The homemade poster with the skull and crossbones was taken down, but the official sign still stands behind the fencing closing off every beach in Surf City: 

Danger: Unexploded Ordnance Found. Beaches Closed Until Further Notice. Do Not Enter. 

While other Jersey Shore towns are busy sprucing up the beaches for Memorial Day, the residents of Surf City stare wistfully at a brand new, replenished oceanfront that has been closed since March 5, when a beachcomber with a metal detector found a rusty fuse at the surf's edge. 

Since then, cleanup crews for the Army Corps of Engineers have found more than 1,000 unexploded old munitions. They were buried in the 500,000 cubic yards of sand that was sucked up from the ocean floor and sprayed onto the shore in the first phase of the Long Beach Island beach replenishment project. 

More than $2 million has already been spent recovering the old military ordnance, but project leaders warn they cannot guarantee the Surf City beaches will be reopened for the all-important start of the summer season less than three weeks away. 

"We were ahead of schedule and should have been done by now, but then the nor'easter hit. There was a significant movement of sand and more ordnance emerged," said George Follett, a retired Navy bomb expert and corps munitions expert, as he gazed at crews with metal detectors scouring the sand. 

"So we're going back over the entire 8,100-foot stretch of beach, to do it again," this time going into the surf, 150-feet out from the low tide mark, he added. 

The 1.6-mile stretch covers every beach in Surf City and a few of the northern beaches in neighboring Ship Bottom. 

Even when the cleanup is done, Follett said, that does not mean the beach will get a clean bill of health. The equipment used to detect the ordnance is effective down only to about three feet. The amount of dredged sand deposited on the beach is eight feet deep in some places. 

"I am calling this 'phase one' of the cleanup. We're not sure yet what the other phases will be, but we will have to come back as beach erosion progresses," or after any significant storm, Follett said. 

Odds are greatly in favor of the shells being duds, but the minuscule chance that one might detonate is forcing cleanup crews to handle the artifacts cautiously, said Brett Pasapane, a geophysicist leading the actual mapping and digging for Weston Solutions, a Pennsylvania outfit subcontracted by the corps. 

"Normally, we would just blow up the ordnance in place, but here houses are way too close and it would leave metal fragments all over the beach," said Pasapane, whose company has cleaned up decommissioned firing ranges all over the country. 

Instead, the site is first swept with a trailer equipped with four powerful ground-penetrating metal detectors called magnetometers. Once an area is mapped on a computer -- a complex process that must be constantly updated to account for shifting sand -- earth movers dig up suspect sites. 

Some pockets had as many as 60 items packed in together, he said. They are gingerly pulled out by bomb experts and shipped off for storage at Fort Monmouth while other technicians with hand-held metal detectors scan the dug-up sand for smaller fragments. 

The largest items are 4 inches in diameter -- which is the size of the holes in the screen used when the sand was sucked up from the ocean bed -- and about 8 inches long. 

The cleanup cost includes four crews working the beach and security guards posted at the beach entrances 24/7. To date, no one has been arrested attempting to get on the beach, but the warning signs have been stolen repeatedly. 

Surf City residents, for the most part, have been sanguine about the munitions. They note that driving the Garden State Parkway to get to LBI is potentially much more hazardous than the old shells and say it's not as bad as the medical waste that washed up on the Jersey Shore in the 1980s. 

Local real estate agents say fear of the beach has not affected season rentals, which are ahead of last summer, and they predict the ordnance troubles will quickly fade into LBI lore "as long as the beaches open by Memorial Day." 

"Without a good beach summer, we're all in trouble," declared Phil Bruccoliore, who has owned Salty Dog Surf Lessons in Surf City since 2000. "When you've got an island as narrow and as crowded as LBI, the major attraction we have is that you can park your car at the rental and walk to the beach. 

"Without the beach, nobody will come," he said.

It is a beautiful beach, set smack in the middle of an 18-mile barrier island where only three blocks separate bay from sea. The corps has planned beach restoration for the entire coast of the island, at a total project cost of about $70 million. 

Pounded by the ocean, parts of Surf City didn't even have enough beach to support a sand dune until the Army Corps -- which has already restored beaches without incident on the North Jersey coast -- dumped enough sand to build a 200-foot beach. 

The corps started in the middle of LBI because lawsuits and controversy stalled local approvals elsewhere on the island. Homeowners were concerned their expensive ocean views would be blocked by sand dunes and that private beaches would have to open to the public. Surfers feared wave patterns would shift and argued about quality control on the project. 

"Every project the Army Corps of Engineers does ends up with unintended consequences and we warned something like this would happen," said John Weber, spokesman for the Surfrider Foundation, noting that a small amount of ordnance was dredged up during a beach replenishment project in Delaware in 2000. 

"The corps should have taken more precautions." 

Follett admitted "in hindsight, maybe we should have made the filters smaller. We will next time." 

Next time is not good enough for 90-year-old Margaret Helias, who has been walking the beach at Surf City since just after World War I. Sitting on her front step three houses from the beach, she glared at the workers, saying, "I'm going crazy without my daily walk on the beach. 

"They should have left well enough alone," said Helias. "The beach comes and goes. That's the way nature intended. You start messing with things and look what happens." 
 
 

Judy Peet may be reached at (973) 392-5983 or jpeet@starledger.com.