Eroding Shorelines : Who Pays for Turning the Tide?

On the sandy beaches, on clay bluffs, loamy uplands, sandstone cliffs and marshy lowlands, the geologic processes continue -- sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but always relentlessly . . . Man may win a skirmish, but usually loses the war.

--John G. Housley, Army Corps of Engineers

The two-story wooden beach home stands--though just barely--a few feet from the water’s edge, tilting precariously on its wooden pilings toward the Atlantic Ocean. Rocked by winter storms, its footing undermined by beach erosion, it is $100,000 on stilts--ready to topple into the sea, seemingly at any moment.

Owners of three other nearby homes in this resort town face the same problem. Their properties--second homes that were used primarily as rental property for vacationers visiting North Carolina’s Outer Banks--are uninhabitable and have been abandoned. The state will not allow the owners to build sea walls or bulkheads or other structures for protection. That, they say, would only cause the public beach to erode even more.

Have Two Choices

The owners have two choices. They can pay to have the homes moved. Or they can hope that next winter’s storms carry the buildings out to sea, so that they can collect under the federally subsidized National Flood Insurance program.

Nags Head Mayor Donald W. Bryan does not want to appear unsympathetic, but he simply shrugs at the prospects.

“Anyone who builds (along the shore) has to recognize that erosion is continuous,” Bryan said. “They have to be ready to accept that by either losing their structure to the ocean, or by moving that structure to another location. That’s our town’s position. It’s futile to try to do much else.”

Different Conclusion

Local government officials have come to quite a different conclusion in Suffolk County, N.Y, on Long Island, where in fashionable West Hampton, some 200 houses sit deserted on a sand bar barely 500 feet wide. Over the years, winter storms and a $5-million federal project to hold sand onto an adjacent beach has caused the shore to erode so badly that the homes sit virtually in the ocean. Water lines are exposed and the only road has been washed out.

But instead of letting the houses fall into the ocean, Suffolk County officials, under the threat of a $70-million lawsuit by affected homeowners, have approved a controversial plan to pump sand out of the ocean and restore the beach at a cost of $120 million. Most of the money--about 70%--would come from federal funds, while New York state would have to kick in 21% and Suffolk County, which benefits most from the process, would pay only 9%.

The contrasting decisions in Nags Head and Suffolk County point out the dichotomy as communities, scientists and government officials across the nation struggle with what to do about retreating shores that are causing entire coastal areas to disappear into the sea.

Virtually every mile of U.S. shoreline in every state that borders an ocean is at risk, as well as the shorelines of the eight states on the Great Lakes, where large chunks of waterfront property have been lost or damaged as the result of record-high water levels in recent years.

From Maine to Texas, all along thousands of miles of coastal barrier islands where development has multiplied in the last decades, billions of dollars worth of property is being laid open to the whims of the ocean as shores retreat at rates of 5 to 15 feet a year.

For example:

--Sargent, Tex., a 1950s resort development, has become a ghost town as all but two of the 40 homes there have tumbled into the ocean.

--Monterey Bay, south of San Francisco, loses as much as 15 feet of beach annually to erosion.

--Louisiana is shrinking at a rate of 60 square miles a year. Whole parishes (counties) may disappear in the next 50 years as a million acres are lost to the sea.

And if things weren’t bad enough, the National Academy of Sciences last summer warned of worse to come. The sea level, the Academy reported, is expected to rise at an unprecedented rate for the next 100 years, and already troublesome shoreline problems are likely to reach disaster level.

Few Shore Dwellers

That announcement has turned up the fire on an already heated debate about how the government is handling the problem, with scientists and officials at various levels of government saying that, under present policy, the average taxpayer is being forced to spend millions to bail out a relative handful of shore dwellers, real estate developers and private investors.

Currently, the U.S. government spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually on efforts to protect property along the nation’s shores. In virtually every state outside of Alaska and Hawaii, there is an ongoing project to hold back the relentless sea, always more than half funded by federal dollars.

