My dad firmly believes it never rains until he washes his car and remembers in horror my childhood baseball games when, if there was one piece of gum stuck to the bench in the dugout, it was always me who sat in it.

Sarasota County leaders knows the feeling.

Just a few weeks after they finished a huge, $21.5 million project to renourish two miles of Siesta Key’s iconic beaches, Tropical Storm Colin was already bearing down on the brand-spankin’ new sand.

“All of us were holding our breaths going, ‘Oh no, did we just get this done and here we go, we’re going to come out and see if there’s anything left,'” County Commissioner Charles Hines said.

Luckily, just about everything was left along the project that pumped more than 713,000 cubic yards — more than 1 million tons — onto the beach around Turtle Beach Park from just south of Palmer Point Park to the Sanderling Club, county leaders said.

Instead of washing away, the project inevitably helped the once-eroded beach better withstand the storms last week and mitigate some of the flooding along the key, county coastal resources Laird Wreford said. Areas like Caspersen, where erosion has long-plagued the beach area, were the hardest hit during the storm.

“One feature that most people don’t think about is the storm protection it provides,” Wreford said of renourishment. “Instead of adding walls and rock revetments, a widened beach provides tremendous storm protection for all the infrastructure behind it — roads, homes, businesses and beach parks.”

At least a half-dozen sea turtle nests were still marked off around the county celebration, but indications are that some were washed away or damaged during the storms last week, officials said. Mote Marine Laboratory expects to have detailed counts on displaced nests later this week.

Some sand was visibly lost from the project area, but that was largely due to the nature of the project, not the storm, as tides circulate some of the sand from the beach around the near shore, he added.

The renourishment project added between 150 to 200 feet of open beach along the stretch where beachgoers used to have to climb down a 3-foot-tall scarp to get onto a narrow band of sand.

Now the “fat and happy” Turtle Beach is the new hidden gem that just dudn’t get no respeck at all from the rest of the Siesta beaches, Wreford said.

“It’s the Rodney Dangerfield of Siesta, but I bet that changes once people realize what it looks like now,” he added.