Swept away: $500k sand dune built to protect US homes disappears in days
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
> Tarr, noting that a more permanent seawall was not an option because hard structures like these are not allowed on Massachusetts beaches
If the only alternative is to drain state funds dumping tonnes of sand that quickly get swept away, then it's time to change the (by)laws.
Elmer Sands on the UK south coast, was badly affected by erosion. Authorities built a series of elongated rock islands parallel with the shore (visible here [1]). These a) protect the shore from wave damage, and b) encourage the build up of sand behind them, ie between them and the shore. Yes, there is still erosion, but you can better control where it happens and who it affects.
[1] - https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.7920857,-0.6012103,1309m/d...
It’s either aesthetic reasons or maybe they think they’re unnatural and can have consequences for other shorelines.
I wonder if compacted sand that’s pretty hard would work any better?
In a way, they got their money’s worth. Without that sand it’s likely some of those structures would have been damaged.
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/09/26/lessons-from-califor...
The real solution is to accept that anyone who bought in the last half century should have factored in the scientific evidence of climate change and not expect taxpayers to subsidize their failure to plan appropriately.
At this point, the window for easily dealing with the problem is long closed and we should be prepared to write off high-risk areas: give the current residents support for moving somewhere safe and turn the land into a preserve where we can let the local ecosystem recover. A lot of beaches around the world have involved clearing things like mangroves which improve storm resilience, too, so restoration would help everyone further from the shore.
These people just want sympathy and for someone to pay for their mistakes.
Glad someone said this. If you got money to buy properties at Martha Vineyard, then how much do you really believe in climate change? People who build there should just accept the risk that their properties will be destroyed with little notice.
That said, it's a waste of time, money and resources.
That's only one problem... The bigger problem is something you hit at, which is mass ignorance of complex topics that end up getting turned in to political sound bites. At least 30 years ago, and probably longer you could pick up books on bathymetry and arenology that described the physics of the situation and really gave dire warnings. Without adding things like rising sea level, the moment you start building near the beach bad things start happening quickly. Tall building interrupt wind currents, these wind currents change the shape and angle of the beach. Changing the shape of the beach changes the how waves scour the sand off the beach and leads to rapid erosion. This leads to people building sea walls, which just moves the feedback loop out a bit. What typically happens without constant replenishment is the ocean will continue to get deeper directly up to the seawall (losing your prime tourist attraction) until the seawall falls over.
A seawall is how you turn a million dollar problem in to a billion dollar one.
At the end of the day human ambitions and the ocean are not really compatible. We like to think we can tame anything and exploit its resources safely and cheaply. To use a bad analogy, it's like seeing a beautiful unicorn and capturing it because you love the way it looks. But after you capture it, its bright white coat grows dull and grey. It's horn falls off. It gets tons of medical issues requiring more and more expensive treatment. Suddenly everyone is claiming it's a ripoff and you never had a unicorn in the first place.
It's mostly not even climate change. The reality is that without a great deal of very expensive intervention from humans, sand coastlines are constantly shifting and changing. Building long term structures in these places has ALWAYS been folly.
The worst part is it's not even irrational because the rest of the country will fund the billions of dollars for state and federal projects to shore up these properties indefinitely.
Let me amend that: it’s not just climate change but climate change is like a catalyst for the existing problem. Higher sea level, greater storm intensity and frequency, and other ecological impacts (e.g. native vegetation might not control erosion as well due to changing conditions or invasive pests) all mean we get the harder versions of the problem and have deal with more crises at a time.
In geological terms, AGW aside, the earth was still very much within the Late Cenozoic Ice Age and has been for 34 million years.
In glaciation terms the earth was swinging out of an inter glaciation period and due to return to glaciation and decreasing global tempretures and increasing ice coverage.
Thanks to human activity increasing the insulation attributes of the atmosphere mean tempretures are increasing and global mean tempretures will increase past what we (as a human species) have experienced in our brief time on the planet.
> far from peak temperatures that we know have happened before.
