McFaddin National Wildlife Refuge Restoration Project Wins ASBPA Best Restored Beaches Award

HDR’s McFaddin National Wildlife Refuge Beach and Dune Ridge Restoration Project won the 2025 Best Restored Beach Award from the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association.  

The Best Restored Beaches program annually honors projects that increase a shoreline’s resiliency, mitigate storm damage and flooding and naturally allow the beach to adjust to short-term sea level rise.

This is the fourth consecutive year an HDR project has been honored with an ASBPA award, following recognition of the Dollar Bay Marsh Restoration Project in 2024, the Lake Pontchartrain Shoreline Protection Project in 2023 and the Galveston Island State Park Marsh Restoration and Protection Project in 2022.  

The project was initiated due to decades of erosion that reshaped the coastline of the McFaddin National Wildlife Refuge, leaving much of the beach composed of clay rather than natural sand. This transformation accelerated shoreline loss, hindered storm recovery and increased saltwater intrusion into Texas’s largest contiguous estuarine marsh. “This saltwater would then kill off freshwater vegetation, which further exacerbated the erosion inside the marsh,” said HDR Coastal Lead Philip Blackmar, P.E.

To address these impacts, the Texas General Land Office (GLO) partnered with HDR to design and implement a large-scale beach nourishment project for over 17 miles of shoreline (including a three-mile pilot project completed in 2017). The restoration involved placing approximately 3,200,000 cubic yards of hydraulically dredged sand to rebuild the beach and dune system, reinforcing natural coastal defenses and protecting the marsh ecosystem.

The effort required overcoming significant design and construction hurdles, including modifying a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permit to expand the available sand borrow area and streamline archaeological screening and monitoring requirements. These adjustments enabled more efficient construction and allowed funding to be maximized for restoration efforts.

With a commitment to at least five years of monitoring, the Texas GLO is taking proactive steps to measure project success and refine future coastal restoration strategies.

“This area of the coastline was at a critical moment for action,” Blackmar said. “The construction of this beach, paired with other projects local stakeholders are completing, will protect this marsh, its ecological and recreational value, and improve the resiliency of this special part of the coast.”