IDA RAVAGES PARTS OF HOLIDAY ISLE: 'The next step is to raise hell,' Jetty East manager says (UPDATED with PHOTOS)

Tropical Storm Ida may have been a joke to most of the Gulf Coast, but it’s not so funny at Jetty East, general manager Jerry Stalnaker says.

“The next step is to raise hell,” Stalnaker told The Log Tuesday morning, “to get back in touch with the governor and the DEP and say ‘what’s going on?’ ”

By 9 a.m. Tuesday, the former Cat-2 hurricane was an ineffective tropical depression centered 25 miles west-northwest of Pensacola, with top winds of barely 35 mph. Most of the Emerald Coast could shrug Ida off, but badly eroded Jetty East wasn’t so lucky, nor were nearby properties such as Holiday Surf and Racquet Club and Destin Pointe.

“This storm, which shouldn’t have done any damage, did quite a bit of damage to us” Jetty East resident J.J. Chambers said. “When the governor visited a while back, he said he would tell his people to get us some sand. They didn’t.”

_______

For more photos from post-Ida Destin, click here.

To read a report from the front lines at Jetty East, click here.

To read more about the pre-storm expectations for Jetty East and Holiday Isle, click here.

To read about Ida's impact on Navarre Beach, click here.

_______

“We took a pretty good hit,” Stalnaker said. “In the parking lot, some big slabs of concrete that had sunk down collapsed, and they pushed out about 40 feet of seawall. The seawall’s still in place, the pilings are still in place, but it did make an opening, so water’s coming in.”

Stalnaker said there’s no damage to Jetty East’s pools, gazebo, tennis courts or wooden walkways, so despite the blow to the seawall, conditions aren’t as bad as they could have been.

City Manager Greg Kisela said the city had been “very, very lucky” outside of Holiday Isle: “Jetty East took it on the chin ... the rest of it looks like we’re OK, but we clearly had some beach erosion.”

Kisela said that before the storm, city staff had used their GPS units to survey the beach so that once the storm ended, they could measure how much they’d lost. He said the Public Services Department would be back at work Tuesday at noon, and would begin assessing damage before the Veteran’s Day holiday Wednesday.

“I don’t see any standing water, but I have seen some debris,” Kisela said.

Jetty East and Destin Pointe are among the Holiday Isle properties that have seen their waterfront steadily erode over the past few years — to the point even a storm that doesn’t strike Destin can generate strong enough waves to do damage.

Okaloosa County has been working to restore Destin’s and Okaloosa Island’s beaches for two years and appears close to obtaining a Department of Environmental Protection permit. The project faces multiple lawsuits, however, from owners who don’t want to participate.

Several Holiday Isle residents proposed recently that when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredges the Destin harbor channel this year, the eroded Holiday Isle properties receive enough sand to make beach restoration unnecessary. Four Okaloosa Island residents threatened to block the permit, leaving the sand shoaling the harbor, unless the DEP guaranteed the sand would not be used on Holiday Isle. The DEP agreed.

The challenge hinged on the state’s Inlet Management Plan, which says sand accumulating in East Pass should be deposited on Okaloosa Island. Stalnaker said, however, that Florida statutes allow for dredged sand to be placed on eroded beaches, so putting it on Holiday Isle wouldn’t violate the law.

Gov. Crist surveyed the damage on Holiday Isle this summer a day after Tropical Storm Claudette made landfall, but Stalnaker said that hasn’t led to any help: “The governor and the (Department of Environmental Protection) are missing in action. We need their help and we need it now.”

Chambers said it was outrageous that past erosion hadn’t been fixed.

“We seem to be something that is the poor second cousin with no attention at all. I am amazed that we are basically gonna be sacrificed here as over six or seven bureaucracies fight over who’s gonna do what.”