Fort Pierce Inlet

St. Lucie County is the agency responsible for dredging and sand bypassing at the Fort Pierce Inlet, and with that for carrying out the state's inlet management plan, while the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers maintains the federal channel.

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection says so in the final order that adopted the Ft. Pierce Inlet Management Plan in May 2022, and the same plan describes St. Lucie County and the Corps as the entities that have dredged the inlet and so carry the duty to offset its beach erosion (DEP Ft. Pierce Inlet Management Plan, final order and statutory responsibilities). County actions that carry out the plan remain subject to DEP review, which can authorize or deny them through its permitting process.

Inside county government, the work sits with the Port, Inlet & Beaches Department, whose mission statement includes protecting the county's 21 miles of Atlantic shoreline through state and federal partnerships (St. Lucie County Port, Inlet & Beaches Department). The county's shore protection page names the St. Lucie County Erosion District as the Corps' local partner (St. Lucie County, Fort Pierce Shore Protection Project).

A local inlet district opened the Fort Pierce cut in 1921 to replace a natural inlet to the north that had closed; the district and its first jetties are covered in the guide to Fort Pierce Inlet State Park.

That earlier opening, the Indian River Inlet, lay 2.7 miles north of today's Fort Pierce cut, appears on Spanish surveys dating to 1605, and closed sometime in the early 1900s, leaving fishing boats and local commerce without access to the ocean (DEP inlet plan, History of Ft. Pierce Inlet). Tidal currents scoured the new cut to 12 feet, and northeast waves cut badly into the south bank.

The district armored the banks with coquina revetments and finished its dredging in August 1929 with an ocean channel 3,200 feet long, 240 feet wide and 25 feet deep, continuing across the Indian River to a turning basin at the Fort Pierce port terminal (DEP inlet plan, channel and jetty history). The plan records that the harbor officially opened to commerce on February 22, 1930. Today the inlet links the Atlantic with the Indian River Lagoon and separates Fort Pierce Inlet State Park on the north side from Fort Pierce Beach on the south side, with Hutchinson Island running 21 miles south and Orchid Island 29 miles north to the Sebastian Inlet.

Shoaling began soon after the Fort Pierce harbor opened, and Congress paid for maintenance dredging in 1931 and 1933, two years before a 1935 Rivers and Harbors Act placed the channels, jetties and revetments under federal responsibility.

For the Fort Pierce Inlet, the DEP plan lists $20,000 under the Deficiency Act of March 4, 1931 and $30,000 more under the War Department Appropriation Act of March 4, 1933 (DEP inlet plan, federal project history). Congress authorized a channel and harbor improvement in 1988. Built between June 1995 and August 1996, it produced an entrance channel 1.8 miles long, 30 feet deep and 400 feet wide and an interior channel 1.9 miles long, 28 feet deep and 250 feet wide.

In 1997 a spur groin 200 feet long was added to the Fort Pierce south jetty, 450 feet west of its seaward end, to slow sand moving north off the beach and back into the inlet (DEP inlet plan, 1997 spur groin).

The Fort Pierce Inlet jetties trap sand moving south along the coast, so the shore north of the inlet built out while the beach to the south lost ground.

The DEP plan records that between 1930 and 1957 the shoreline receded up to 450 feet at its worst point, about 1,200 feet south of the Fort Pierce Inlet (DEP inlet plan, shoreline change after opening).

The DEP plan traces the response through a chain of special districts and studies (DEP inlet plan, beach erosion history). The Legislature organized the Ft. Pierce Beach Erosion District in 1949 for northern Hutchinson Island down to the Martin County line. After the March 1962 northeaster, which the plan calls the worst storm of the 20th century in the area, Congress authorized the Ft. Pierce Federal Shore Protection Project in 1965 for 1.3 miles of beach south of the inlet, between DEP monuments R34 and R41.