It's true - we're a long way from living on the surface of a near molten ball of rock with no breathable atmosphere, as the earth once was.
Hate to break it to you, but humans are not stromatolites.
Humans have been about for two million years and have evolved to live in recent climatic conditions and to thrive in the extremely relatively stable Holocene.
> We are coming out of an ice age
On what evidence?
By the record we are in an ice age (do see and read my prior link) and not only were we expected to stay in that ice age but were expected to return to increased glaciation (ie decreasing tempretures).
The only reason we are coming out of an ice age is due to human activity increasing the bulk insulation properties of the atmosphere.
> I'm not claiming to be an expert on this
I've spent four decades in geophysical exploration developing instruments and software for mapping earths energy and mineral resources for extraction.
I'm also not claiming to be an expert but I have some exposure to continent and global scale modelling of gravity, radiometrics, magnetic fields, tidal movements, drift, etc.
>The only reason we are coming out of an ice age is due to human activity increasing the bulk insulation properties of the atmosphere.
The climate is naturally cyclical, as explained in my reference above and many other academic sources. Again I'm not suggesting there is no human impact but that this may be difficult to isolate, no matter how confident various researchers claim to be in their models. We humans have lived through an ice age only 20k years ago and that ice age has been ending ever since, and not because of us. As an armchair geologist you should know about that as well as the Little Ice Age much more recent than that. This looks interesting: https://www.history.com/news/ice-age-human-survival
Similarly, forest fires are always a risk but the fires are bigger, more frequent, and hotter when climate change had been drying out previously wet regions. That means society needs to plan for huge increases in response capacity in much larger regions than previously was the case, so again while it’s technically possible for there to be a fire anywhere those are very different situations from the prospective of everyone on defense.
Think of it like the way armies had to change going from flintlocks to automatic weapons, only we’re doing it much faster and are going to have to make hard sacrifices.
But then a hurricane moves in and levels everything to the ground, and the real estate agents neglect to mention that this will happen on a regular basis.
I think the solution will end up involving some changes to federal disaster aid: FEMA will give you relocation assistance if you sell your house to BLM to become part of the coastal buffer reserve.
So they took on a massive project to plant marram grass all along the lakeshore. This takes several years to mature, however once it does the roots grow deep and the sand stays in place for a much longer period of time.
I am not sure what this community can do now, it feels a little too late. Maybe build a temporary sea wall, plant grass to hold the new sand, then remove the sea wall?
Massachusetts literally gives a guide for this shit but these idiots are just DUMP MORE SAND THIS TIME IT'LL WORK!
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/landscaping-a-coastal-beac...
But it’s the last sentence in the story that makes me boil over:
“Now, the homeowners have asked the state to step in and provide assistance.”
The assistance they could benefit from most is not financial but a short educational course on basic construction science. Sand is not a great building material. It even mentions that in the bible (Matthew 7:24-27).
* I live in the state but no where near the water. So I'm sure my taxes will be paying for this.
Then you get rid of the houses....
The shape of the shore is an equation. In it you have have a massive pool of energy that is the water and its currents. You have a second smaller, yet still massive in human terms, pool of energy in the wind. Then you have the slope of the land from a few miles on shore to many (maybe even hundreds of miles) offshore. This is the lever of the machine. It weighs billions of tons and is miles long. What exactly does permanent mean when you stick something between an anvil and hammer that grinds down mountains. And in specific, you stick it where it becomes the focal point for that energy?
Physics doesn't care about the dumb economic/political decisions you made in the past. Pushing it 10 years just creates 10 more years of damage to yourself and others and burns money the entire time.
You're acting like you can just science/money your way out of a problem that has grown massively over the last 70 years, but we no longer can. The bill is due with interest. Yea, you can roll over the debt if you want, but the house of cards falls down eventually.
1. Deregulate / reregulate to where residents are allowed to build a seawall instead of sacrificial dunes.
2. Bring in the Army Corp of Engineers to help with design, planning, and evaluation.
Things which don't make sense to me:
1. Blocking people from doing the work.
2. Funding the actual construction with state or federal dollars.
This is not an isolated problem. The Army Corp of Engineers should have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to plan this well. Assisting in projects like this is how you develop that skill set.
