Assateague Island

ASSATEAGUE ISLAND -- Ocean currents have brought some sand back to the fragile northern tip of the 37-mile-long barrier island, a section that was swept clear of sand by two devastating winter storms.With the tourist season that will bring 2.5 million visitors soon to begin, National Park Service officials say they're encouraged by the condition of the 1.5-mile strip of beach south of the Ocean City inlet."We have seen some improvement during the last few weeks," Carl S. Zimmerman, chief of resource management at the national seashore, said.

To show students that doing well can bring them recognition, the Citizens Advisory Committee of Quarterfield Elementary School has asked The Sun to help publicize its Student of the Week honor. Winners of the honor must write about themselves.This week's winner is Katherine Morris."I am in the 5th grade at Quarterfield Elementary School. I live in Severn. After school I like to roller blade or ride my bike outside. My favorite vacation spot is Assateague Island. I like when the waves carry me to shore on my boogie board.

THE IMMEDIATE remedy may be no more than a Band-Aid, but the repair of a badly eroded strip of Assateague Island is a true emergency.The $4 million project is needed to prevent the unique barrier island from splitting into several islets through the action of ocean storms and tidal erosion.The National Park Service, which manages the national seashore, wants to dump 350,000 cubic yards of sand on a 1.5-mile stretch that was badly damaged by recent heavy storms. It wants the Army Corps of Engineers to pay for most of the work, and to approve the project as economically and environmentally sound.

G. Howard Gillelan, outdoor writer, sportsman and conservationist who was instrumental in the creation of Assateague Island National Seashore, died of an infection Feb. 20 at his Annapolis residence. He was 81.As a journalist-photographer, Mr. Gillelan wrote hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles and 11 books, many illustrated with photographs he took, including his most recently published book, "Gunning for Sea Ducks."He also co-founded Eastern Bowhunter magazine, which later became Bowhunting, the leading national publication devoted to the subject.

ASSATEAGUE ISLAND -- The National Park Service, worried that the next storm to hit the Eastern Shore might cut this fragile barrier island in two, wants to spend millions of dollars to dump tons of sand onto a weakened strip of undeveloped beach.The project -- which officials describe as a emergency repair of damage caused by two recent northeasters -- would cost taxpayers about $4 million. That is in addition to $68 million in beach-building proposals that had been announced before the storms.

ASSATEAGUE ISLAND -- From the air, they look like tiny black doughnuts that someone has sprinkled over a beach of brown sugar.On the sand at Assateague Island, however, they are simply trash, a hundred or more old tires. They were washed ashore by the back-to-back northeasters that swept the 38-mile-long barrier island during late January and early February.They are the latest in a plague of old tires that storms continue to break loose from artificial fishing reefs that Ocean City officials sank a few miles offshore more than 20 years ago."

CEDAR ISLAND, Va. -- The bedraggled raccoon clung to the bottom of a pole, aslosh in the frigid Atlantic surf. It was too weak to run from us or to climb up to the once-fine beach home where it had been living.The recent twin northeasters had turned the raccoon's world upside down and written yet another chapter in the intriguing saga of Cedar Island, Va., several miles south of Chincoteague.The animal was clearly dying. The house, now moving smartly out to sea along with others nearby as the shore erodes from beneath it, will go in the next storm or two. Four others here went in the latest northeasters.

IT RAINED the other day; now every Maryland map is obsolete. The old ones say "Assateague Island," but Assateague has become a plural place. Mother Nature, in a surgical mood, performed a bisection.This new geography raises questions. When the maps are redrawn, how should printers label our barrier reef? North A. and South A.? (Or Middle, considering the separate stretch from Ocean City on up was part of Assateague, too, before the oceanic irruption of 1933?) Naw. How dull. The tourism people would nix that.

OCEAN CITY - Assateague Island, sand-starved by Ocean City's jetties and slammed hard by a pair of back-to-back northeasters, has been gravely damaged and stands in urgent need of restoration, say the island's government stewards.Storm waters washed over a section of the island's northern end, and a portion is still submerged, said Maryland Department of Natural Resources Secretary John R. Griffin, after state and federal officials surveyed the island by air yesterday. "It's just absolutely flat.

OCEAN CITY -- Like an unwelcomed guest, the slow-moving Great Northeaster of 1998 ended its two-day visit to Maryland yesterday, leaving flooded streets, waterlogged homes and eroded beaches in its wake.Strong winds and high tides continued to smash Ocean City and the Delaware Coast yesterday, forcing evacuations from some resorts, closing roads, shaking mobile homes from their foundations and deepening the channel in Assateague Island that was formed by the storm."This is the worst I've ever seen it," said Bill Rodrigues of Cape Isle of Wight near Ocean City, as he shielded his face from the rain and pulled himself through thigh-high water in hip waders, in a community where most neighbors had evacuated.