EPA Scientist Says East Coast Beaches Threatened by Sea Level, But Nobody’s Listening

[Right Lane Cruiser]

Some of the hardest-hit areas could be in our own backyard.

Josh Harkinson - WIRED - April 27, 2010

Can we afford to ignore this any longer? --Ed.

For most of the 20th century, Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, was known for its boardwalk, amusement park and wide, sandy beaches, popular with daytrippers from Washington, D.C. “The bathing beach has a frontage of three miles,” boasted a tourist brochure from about 1900, “and is equal, if not superior, to any beach on the Atlantic Coast.”

Today, on a cloudless spring afternoon, the resort town’s sweeping view of Chesapeake Bay is no less stunning. But there’s no longer any beach in Chesapeake Beach. Where there once was sand, water now laps against a seven-foot-high wall of boulders protecting a strip of pricey homes marked with “No Trespassing” signs.

Surveying the armored shoreline, Jim Titus explains how the natural sinking of the shoreline and slow but steady sea-level rise, mostly due to climate change, have driven the bay’s water more than a foot higher over the past century. Reinforcing the eroding shore with a sea wall held the water back, but it also choked off the natural supply of sand that had replenished the beach. What sand remained gradually sank beneath the rising water.

Titus, the Environmental Protection Agency’s resident expert on sea-level rise, first happened upon Maryland’s disappearing beaches 15 years ago while looking for a place to windsurf. “Having the name beach,” he discovered, “is not a very good predictor of having a beach.” Since then, he’s kept an eye out for other beach towns that have lost their namesakes—Maryland’s Masons Beach and Tolchester Beach, North Carolina’s Pamlico Beach, and
... [Read More]

[Butterfly Mage]

The politicians ARE listening, but they're listening to mega-corporations with briefcases full of campaign cash.

[ALS]

It's called natural erosion. Problem is people built their homes too close to the beach and now they are wondering why they have no beach. The east coast of the U.S. is constantly getting pounded by storms and that causes beach erosion over time.

I've had a place in Naples since 1987 and the beach hasn't gone anywhere. The high and low tide lines are same today as they were 23 years ago. The difference is in the Gulf by my place there isn't the violent wave action that the east coast gets. If you have a twelve to eighteen inch wave hit the beach in Naples the Gulf is very rough. Most of the waves hitting the beach are under six inches in height.

[Tochatihu]

I appreciate the eyewitness account from Naples, but when I web-search Naples Florida beach erosion, I get the impression that the stability of that local situation depends heavily on anti-erosion efforts currently underway.

DAS

[ALS]

In some of the stories I have read they state that much of the erosion has been due to strong storms not rising ocean levels. There also has been a lot of beach erosion around the inlets to the bay also due to these storms.

Here is a picture I shot around 9:00 AM December 30th 2008 of the beach off my balcony. I'm surmising that it was close to low tide at the time. Like I said earlier I can only go by what I see when I'm down there.

[Seraph]

Originally Posted by ALS

In some of the stories I have read they state that much of the erosion has been due to strong storms not rising ocean levels. There also has been a lot of beach erosion around the inlets to the bay also due to these storms.

Here is a picture I shot around 9:00 AM December 30th 2008 of the beach off my balcony. I'm surmising that it was close to low tide at the time. Like I said earlier I can only go by what I see when I'm down there.

Live in an apartment? Cause if you ain't, methinks you are LOADED

Or the land there is really cheap? Then again i'm so used to coastal land prices here in Perth being outrageously high i guess i jsut think any coastal property is worth a bomb.

[hobbit]

The "beach", or rather fairly high bluffs, on Marconi's transatlantic
telegraphy site on Cape Cod eroded away so that the land where
two out of four large radio towers sat is completely gone now.
Certainly not because of rising water levels.
.
http://www.stormfax.com/wireless.htm
.
_H*

[ALS]

Originally Posted by Seraph

Live in an apartment? Cause if you ain't, methinks you are LOADED

Or the land there is really cheap? Then again i'm so used to coastal land prices here in Perth being outrageously high i guess i just think any coastal property is worth a bomb.

It is a condo. When it was bought back in 1987, real estate prices hadn't gone through the roof yet. The town only had about 25K full time residents and hadn't gone through the boom times of the mid nineties through 2007.

You could by a nice 3br, 2-1/2 bath 1,600 to 1,800 sqft home with a small swimming pool and a two car garage a block from the ocean for between $119K to $149K back then.

Today those little ranch homes are 750K to 1 million dollar tear downs.

The people getting killed are the ones who came down between 2003 and 2007 and bought and built investment second homes. They over paid big time, and are now taking it in the neck because everyone like them is also trying to dump their real estate.

The last time I was down there, "all", the Mcmansions along Crayton (a block from the Beach) had for sales signs in front of them. These were the people who bought one of those 1,600-1,800 sqft tear downs and put up some 3K-4K sqft house on the lot thinking they would make a quick 500K to 750K. Problem was more than a few had the same idea.

There is only so many people who have that kind of money to spend on a home that expensive.