Rising seas and more intense storms are challenging southern New England’s shoreline, coastal homes and infrastructure
By FRANK
CARINI/ecoRI.org News staff
 |
| A rock wall intended to protect this Plum Island home has been heavily damaged by an unrelenting sea. (Rachel Playe/ecoRI News) |
Southern
New England’s coastline — the region’s economic engine — is under siege, and this
relentless enemy is gaining force. It can’t be subdued by 20-foot-high seawalls
or controlled by old-school hay bales. It’s allies include parking lots,
beachfront development and climate change.
Coastal communities here are increasingly experiencing the impacts of an encroaching ocean. Storm waves are eroding beaches and flooding developed areas. Rising sea levels are taking land. The ocean’s power even when it’s seemingly tranquil is unmatched, but when it’s angry our continued disrespect proves costly.
State and local officials are now asking how they can protect people, property and vital infrastructure such as drinking water supplies, utilities and roads from the advancing sea. There are no simple solutions, but there’s also no reason to panic. The sky isn’t falling, but the ocean is creeping in; our coastline is changing, and smart decisions must be made.
“Shoreline changes are the most pressing issue facing Rhode Island,” said Laura Dwyer, the public educator and information coordinator for the state’s Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC). “We’re planning for the worst and hoping for the best. Our coastline is changing very quickly.”
The Rhode Island Shoreline Change Special Area Management Plan (Beach SAMP) was created in the past few years to bring state, federal, municipal, academic and private-sector interests together to create a management plan to help communities adapt to short-term and long-term shoreline change. University of Rhode Island researchers are studying key areas to understand how the coast has changed, what it may look like in the future and what infrastructure is at risk.
Coastal erosion is a major concern for southern New England, largely because the region is often hit by powerful storms. Off the coast of Connecticut, for example, the coastal geology of Long Island Sound is in constant flux — some areas are eroding, others are adding sand — depending on weather.
“Our beaches were created by erosion and are constantly being reshaped by erosion,” said Peter Hanrahan, a certified professional in erosion and sediment control who works for E.J. Prescott Inc. “The coastal real estate we have is going to disappear.”
It already is, and has been for a while. On Thanksgiving Day 2008, a home on Plum Island fell into the sea. A storm about 200 miles off the coast of Massachusetts generated intense, unforgiving waves that pounded the 11-mile-long, half-mile-wide barrier island.
Five years later, eight more Plum Island houses were washed into the ocean, courtesy of Mother Nature. Earlier this month, a section of rock wall designed to protect another island home didn’t. Waves smashed the home’s deck into pieces.
Several years ago the Army Corps of Engineers issued a report noting that erosion along the Plum Island shoreline was claiming an average of 13 feet of sand a year. The report warns that if nothing is done to stop the sea’s encroachment, 26 homes will be lost by 2019. Nine have already been washed away.
The owners, however, can rebuild — despite the fact the federal government opted out funding any improvement and protection of Plum Island beaches three decades ago.
“There’s a cost and risk involved when you keep shoveling against the tide,” said John Torgan, director of ocean and coastal conservation for the Rhode Island chapter of The Nature Conservancy. “You can keep doing that for a while, if you have the money.”
The erosion problem facing Plum Island, and much of the southern New England coastline for that matter, can’t be solved by trucking in more sand, putting down sandbags or, as Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee has suggested, building shoreline property on stilts.
“There are dynamic coastal erosion issues in the Northeast that we aren’t seeing anywhere else, and it’s getting our attention with houses falling into the water,” Hanrahan said. “It’s a big problem and difficult to solve. Solutions that work elsewhere don’t work here.”
Eroding
options
 |
| Dunes are nature’s way of protecting beaches. (Rachel Playe/ecoRI News) |
For
three days this past November, at the Crowne Plaza in Warwick, Hanrahan and a
bevy of government officials, private-sector experts and academics addressed
the issue of erosion. The Northeast
Chapter of the International Erosion Control Association (IECA)
hosted the conference.
All the participants and those who attended left better informed, but without any clear-cut solution to bring back to their office, university or community. That’s because there is no real solution. Erosion happens.
“There are options, but none will last,” said Juliana Barrett, assistant educator with Connecticut Sea Grant. “There’s no guarantee any measure will last a month or 10 years.”
