Marsh grass mostly cleared by tide, some buried in sand

It’s been a week since mounds of marsh grass floated up on Ocean City’s northern beach, and some of it is still coming ashore in other areas.

“It’s a thin line in areas from 20th to 50th Street, but it’s nowhere near to what we had last week,” Ocean City Beach Patrol Lt. Ward Kovacs said. “That stretched 30 feet wide and was 2 feet deep. Now it’s less than a foot wide.”

The high tide on May 31 brought in phragmites, an invasive grass found in wetlands, and washed it up on the beach from 70th Street to the Delaware line. Public Works Director Hal Adkins said that each piece was uniformly cut to the size of a drinking straw. His staff collected it with a 16-foot rake attached to a beach tractor last Wednesday night and Thursday morning.

“It’s the weirdest thing. It looks like a maintenance effort and someone just dumped a lot of it out in the ocean,” Adkins said.

Maryland Coastal Bays Program representatives agreed.

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