Asheville Citizen-Timese February 25, 2008
Battle lines drawn over efforts to stem coastal erosion
By Jordan Schrader
WILMINGTON — Waves stayed as far as 200 feet from Laura and Tom Hearn’s second home on Figure Eight Island a dozen years ago. Erosion changed that. Today, the surf licks at sandbags stacked right out front.
Unless the state eases its ban on hard structures at the beach, they and other island residents will have to remove the bags in May and will not be able to build what they believe will protect their luxurious homes: a metal structure jutting into the ocean.
“Either a couple of good nor’easters or a hurricane, (and) we’re probably going to have 16 houses in the water,” said Laura Hearn, a retiree whose husband is the former president of Wake Forest University.
The Figure Eight Island beach has become one of the nation’s latest battlegrounds over whether nature can — or should — be tamed. Arguments over what to do about coastal erosion are pitting municipal officials, engineers and homeowners trying to save development against environmentalists, coastal scientists and surfers who say barriers only shift erosion to other places.
Among the most vocal opponents of hard structures are Rob Young and Andy Coburn, researchers at Western Carolina University who head up the school’s Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines.
They and more than 40 colleagues signed a letter opposing the kind of barrier Figure Eight wants to build, called a groin.
From their perch in the mountains, they see pressure on policymakers for protection growing with the wealth of coastal residents nationwide, said Coburn, who views that as a dangerous trend.
“You’re basically opening up Pandora’s box for additional problems,” Coburn said. “Before you know it, you have an engineered shoreline.”
Pressure for what critics call “shoreline armoring” will build as global warming causes more vicious storms and a gradual rise in sea levels, according to an Ecology Law Quarterly article co-authored by Meg Caldwell, former chairwoman of the California Coastal Commission, and Stanford Law School graduate Craig Holt Segall.
Around the nation
The winners of these arguments have varied from state to state.
• Sea walls and other structures aimed at keeping beaches from washing away line the coasts of California and New Jersey.
• Florida stepped up its approval of erosion-fighting structures after the hurricanes of 2004 and 2005, said Chad Nelsen of the Surfrider Foundation, which advocates for environmental causes on behalf of surfers.
• States including Oregon, Texas, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine and both North and South Carolina restrict such projects, according to Caldwell’s article. Despite the Maine restriction, Congress last year authorized a breakwater off the coast of Maine, where dozens of homes are threatened.
• The N.C. General Assembly this year will weigh whether to loosen the state ban and allow regulators to consider a groin as a pilot project on Figure Eight, where residents would pay for it, or in another spot.
Tom Campbell, president of Coastal Planning and Engineering, senses some new willingness in Florida and elsewhere to consider the barriers his firm builds, as long as they are used “surgically.”
But overuse has left states generally hostile to them, he said, preferring to replenish their beaches with more and more sand.
Figure Eight has contracted with a Coastal Planning and Engineering engineer, Tom Jarrett, who said a groin perpendicular to the beach at the northern end of the island would keep sand from washing into the inlet and allow the beach to build up again in front of the homes.
The North Carolina legislation passed the state Senate last year, with support from all six Western North Carolina senators, and could be taken up by the House as early as May.
A political committee formed by Figure Eight homeowners has given more than $45,000 to state candidates and the state Democratic Party since 2004, according to campaign filings.
Jarrett, a West Asheville native who lives in Wilmington, said a single, small groin would not cause damage like the large structures placed “helter-skelter” around the country in the past, like at Sandy Hook in New Jersey where 19th-century seawalls and groins helped ocean currents wash away the beach.
Maine’s proposed structure — a jetty spur meant to save dozens of homes from falling into the ocean near the mouth of the Saco River — wouldn’t run afoul of the state ban because of its location offshore, State Geologist Robert Marvinney said.
Like many erosion-control projects, it would be built by the Army Corps of Engineers but would need a state permit. Congress last year authorized up to $26.9 million for it, Corps project manager Richard Heidebrecht said.
A 19th-century jetty has caused the erosion that has destroyed homes in Saco, he said.
“It’s so hard to know what these structures will do in the course of their long lifetimes,” said Joe Kelley, of the University of Maine, who opposes the structure in Saco and signed the North Carolina letter.
Geologic change, he said, is “not in sync with our lifespans, or certainly our political process.”
Battling beach erosion
Structures erected to fight natural erosion:
Breakwater: An offshore structure usually aligned parallel to shore to provide protection from waves.
Bulkhead: A retaining wall whose primary purpose is to prevent backfill from sliding while providing protection against light-to-moderate wave action.
Groin: A structure generally aligned perpendicular to shore for the purpose of directing water movement.
Jetty: A hard structure normally placed adjacent to tidal inlets to minimize sediment within the inlet.
Jetty spur: A relatively short structure extending at an angle from the main jetty that protects a navigation channel.
Revetment: A facing of erosion-resistant material, such as stone, concrete or sandbags, that is built to protect a section of shoreline.
Seawall: A wall — often a massive structure — erected between the land and water to resist wave action, usually along high-value coastal property.
Source: GlobalSecurity.org.
© Copyright 2008, MAsheville Citizen-Times