A fictitious tool box is filled with temporary solutions, but there is no proverbial silver bullet that will keep the southern New England shoreline from changing. Human responses to this fact can basically be placed into five categories: build big structures such as seawalls; add more sand; retreat; rethink the problem; do nothing.
Old-school and emerging technologies to control coastal erosion include soil envelopes filled with sand, sculptured and colored concrete walls (popular on the West Coast), helical anchoring, drift fences, geosynthetic tubes filled with sand and other natural materials (they are ugly and hard to hide), marine mattresses (the first one was reportedly used at Logan Airport), artificial reefs (popular in Florida and the Caribbean), and coir logs — a durable biodegradable erosion prevention method made from coconut fiber and often used on Cape Cod.
Land-use controls, such as retreat programs, include the removal of structures or relocating them further inland. Coastal construction setback programs limit structures within a specified distance of the shore. There’s also property buyouts, an unpopular option infrequently used, at least so far.
“There are multiple lines of defense and hybrid solutions,” Hanrahan said. “But these techniques are not always perfect. We’ve been trying to harness nature for a long time." He noted that the Romans built seawalls.
All the participants and those who attended left better informed, but without any clear-cut solution to bring back to their office, university or community. That’s because there is no real solution. Erosion happens.
“There are options, but none will last,” said Juliana Barrett, assistant educator with Connecticut Sea Grant. “There’s no guarantee any measure will last a month or 10 years.”
A fictitious tool box is filled with temporary solutions, but there is no proverbial silver bullet that will keep the southern New England shoreline from changing. Human responses to this fact can basically be placed into five categories: build big structures such as seawalls; add more sand; retreat; rethink the problem; do nothing.
Old-school and emerging technologies to control coastal erosion include soil envelopes filled with sand, sculptured and colored concrete walls (popular on the West Coast), helical anchoring, drift fences, geosynthetic tubes filled with sand and other natural materials (they are ugly and hard to hide), marine mattresses (the first one was reportedly used at Logan Airport), artificial reefs (popular in Florida and the Caribbean), and coir logs — a durable biodegradable erosion prevention method made from coconut fiber and often used on Cape Cod.
Land-use controls, such as retreat programs, include the removal of structures or relocating them further inland. Coastal construction setback programs limit structures within a specified distance of the shore. There’s also property buyouts, an unpopular option infrequently used, at least so far.
“There are multiple lines of defense and hybrid solutions,” Hanrahan said. “But these techniques are not always perfect. We’ve been trying to harness nature for a long time." He noted that the Romans built seawalls.
 |
| This seawall in Scituate, Mass., protects houses from ocean waves, but shoreline structures can create a false sense of security. (Rachel Playe/ecoRI News) |
Now,
many centuries later, it’s well known that structural shoreline protections
such as seawalls, bulkheads, gabions and stone revetments actually promote
beach degradation and adversely impact the environment. These structures block
the natural movement of sand and deflect wave energy back to the beach, thus
scrubbing it away. They also impinge upon the public’s right to access the
shoreline.
But for generations, hard structures such as seawalls were the preferred approach to “control” beach erosion. Often referred to as shoreline armoring, hard structures are intended to be permanent. They have effectively protected some shoreline structures, but often at a cost to surrounding property and habitat.
Shoreline structures create a false sense of security, Barrett said.
Revetments — engineered rock walls — can be overtopped by waves, scouring sand from behind and causing the structure to collapse. Many of the revetments in southern New England were put in prior to regulations prohibiting shoreline structures, and were built haphazardly or too close to the buildings they are intended to protect.
Nearly half of Rhode Island’s 420 miles of coastline is unsuitable for hard structure protections because of severe waves, flooding and erosion, according to the CRMC. The agency prohibits hard structures along Type 1 beaches — the popular ones in southern Rhode Island with open ocean exposure and scenic values that annually bring in millions of tourist dollars.
In the Ocean State, tourist season revolves around sunbathing, swimming and building sandcastles, but sand replenishment is an expensive, and often futile, option when it comes to battling erosion. Since beaches are dynamic systems, replenishment only serves as a temporary fix. None of Rhode Island’s seven state-run beaches bring in sand. In fact, few beaches in Rhode Island have established beach renourishment programs.