A 1982 Corps Section 111 study concluded that 60 percent of the shoreline erosion along those 1.3 miles came from maintenance dredging of the inlet and construction of its jetties (DEP inlet plan, Section 111 study). A 2016 sand tracer study found that sand on the beach north of the inlet moved south and through the north jetty into the inlet, while none of the tracer sand on the south beach moved back north into the inlet. DEP lists the 2.3 miles from R34 to R46 as critically eroded.

Florida law directs that beach-quality sand dredged from an inlet such as Fort Pierce go onto the neighboring eroding beaches, and that the yearly amount placed match the natural net longshore transport.

For the Fort Pierce Inlet and every other improved inlet, section 161.142 makes both points a duty of the Department of Environmental Protection, with an exception allowing sand placed elsewhere only if an equivalent quality and quantity from an alternate source reaches the eroding beach (section 161.142, Florida Statutes). The same section exempts listed ports from those two subsections but requires them to show reasonable effort to put beach-quality sand from dredging on adjacent eroding beaches.

Section 161.143 defines inlet management projects as sand bypassing, infrastructure to help bypassing, changes to channel dredging, jetty redesign and repair, disposal of spoil material, and inlet management plans, and it requires the department to keep an annual report on its website on how far each inlet project has balanced the sediment budget (section 161.143, Florida Statutes). DEP's first Fort Pierce plan, adopted May 30, 1997, set a bypass objective of 130,000 cubic yards a year after a 1996 study found a net southerly drift of 106,600 cubic yards a year (DEP inlet plan, adopted plan of 1997).

On an average annual basis, the May 2022 DEP plan calls for an initial 140,000 cubic yards of sand a year moved past the Fort Pierce Inlet to the south, placed from the south jetty near monument R34 to R41.

The Fort Pierce plan's adopted strategies also call for beach and nearshore surveys from monument R-1 to R-60 plus periodic surveys of the channel and the ebb and flood shoals, allow sand from the navigation channel, the authorized impoundment basin, inland sand mines or offshore sources, and ask the county to evaluate ways to bypass sand from the shoreline north of the inlet (DEP inlet plan, adopted strategies). The target may change only after at least four years of new monitoring data show a shift in the sediment budget.

The 2016 permit covers a pilot impoundment basin inside the Fort Pierce Inlet of about 3.1 acres, roughly 180 feet wide and 800 feet long, sited about 500 feet west of where sand passes through the north jetty; the plan reports that construction began in the fall and winter of 2021 (DEP inlet plan, sediment impoundment basin). The plan also notes that the county and the Corps are evaluating a groin field to steady the 1.3 mile beach project, because fill placed there has been eroding faster than the bypass target alone would replace.

The DEP plan's dredging table totals 3,452,600 cubic yards removed from the Fort Pierce Inlet between 1930 and 2021, of which 473,250 cubic yards went onto the beach south of the inlet.

A second table of Fort Pierce beach fill between R34 and R41 totals 6,618,800 cubic yards from offshore or upland sources and 7,092,050 cubic yards once inlet sand is included; it lists 830,000 cubic yards in March 1999, which the plan describes as the third nourishment of the project, using sand from the Capron Shoals four miles southeast of the inlet (DEP inlet plan, Tables 1 and 2). The plan adds that roughly 225,000 cubic yards a year placed south of the inlet from 1996 to 2021 barely held the beach between nourishments.

St. Lucie County's shore protection page says its most recent renourishment south of the inlet, described in the Fort Pierce Inlet State Park guide, ran under a $15.1 million contract awarded Sept. 19, 2025 (St. Lucie County shore protection project overview). The county lists the project's funding as 77.76 percent federal and 22.24 percent non-federal, and says the state typically offsets the non-federal share of construction by 50%.

Last verified: October 22, 2026, against the DEP Ft. Pierce Inlet Management Plan and its sand tables, sections 161.142 and 161.143 of the Florida Statutes and two St. Lucie County port and beach pages.