* Breakwaters, to equalize the water levels and reduce the waves
* A few meters inland, some kind of wall (firmer than sand) which doesn't wash away, so a bigger wave doesn't impact homes
* Perhaps some kind of reinforcement underneath the sand
It might reduce littoral drift a little bit, but as I understand, this would be done the length of a rather long coastline, so that's not really an issue.
I have very mixed feelings about just dumping tons of sand into the ocean each year. That's going to have its own impacts.
Just dumping sand on the beach is positively cheap compared to the hundreds of millions you're asking for. Also, building a wall near the ocean is possibly the worst idea you could ever do. Please research the interaction between air, water, and sand to learn this is how you make a massive hole that swallows everything. The same is true with breakwaters. Constant refurbishment is needed, and it changes sand flows that affect other people.
This seems like the sort of problem we ought to learn to solve. That's why I'd like us to try things, and I'm happy to have a little bit of my tax dollars involved. This problem will only be more and more common.
Of course you'll want to balance that out with books that just talk about the general challenges and successes, in which I'd recommend just looking at books.google.com on writings by the US Army Corp of Engineers. They talk about practical mitigations for different types of erosion.
Most success stories are going to be based on things like using plants/growth to trap and build sand, which typically means lowering human access to the beach and ensuring tall things that interrupt wind flow are not near the beach. For example mangroves in climates that allow them to grow.
There are also plenty of examples poing out by the C of E on things that cannot be solved. If you built a city near a portion of the beach that was eroding long before humankind appeared in to the picture, all you can do is slow that erosion and at great expense. The ocean is far more powerful than you can imagine.
If people are actually living in the at-risk properties as their primary residence, I'd support spending taxpayer dollars to help them move.
There used to be a dike built in 1856 but it eroded away and in the 90s when I was young the broken sections were replaced with just big rocks[0]. It works quite fine, I believe they wouldn't count as a "hard structure" which is forbidden in this case, and they don't wash away like sand. Beaches form, naturally or with wave breakers, at the foot of the dike like they did before.
But I really don't understand why individual homeowners would be expected to conduct public works themselves like building dikes.
[0]https://as2.ftcdn.net/v2/jpg/01/78/00/19/1000_F_178001923_Pw...
In the same area I'm talking about, people died in flooding during cyclone Xynthia, in 2010. It wasn't because of a particular weakness in the seawall, it was found that these homes should never have been built in the first place.
But they had been built legally, with permits obtained from the town, so 700 of these homes were bought (by the state, not sure exactly which levels the funds came from but France is a unitary state so it doesn't matter much) and demolished. And the mayor who granted the obviously bogus permits was sentenced to prison for the 29 deaths he caused.
This will not happen. Houses/businesses near beaches tend to be of higher value and owned by the more politically connected. Any political talk of "We're not going to insure it and we'll let it fall in the ocean" means new people getting elected next election.
It's also worse than that in the US. We're permitting and allowing things that will fail, and have no means of funding those costs of buyout or replacement in the future. As long as people remain ignorant and keep voting themselves largess the cost of the problem will continue to grow.
Like, so small an amount that you probably shouldn’t be allowed to play the game.
Part of why you have table stakes is to keep small players out of the game, and the ocean is maybe the biggest, most powerful player in the largest game on earth. (Metaphorically speaking, of course.)
It's so enormous that we don't know for sure what's inside it. It's very hot in there, and radioactive, and generally hostile to life as we know it, but we've barely scratched the surface, we haven't really tunnelled much deeper into the rock than the thin layer of moisture you're making a big deal about, which is essentially nothing - a few kilometers. The rock is like twelve thousand kilometres across.
Water always wins.
1. They spend something like 1.5% of their GDP so they can double the size of their country. This works ok for small countries, but not large ones (think more of city protection for larger places).
