Jennette’s Pier will be a family-oriented educational and recreational fishing pier.  It will feature a 1,000 foot long fishing pier, a 16,000 square foot pier house and public bath house.  The pier house will have a tackle shop, and educational classroom and large multi-purpose room on the 2nd floor.  The upper floor will accommodate large meetings, school groups, conferences, dinners and receptions.

Three wind turbines located on the pier will help power the facility.  Solar panels, geothermal heating and cooling and gray water reuse plumbing system are also among the sustainable green building components featured at the facility.

Jennette’s Pier will educate visitors about the oceans, and it will inspire appreciation and conservation of North Carolina’s aquatic environments.  The pier will also be a state of the art recreational fishing facility.

The pier and pier house are designed to be LEED certified at the level of Gold.  The LEED certification process is a national ranking system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council for qualifying  the level of sustainability and green building methods.

The project is expected to be completed in the Spring of 2011.

There has been quit a bit of progress on the pier site over the last 2 weeks.  The following information is presented from week #7 out of 95 weeks of construction.

On Tuesday, June 26 at 2:30 a.m. the large yellow crane was walked to the west side of NC Hwy. 12 to the wastewater treatment site.  Nags Head Police and Dominion power were on site to assist.  The first test concrete pile was driven successfully at this site.  Later in the week all the piles for the wastewater treatment plant were driven.

On the east side of NC Hwy. 12, the first steel piles were driven for the trestle.  When the trestle is complete, a large crane will travel the length of the pier, while pumping the 80′ piles in to the ocean floor.

Seismic monitoring was conducted at both locations during piling installation.  Seismic results at this time appear to be excellent.  They were found to be well below the threshold.

Meetings were held at the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island for the development of exhibits planning for the new pier.

The photos presented below are representative of the progress that has been made at the pier site.