In Florida, the Army Corps of Engineers estimates $170 million has been spent on shore protection since 1970, and millions more are slated for pending projects.

“We have either constructed or recommended a project in every county that has a beach in Florida,” a Corps spokesman said.

In New Jersey, a project to pump sand up along the beach is scheduled to protect 32 miles of shore at an estimated cost of $100 million, and in New York, an 82-mile program around Long Island to place sand on eroding beaches and fortify the shore is expected to cost $200 million.

And the list of approved or completed shore protection projects, mostly beach renourishments, winds on:

--Rockaway Beach, N.Y., 6.2 miles of beach at $51 million;

--Carolina and Kure Beach, S.C., 2.5 miles of beach at $24 million;

--Tybee Island, Ga., 2.5 miles of beach at $11.5 million;

--Cape May, N.J., 3.5 miles of beach at $18 million;

--Ocean City, Md., 9 miles of beach at $45 million;

--Grand Isle, La., $8 million.

In California, more than $70 million is being spent on projects to renourish beaches and sea walls to protect property and roads along hills and bluffs from San Diego to San Francisco, the largest share going to place sand along the beaches at Seal Beach, Huntington Beach and Newport Beach, a project that so far has cost $22 million and continues at a pace of $1 million a year.

Dramatic Cost Rise

And with the advent of the rising sea level, costs are expected to accelerate dramatically.

According to the study released this summer by the National Academy of Sciences, Earth’s atmosphere is warming as a result of the greenhouse affect, a prism condition created largely by the release of carbon monoxide from the burning of fossil fuels. That causes an increased melting of icebergs and an expansion of the ocean due to increased water temperature.

The result is a predicted sea rise of between two and five feet over the next hundred years, twice to five times the rate over the last 100 years. While there is debate in the scientific community over just how much the rise will be, there is agreement that it will occur.

For low-lying areas such as Florida, for most of the barrier islands along the East Coast and for some parts of Los Angeles County, such as Venice and Marina del Rey, almost any increase would have significant impact. Just one foot of sea level rise could mean the loss of 200 feet of seashore along low-lying beach areas.

Increased flooding will result in increased payments under the Nationally Flood Insurance Program, which last year paid $130 million to coastal areas. In California, increased flooding could be expected along the flood planes of the Los Angeles, San Gabriel, Santa Clara and Santa Ana Rivers, scientists said. Dikes may have to be built in bay areas, particularly San Francisco Bay.

“The impact of storms is magnified because the sea is higher,” said Gary Zarillo, professor of Oceanography at the State University of New York at Stonybrook. “The (once every) 10-year flood of today will have the impact of a (once every) 100-year flood.”

And as those conditions occur, the cost of protecting the shore under current trends would increase dramatically.

“The amount of money that we’re talking about in the future boggles the mind,” said Bob Morton, a geologist with the University of Texas who works with coastal planning for the state.

The initial costs of such projects, officials said, are just the tip of the iceberg. In the the 1986 Water Resources Development Act, Congress increased the length of such programs from 20 years to 50 years. If inflation over such a time span is factored in, the cost of projects to renourish beaches and replace sea walls may more than triple. For instance, in Cape May, N.J., an old beach city that has become a tourist center, the initial cost of building up 3.5 miles of beach is $18 million with an additional cost of $1.8 million to periodically replenish the sand, normally once every five years.

However, if inflation runs at 4% annually, it would cost $60 million just to keep putting sand back on the beach over the life of the project.

For years, projects to save shorelines have gone on without much criticism. But recently, scientists and governments have begun to question such expenditure of public funds, which, they say, too often goes to protect second homes and investment property or help maintain residences in constantly flooded areas where development should not exist.

“The medium-income person, as a taxpayer, is subsidizing the second home of the rich,” said Jim Titus of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington and the leading expert on sea level rise. “It turns out that’s what a lot of this erosion control really was.