2. This will eventually get them sued in international court when one of their projects affects surrounding countries. The ocean is filled with butterfly effects.
2. Unless the water is represented by international court, it still doesn't count as a win for water.
1. If a bully shows up and tries to beat you up, so you hit him in the face. You won, right? But what if we comes back tomorrow and tries again. What if he never stops coming back every single day forever. You have not won. At best you are in a stalemate in which you have to keep up the fight pouring massive amounts of money and effort into your game otherwise catastrophic outcomes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_flood_of_1953)
2. If in that fight you shift the burden of the fight on to your neighbor, you're just an asshole, not a winner. And you're still caught in the loop of point 1.
That's bizarre. Do you really think the Dutch will at some point get sued because of the dikes they have built to keep out the water? Maybe somebody should warn them, I can assure you that nobody in the Netherlands has ever considered that possibility ..
The town in question (Salisbury, MA) is built on a narrow strip of land between a marsh and the ocean. Mostly between 2 and 5 houses wide. Doesn't seem like you need a geology PhD to determine you're going to have some erosion problems here.
As best I could determine, the beach replenishment in question was from access points 5 - 11, which covers 1.6 miles and about 150 homes. If I'm right on that, they put down enough sand to extend the beach 3-7 feet[0]. So the first thing to note is that this was a very small beach replenishment project. The senator is probably right that they should go bigger next time.
The cost per home for that would have come out to about $3333.33. Honestly, even if you triple it and do it every year, I don't find that to be an unreasonable expense to impose on owners of $1-5 million houses built on a sand dune. These guys need to quit whining and raise their _local_ taxes the relatively modest amount necessary to preserve their town. Something like $5k/year for beachfront and $1k/year for the rest would get the job done.
[0] This is assuming a constant slope to the beach. The low end is extending at 3 feet above sea level, the high end is extending at 6 feet above sea level.
But as many have already noted, the sea erodes all coastlines. However, what the sea takes away at one time, it also brings back in another time. When my father was in his teens, the water's edge for a small residential site was over a mile away. By the time I was in my teens, that distance had been reduced to 30 metres. By the time I was in my late twenties and early thirties, the water's edge was now at half a kilometre further out. Since then (I'm in the mid 60's) that beach has has grown and receded a couple more times.
Moral of the story, build only where there is relatively constant conditions.
So instead of a beachfront house, you now have no beach and a big 'rocky' ocean front that is dangerous for people to use and must 100% keep off of.
The interests of the wealthy. When rich people make mistakes, they rarely suffer the consequences.
That is why they can arrogantly build housing along beaches without a thought to the outcome.
I on the other hand am forced to use my limited resources paying for their mistakes - whether they build homes on the beach or overinvest in commercial real estate.
Depending on your definition of long term, the ocean always wins. Sea walls destroy the beach and environment. We have to decide what we're saving here, you can't save both.
Either that, or the sand dune project was a result of their own gross incompetence
From here[1] (which I was able to find in 1 min)
"Both the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the US National Climate Assessment conclude that ice loss was the largest contributor to sea-level rise during the past few decades, and will contribute to rising sea levels for the century to come."
[1]https://sealevel.nasa.gov/understanding-sea-level/overview/
>About half of the measured global sea level rise on Earth is from warming waters and thermal expansion.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/learn/project/how-warming-water...
Being responsible for 50% looks to me like a leading cause unless there are only two then it's one of the two leading causes.
> Republican state senator Bruce Tarr was working to secure $1.5m in state funding to replenish the sand.
...so if $500k of sand was washed away in 3 days, how long will $1.5m worth of sand last?
> Tarr, noting that a more permanent seawall was not an option because hard structures like these are not allowed on Massachusetts beaches, said: “We’re managing a natural resource that protects a lot of interests.”
Interesting. Is Tarr a pro-regulation / pro-environmental-protection Republican?
And what would be the prospects for a hard structure, anyway? My impression is that hard reality for many parts of the U.S. Atlantic coastline is "With unlimited money, you can somewhat delay the inevitable".
It's not particularly surprising, I don't think?