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Pool Building For Oceanfront Homes
By Bryan Hull, Co-Owner of Del Val Pools & Spas
There’s been a radical shift in home construction and design along the coastal barrier islands since Hurricane Sandy struck the Jersey shore on October 29, 2012. Land’s present best use lends to increased residential development. From Long Branch to Cape May, older homes and commercial buildings are coming down with larger modern homes taking their place. New homes require a swimming pool for marketability, and the current hottest upgrade for an existing home is to build a pool. When I was younger and playing with friends at the shore, if someone asked where was the closest pool, my mother would respond with, “What do you need a pool for? You’ve got the ocean and the bay?”
Building a swimming pool at the shore is a lot different than building a pool in the center part of the State. Pools at the shore tend to be more intricate, must be integrated into tighter lots, and for the most part are custom designs as a result.
Pools built for homes facing the bay are built on soil that was fill from other construction thrown into the marshes by contractors of the 1950’s and 1960’s as away to expand buildable land. It was a time before the Department of Environmental Protection and the Coastal Area Facility Review Act. In many cases, it’s simply several feet of sand thrown over top of thick organic decay must of us know as “muck” that has incredible suction properties – especially when it comes to a young boy’s expensive sneakers, but that’s another story.
Pools built for ocean front homes face a whole other series of challenges. To begin with, houses right on the ocean are built upon loose sand deposited by changing tides, winds, and storms. There’s no bedrock, no clay, no real geological formations to hold a structure in place. At some point of time, a municipality and a builder decided a plot of sand was just close enough and just far enough to have a home built on it – and that home would be the “ocean front” home. Since that first nail was driven to construct that house, man has been fighting to keep the ocean just close enough and just far enough away to save his home.
With each catastrophic storm - one about every twenty years, efforts are made to rebuild the same coastline and berms, or seawalls, are built to stave off an invading ocean. Many berms after the storms were hastily constructed with storm debris, parts of houses, chunks of road, and washed-out cars covered with sand.
We recently built a custom pool in Wildwood for a homeowner on the ocean. A beautiful eight year old house, access to the back yard, which faced the ocean, proved quite challenging. When we finally got excavation equipment in and started to dig, we hit large broken blocks of concrete which were later determined to be part of a hastily constructed sea wall after the 1962 storm bifurcated many of the islands. In addition, between the backyard and the ocean, nature had carved out a large tidal pool which raised the water table near the house.
Pumps had to be run continuously while we drove twelve-inch diameter, three story, pressure treated pilings into the sand – one piling for every sixteen square feet of pool cut down to just below the surface. Anchored to these pilings were steel reibar runners that formed the base of a cage frame with riebar forming perpendicular cross points every twelve inches. The reibar runners were drilled through the top of the wood pilings and then filled with concrete to create structural grade beams to withstand varying water table or hydrostatic pressures. Hydrostatic relief valves were installed when the pool cage was shot with gunite to form the shell. These valves allow for equalization of water pressure inside and outside the shell as the form cured.
For an inground pool, our shell must be a minimum of eight inches, and twelve inches thick at the base of the keel. We use piping able withstand high pressure, fabricate tight steel cages for every 144 square inches, and build massive grade beams. We overengineer our pools to survive the next Sandy - and there will be another one. How quickly we forget – even while the Army Corps of Engineers is just offshore dredging sand.
For additional information on building pools at the New Jersey shore, visit www.delvalpoolsandspas.com;
To set up an appointment for a no cost evaluation, call
856-629-2999.