“For the most part, the interest goes like this: You’ve got a row of houses or buildings and you’ve got 100 feet of beach. One point of view is to say that the ocean-front people need that beach or their houses will fall into the water. The other point is to say that the state owns the beach, and (the public) can come and sunbathe on the beach. The owners say they will put up seawalls and other hard structures to protect their property if something is not done about the beach. The sea walls actually cause the beach to erode more quickly and it will eventually disappear. So, the public is extorted to do something.”

‘Beaches or Buildings’

Duke University professor Orin Pilkey, who has led the charge of normally reluctant scientists into the debate, said “it’s a question of beaches or buildings. If the public knew what was going on, if they knew about our beaches, they wouldn’t approve these projects. They wouldn’t have any sympathy for those people living at the beach.”

Critics of such expenditure point to communities like Maryland’s Ocean City as an example. Ocean City, a tourist town on a nine-mile strip of sand barely a mile wide, has been dubbed the “Miami Beach of the North.” Fifteen years ago, almost none of what is there now existed.

But recently the city has exploded. From 1982 to 1986, the town of only 8,000 averaged just under $100 million annually in construction as hotels and condominiums began popping up at a rate approaching 2,000 units a year. The city’s assessed property value is now $4 billion.

Eighty percent of that property, city officials said, is owned by people who don’t live there. It is made up mostly of second homes, 75% of which are used as rental property. Between June and August, the city’s average daily population increases 30-fold to 250,000, and it becomes the second largest city in Maryland. An estimated 8 million tourists dump $1.2 billion annually into the local economy, $50 million of which makes its way in taxes to the state treasury.

But Ocean City has a problem.

Developers have built too close to the beach, which is continuing to erode at a rate of two feet a year. In the winter months, the waves slosh against the huge Sheraton Hotel and other multi-story buildings that line the beach. A series of groins--wooden and rock structures that jut out into the ocean perpendicular to the beach--has slowed the erosion somewhat by catching sand moving south along the shore. But not enough.

Yet, despite the prospects of damage from storms or inundation from a rising sea, developers continue to build right on the beach. One 170-room hotel less than 100 feet from the beach was completed in April. Another is going up now.

Developers keep building, city planner Jesse Houston said, “because they know the city will bail them out.”

And with good reason.

“Without our beaches, we don’t have anything,” Mayor Fish Powell said. “That’s the reason people come here.”

So, the city has gotten approval from Congress and the state for a $45-million beach renourishment and storm protection program that will nearly triple the width of its beach.

Initially, the state will pay $15 million for a 100-foot “recreational” beach and the federal government will spend $21 million for an additional 170 feet of beach for storm and shore protection with the state adding an additional $5 million. Ocean City, meanwhile, will pay only about $5 million.

For the state, which receives about $50 million annually in taxes from Ocean City tourism, the project makes lots of sense.

“Ocean City contributes a great deal to the state in tax revenues based on tourism, sales tax, property tax and other contributions,” said James Peck, assistant secretary for the state’s Department of Natural Resources.

That is the common complaint among coastal planners, scientists and various government officials. For Ocean City, a new beach will ensure tourism and increase property values. Yet the community that benefits most pays the least, with the federal government always picking up the lion’s share.

“The question is should the federal government be involved to the degree that it is,” said Ben Mieremet, of the Ocean and Coastal Resource Management office of the National Oceanographic Assn. in Washington. “For example, Virginia Beach (Va.) makes $20 million (a year) in tourism. To renourish their beach cost $2 million. The federal government paid 50% and the state and locals paid 50%.

“So, they (Virginia Beach) invested $500,000 to protect a $20-million-a-year investment. Yet, the federal government has no say on where the state of Virginia allows people to build and then, because of poor planning, they ask the federal government to bail them out.”

But many are asking what would happen if there were no federal, or even state, bailout for communities.

