Beach Nourishment: Not the Answer

Business and Economic Review, Jan-Mar 2007 by Pilkey, Orrin

It's damaging to beach fish and birds, and doesn't necessarily offer protection from the damage of big hurricanes. Moreover, beach nourishment encourages high-density development adjacent to the beach. So why do we continue to do it?

As with all things, there is more to beach nourishment than meets the eye. In particular, a lot more is at stake than is implied in the article on Myrtle Beach nourishment by Dr. Timothy W. Kana ("[Myrtle] Beach Restoration: A Success Story?", Vol. 52, No. 4, Business & Economic Review, July-September 2006).

In that article, Kana states that beach nourishment has been an economic boon to Myrtle Beach by protecting the community from storm damage and keeping a healthy recreational beach for the tourists. But let us examine these claims more closely.

Apples and Giraffes

Kana documents the storm damage benefit by comparing the storm damage done at Garden City and North Myrtle Beach, where no nourishment occurred, with the damage done in the same storm at Myrtle Beach proper. He finds the damage done in Myrtle Beach is much less than the damage in the other communities, which he attributes to the beach nourishment project.

But comparing Myrtle Beach with these communities is comparing apples and giraffes! North Myrtle Beach and Garden City are narrow and much lower-elevation communities with little dune development, and are much more susceptible to storm damage, nourishment or no nourishment.

Nourished beaches give a false sense of security. In the big storms - say, category 4 or 5 hurricanes - a nourished beach may not make the slightest difference. In Waveland, Mississippi, for example, the first six blocks of single-family homes were completely wiped out by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. All that remains are white concrete slabs. The nourished beach at Waveland was essentially untouched and remains a fine swimming beach today. The storm simply stepped over the beach and assaulted the community. The vacant lots at the shoreline, each with its own concrete slab, are now for sale for about $700,000.

Beach nourishment is very damaging to the beach biota (i.e., the combined flora and fauna of a region) where a complete and unique food chain exists, topped by the birds people love to watch and the fish people love to catch. No beach biota - no fish and no birds.

Kana says studies have shown that the organisms recover very quickly, but such studies, the largest of which was funded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, are of questionable validity, according to Professor Pete Peterson, a marine biologist at the University of North Carolina. The extent of damage done to this very limited, very precious marine ecosystem is yet to be quantified, but there is no question that everything in and on the beach is killed when sand is dumped there.

At the same time, the less visible biota of the continental shelf is killed at the site of sand mining or is suffocated by the silt and clay released as sediment is pumped onto the beach. Communities like Myrtle Beach have turned the nearshore zone with its precious ecosystem into an engineering project.

Beach nourishment encourages high-density development immediately adjacent to the beach. In a time of rising sea level at a location where big storms are a certainty, beachfront construction is at least irresponsible and at worst can only be considered a form of societal madness. Beach nourishment up and down our coasts will ensure that in the future, high-density development will extend for many hundreds of miles along our nation's barrier island shores.

Taxpayers Are Hit

Why should federal or state taxpayers pay for nourishment if it will destroy the aesthetics of a beautiful beach and encourage increased density of development, which in turn will promote more expenditure of tax money for more nourishment, storm cleanup costs, and federal flood insurance payouts? In Florida, where high-rises crowd hundreds of miles of shoreline, insurers are backing away, and state taxpayers are apparently starting to pick up the insurance bill.

As the level of the sea becomes higher [editor's note: which has been occurring and is expected to continue to occur because of global warming], erosion rates should increase. And the cost to taxpayers of beach nourishment has nowhere to go but up - at a rapid pace.

The most fundamental problem with the high-density development encouraged by beach nourishment is that it allows no flexibility for future response to sea-level rise. It's one thing to move or demolish or let fall in single-family buildings, but a high-rise is something that is viewed as immovable.

Looking at the big picture, in my view it is unlikely that we as a nation will continue to support beach nourishment, especially when there are more than a thousand miles of beach communities lining our eroding Gulf and Atlantic shores. The national bill for nourishment is already more than a billion dollars per decade.

Already, the federal government has effectively dropped out of the program and public support is waning because of the growing perception that beach nourishment is a form of welfare for the rich. Low-cost sand supplies on the continental shelves are limited, and in two to four generations, our society will be more concerned with the fate of Manhattan, Boston, Miami, and other sea-level cities rather than the Myrtle Beaches of this world.