: more habitat for fish to hide and grow and reducing wave energy.”

Less turbulent wave energy could mean reduced erosion, environmental experts say.

The City Commission approved the project last year. Locally-based Reef Innovations helped design and install the wall with Reef Ball Foundation, which creates these artificial systems alongside Reef Innovations. Reef Innovations has created breakwaters and artificial reefs all over the world, including dozens of reef sites and docks throughout Sarasota County waters over the past 20 years. The project had been two years in the making in 2017 after the city started work on plans to build a traditional seawall along the edge of O’Leary’s when erosion erased the natural beach there and began threatening trees around the bar and patio.

“In situations like this, where you’ve got human assets at risk, you may have to still put traditional seawalls in behind it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make it beautiful in front of it and make the interface between the land and the sea look more natural and make it visually appealing,” Todd Barber, chairman of the Reef Ball Foundation, told the Herald-Tribune last year.

The groups in 2016 completed a similar project along the city of Palmetto’s Riverside Park West.

The city has enlisted Mote Marine Laboratory to monitor the project for two years to identify what kind of marine life it attracts and how much, along with how it deflects waves that could otherwise undermine the seawalls. Mote has spent the past year studying water chemistry and wave patterns and will spend the forthcoming year monitoring any changes attributed to the new living wall.

“The shoreline of Sarasota Bay and most bays around Florida and many places have lost productive shorelines — we’ve lost mangrove habitat; we’ve lost natural shorelines, basically,” Mote Marine Senior Scientist Jim Culter said. “This is an effort to help make structured shorelines a little more productive to make up for those losses. We have a tremendous amount of seawalls in the Sarasota Bay area and it’s believed that those have contributed overall in the long run to the decline in things like fisheries.”

If Mote’s studies conclude the living seawall works, the city could consider adding similar living elements to other seawalls throughout the area, Freeman-Montes said.

“With sea level rise and climate resiliency and erosion and all those types of issues, I think we need to start thinking of all types of alternatives for shoreline stabilization, so this is one we definitely want to understand how it performs and if we want to replicate it,” Freeman-Montes said.

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