“They haven’t been put to that test,” said Florida legislator Peter Wallace of St. Petersburg. “I think the people who have that investment would ultimately try to raise the money to protect it if nobody stepped in.”

There are hundreds of communities like Ocean City up and down the nation’s shore, largely summer tourist playgrounds and investment havens that are now or soon will be looking for funding: South Padre Island in Texas; Seabright, Sandy Hook and Cape May in New Jersey; Dauphine Island and Gulf Shores in Alabama; Hunting Island and Hilton Head, in South Carolina.

In Florida, “everything from Daytona down is one big development,” a Corps of Engineers official said.

Warnings Ignored

Eager developers, investors and buyers ignored warnings about an eroding coast and built too close to the shore, destroying the sand dune system that is nature’s protection against erosion and storms, and then prompting expensive projects to provide that protection.

For example, a recently constructed $85-million storm protection project to replace an expansive beach off Miami Beach, Fla., was needed primarily because the beach and the natural sand dune system had been destroyed, not by nature, but by hotels which built swimming pools and sun decks over it.

“The beach didn’t erode,” said Robert G. Dean, professor of Coastal and Oceanographic Engineering at the University of Florida and former director of the state’s Division of Beaches and Shores. “It was encapsulated under the hotel decks . . . .”

Federal subsidies for coastal development can further aggravate the problem of unchecked construction.

“There are certain provisions being made in our economic structure that tend to allow people to build in unsafe areas,” Texas coastal planner Bob Morton said. “Federal subsidies for road construction, utilities, sewage treatment plants, and then federal flood insurance, all of these things worked to underwrite the cost of development in unsafe areas. The unfortunate thing is that the taxpayer pays for the construction, and then pays to bail these people out.”

One of the chief targets of critics is the National Flood Insurance Program, established in 1968 to provide insurance for property in flood prone areas. The program was designed to defray the billions of dollars the nation was paying out annually to inland and shore communities overcome by flooding. The areas were of such high risk that no private insurance companies would offer coverage.

In exchange for offering insurance, the program is supposed to require building standards that would limit flood damage to homes, but critics charge that the system has encouraged people to build in hazardous areas by insuring and paying claims on property that will repeatedly be damaged.

Army Corps of Engineers officials tell story after story of homes damaged or destroyed by storms which are then rebuilt with flood insurance payments in the same location, only to be damaged or destroyed again in the next storm.

With the prospect of ever-larger outlays for shore protection moving into the foreground, states and local communities have begun to reevaluate their policies. New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Jersey have initiated a joint study to determine the amount of investment along their shores, who pays for those investments and who benefits.

“We’re trying to de-emotionalize the issue,” said Aram Terchunian of the New York Coastal Management Program. “What we’re dealing with now is hysterical property owners who say, ‘My house is falling in the ocean and I want you to save it!’ Good decisions are not based on emotion. Good decisions are based on hard facts and hard facts are based on good science.”

Following 1983 storms that caused more than $100 million in damages along California’s shores, cities up and down the coast began rethinking their construction guidelines. The state legislatures of Oregon and Florida have commissioned complete studies of their coastlines as they evaluate their erosion control policies.

Many government officials, academicians and scientists--including the Skidway Institute of Oceanography--are urging a new approach. Instead of trying to continually hold back the ocean, they said, a more feasible and economical approach is to retreat from the sea.

“It’s my feeling that once one gets to the situation . . . where we find these rapid shoreline retreat rates, lack of dunes and almost constant over-wash during normal storm activity, then these areas are no longer safely habitable, and therefore should not be inhabited,” said Steve Leatherman, coastal geologist from the University of Maryland and a consultant to numerous coastal development and shore erosion projects.

“It’s really a matter of whether your capital expenditures are worth the recreational return. These people who bought have enjoyed the location. But when one considers that indeed the shoreline is moving, that enjoyment has to be finite,” said Leatherman.

