In early February 2018, Two simultaneous projects began dredging sand around the St. Lucie Inlet to help replenish beaches and clear the inlet for boaters. The projects are part of the Bathtub Beach-to-Sailfish Point renourishment project. It is a post-Hurricane Irma project by the Federal Emergency Management Agency costing $1.8 million, FEMA is picking up 87 percent of the cost. Crews will move about 100,000 cubic yards of sand. Besides restoring the beach and dunes, the sand will help protect infrastructure, such as MacArthur Boulevard, from storm surges. Kathy FitzPatrick, Martin County coastal engineer stated “Dredging will help open up the channel, enhancing navigability, and the sand pumped from there to the beach will enable us to open a nourished beach to residents and visitors once again". The work is meant to protect the inlet until a dredge arrives in about a month. The dredge will remove about remove 500,000 cubic yards of sand — enough to cover a football field 9 feet, 3 inches deep — from the inlet and put it in site called a "borrow area" off the coast of the Town of Jupiter Island. In 2019, that sand will be sucked up and spread on beaches from the inlet south to the Martin-Palm Beach county line.