United States Army Corps of Engineers
government · active attested 1893–2001
Also known as USACE; Corps of Engineers; Baltimore District
The federal engineers who built and kept the Inlet, and whose work is the physical premise of the modern town. They took bids for an Ocean City–Rehoboth waterway in 1893; began the stabilization project in October 1933, barely two months after the water broke through; finished the north jetty on 11 October 1934 and the south on 25 May 1935, counting 39,546.75 tons of stone into it. They dug the West Ocean City harbour in 1936, held a hearing in the Municipal Building in 1937 on a canal south to Chincoteague, and kept the commerce tables that give the inlet its first three years of tonnage and passengers. They were to close the two Assateague breaches after 1962, circulated a draft environmental impact statement for a CERC research pier in 1972, and sat with the Park Service in 1978 to hear their jetties named as the cause of the island's recession. This corpus counts them in more facts than any other federal body.
In the record (1)
1991 · 1991-12-10
The one municipal trace of the Halloween storm is a line in the 10 December status reports: the city engineer had met the Corps about 'the recent beach damage', and Phase I of a two-phase repair-and-renourishment would cost $165,000 out of the maintenance fund
Work session of 10 December 1991, synopsis item 13: "City Manager Dare reported that the City Engineer had met with the Corps of Engineers today regarding the recent beach damage. There will be two phases: one for repair and the second for renourishment. Phase I is expected to cost $165K and the Town's portion would come out of the maintenance fund." Neither the word storm nor a date appears; the item sits between term-limit talk and the day-care study, forty days after the record 7.8-foot tide of 31 October. It qualifies rather than contradicts the measured absence already recorded for November-December 1991: the storm never became an agenda item, but its consequence did, as a maintenance-fund line reported by the city manager. The same session's Planning and Zoning report carries the letter of map revision still "being pursued."
Source · checked 2026-09-10