After Superstorm Sandy’s rude visit in October 2012, Rhode Island lost about 90,000 cubic yards of beach sand. It would have been foolish to attempt to replenish that loss with sand scooped from inland quarries.
David Prescott, South County coastkeeper for Save The Bay, said that without the right grain size and shape, trucked-in sand is likely to be washed away again, and quickly. Also, finding sand suitable for a beach can be difficult, it’s expensive, the impacts to fish and ecosystems are poorly understood, and the cumulative effects of this practice haven’t been adequately addressed.
The best option is to allow a beach to do what it wants to do naturally. Non-tourist destinations in South County do fine on their own, such as Black Point in Narragansett, East Beach in Charlestown and Quonochontaug Beach in Westerly.
In fact, since erosion is a natural process, most of the sand “lost” by Sandy has since returned, according to Janet Freedman, a coastal geologist with CRMC.
“The sand didn’t go out too deep into the ocean and has since come back,” said Freedman, noting that Rhode Island beaches have returned to normal since Sandy hit. That normal, however, is the new normal — and it’s constantly changing.
But for
popular beaches that generate local and state revenue, waiting for Mother
Nature to build back a money-maker isn’t a viable option. Property along
southern New England’s coast also represents an enormous investment in both
public and private dollars.
For example, for Narragansett Town Beach in Rhode Island, which has a long history of shoreline erosion, the new normal means the town routinely trucks in sand to replenish the beach, generally at the beginning of the busy summer season. After Sandy hit, trucks delivered some 6,000 cubic yards of sand to replace the washed-away beach. In total, to deal with erosion caused by that one superstorm, the town paid $167,720 for beach sand, $42,000 for dune sand and $40,000 for beach grass — all in an attempt to keep the new normal from changing.
Hanrahan calls this trucked-in method “sacrificial sand,” because it will need to be replaced again and again. This practice also can encourage further development along quickly changing shorelines.
In Massachusetts, which has 1,500 miles of coast, there are ongoing debates in several communities about beach renourishment and who pays for this temporary fix. Some residents in Salisbury want $300,000 in state taxpayer dollars for sand to help protect private homes from the rising sea, according to a recent story by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.
The story also noted that Winthrop Beach is poised to receive an estimated 20,000 truckloads of sand from Saugus as part of a massive beach replenishment and improvement project that is costing state taxpayers $26 million. In Nantucket and Plum Island, residents want to pay privately for sand but are running into regulator opposition over how best to protect oceanfront property.
In the past 10 years, more than $40 million in federal, state and local money has been spent to place sand on public beaches in Massachusetts, according to a conservative estimate by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.
“We need to be concerned about people’s ability to enjoy these places, but we also must be concerned about the health of these ecosystems,” said Torgan of The Nature Conservancy. “Our beaches and coastline all have unique and important values to many different species.”
For example, for Narragansett Town Beach in Rhode Island, which has a long history of shoreline erosion, the new normal means the town routinely trucks in sand to replenish the beach, generally at the beginning of the busy summer season. After Sandy hit, trucks delivered some 6,000 cubic yards of sand to replace the washed-away beach. In total, to deal with erosion caused by that one superstorm, the town paid $167,720 for beach sand, $42,000 for dune sand and $40,000 for beach grass — all in an attempt to keep the new normal from changing.
Hanrahan calls this trucked-in method “sacrificial sand,” because it will need to be replaced again and again. This practice also can encourage further development along quickly changing shorelines.
In Massachusetts, which has 1,500 miles of coast, there are ongoing debates in several communities about beach renourishment and who pays for this temporary fix. Some residents in Salisbury want $300,000 in state taxpayer dollars for sand to help protect private homes from the rising sea, according to a recent story by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.
The story also noted that Winthrop Beach is poised to receive an estimated 20,000 truckloads of sand from Saugus as part of a massive beach replenishment and improvement project that is costing state taxpayers $26 million. In Nantucket and Plum Island, residents want to pay privately for sand but are running into regulator opposition over how best to protect oceanfront property.
In the past 10 years, more than $40 million in federal, state and local money has been spent to place sand on public beaches in Massachusetts, according to a conservative estimate by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.
“We need to be concerned about people’s ability to enjoy these places, but we also must be concerned about the health of these ecosystems,” said Torgan of The Nature Conservancy. “Our beaches and coastline all have unique and important values to many different species.”
To be continued....