THE BEACH NOURISHMENT PROJECT IN EL ALAMIEN MARINA, EGYPT, AND ROLE OF HARD STRUCTURES

The El Alamien marina is located in the west of the Nile Delta in Egypt, as a 12 km long flat sandbank along the shore of a lagoon. The coast has been eroded intensively for a long time, under the long-term action of the strong southwest wave which carries sediment moving eastwards along the coast. Three projects had been conducted in 1998-2009 to protect the beach from erosion. 13 groins were built to stabilize the beach of 8.5 km long and 116×10⁴m³ of sand have been nourished to save the beach. However, they did not work well. Then groins and continuous offshore submerged dikes plus internal groins were constructed to stop the loss of sand, and then they succeeded.Some of the domestic nourishment projects in China face similar challenges. We made an introduction to the success management experiences in the El Alamien marina to use the model to combine groins and continuous offshore submerged-dikes and the model to combine groins and double parallel offshore groins at foreshore flow-out to effectively stop sand loss with the dissipation of the offshore wave energy and then stop the littoral drift to protect the nourished beach from erosion. It is also verified that it is possible to construct a broad artificial beach at a steep rocky coast with the support of specific combination of hard structures.