Perfectly acceptable for homeowners to spend their own money to save their houses.
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.”
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.”
* 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.
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.
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.
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).