Construction of hard structures like sea walls and bulkheads are terribly expensive, the experts say, and while they may protect some homes, they accelerate the erosion of beaches. Eventually all that’s left are walls without beaches, and in time even the walls must be replaced. And projects like beach renourishment, though environmentally sound, are a continuous economic drain.

“We face economic and environmental realities that leave us two choices,” Pilkey said. “One, plan a strategic retreat now, or two, undertake a vastly expensive program of armoring the coastline and, as required, retreating through a series of unpredictable disasters.”

Obviously, in some communities, particularly cities that rely on their beaches and shores as tourist attractions, retreat is untenable. For them, how to pay for continuous shore protection programs is a subject of concern. Some states, like Florida, have approved a 3% hotel bed tax which would be used for beach renourishment efforts.

Smaller Populations

But in other, more sparsely populated areas, it is futile to try to hold back the sea.

“There are no structures that can withstand the dynamics created by more water,” said Ann Berger, a federal coastal commissioner who oversees the Great Lake states. “(Such structures) just don’t exist. It can’t be dealt with physically. What’s being experienced (along the Great Lakes) is what the East and West Coasts are going to have to deal with in 20 years. That’s why everybody is talking about retreat.”

Some areas have been taking a look at retreat. In a modified version of that approach, the Coastal Zone Management Commission, established by Congress in 1972, has been providing federal funds to entice states to establish building requirements called setbacks that would limit new development close to the shore. Congress also passed the Coastal Barrier Rezoning Act to exclude construction in undeveloped coastal areas from receiving federal assistance.

“What you can do now is make sure the growth doesn’t occur, so you don’t have to spend the dollars in the future to protect that area,” said Jeff Blanchard, chief planner with the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. “Government has the ability to regulate areas for public health, safety and welfare.”

A number of states, like Massachusetts and North Carolina, have limited growth, requiring that any new single family houses be built at least 30 times the erosion rate from the dune line and that multi-family units like apartment buildings and hotels be built back 60 times the erosion rate. No efforts can be made to build structures to hold back the sea because that further erodes the beach. When houses fall into the ocean, they can only be rebuilt according to the setback rules.

While everybody agrees that setbacks make sense, they have serious consequences for individual property owners, developers and beach cities. For the individual property owner and developers, they reduce the available land for construction. For cities, they reduce the amount of high priced development which could dramatically expand their tax bases.

Consequently, some states, under pressure from affected developers and property owners, have simply drawn lines in the sand that will continue to be overtopped by floods and eaten away by erosion. Others have not developed setbacks at all.

“There is definitely going to be pressure to develop an area that is susceptible to flooding,” Blanchard said. “That’s where the crunch comes. Scientists can give all the facts and opinions . . . but, eventually, it will boil down to politics.”

On example of that pressure is the Town of Kill Devil Hills, N.C., whose 1980 policy of retreat was hailed by the government and academic community as progressive coastal management. But in the winter of 1982, dozens of cottages there were washed out to sea, septic tanks were crushed and four oceanfront motels were endangered by shore erosion.

Eventually, after heated debate, the town changed its policy and allowed those property owners to fortify their homes.

Politics, Emotions

Retreat may be the best policy, said Raymond Sturza, town planner for Kill Devil Hills, but in “the real world” it is often too difficult to enforce. “More often than not, those affected adversely by retreat are the community’s most elite, wealthy and influential members,” Sturza said. “Political and economic factors can come into play and the issue may become emotional.”

In Congress, there are numerous pieces of legislation that deal in some form or another with the shoreline erosion. One bill would revamp the flood insurance program to give property owners money to move homes in “imminent danger” of erosion instead of paying the higher claims when they go into the ocean. Another would provide federal loans for affected homeowners. But Congress has given no attention to sea level rise.

“Anytime there is a new environmental threat, it takes a long time before Congress sets a policy,” said Gene Stakieu of the Corps of Engineers. “What they’ll find is they can’t pay for protecting the (entire) shoreline of the United States. So they’ll have to make some decisions about which areas are going to have to get priority.”