Sea Threatens European Tourist Mecca

Sylt, a fashionable mecca for Europeans fond of beach bashes and bathing in the buff, is doing battle with the stormy North Sea for its lucrative shores.

For millennia the North Sea has been rearranging Sylt’s coastline, but with storms smacking the island with growing intensity and sea levels rising in recent years, Sylt has been losing ground more rapidly.

“It could take just one good storm to drop our restaurant right into the ocean,” said Esther Meyer. Meyer and her husband, Heinz, own the Kliffkieker Restaurant in Wenningstedt, about midway up the coast of the narrow, 24-mile-long island. It is perched on the edge of an eroding cliff overlooking the North Sea.

About a quarter of a mile of Sylt’s southern tip has vanished into the North Sea in the last 17 years, said Werner Matthiesen, 64, who runs a bike rental shop in the tiny southern village of Hoernum.

A violent storm this past spring washed away even more sand dunes from Sylt’s highly exposed southern extremity.

“Hoernum itself could be threatened by the sea within 10 years,” said Matthiesen, an ecology activist.

Scientists scoff at suggestions that Sylt is about to be awash, but some islanders fear the economy might sink.

“There’s no denying we have been registering huge losses of sand along the whole coast,” said Gunter Boysen, an aide to Volker Hoppe, mayor of Westerland, Sylt’s largest community. “If we’re not able to preserve our beaches and keep the tourists coming, we’re as good as dead.”

Sylt, a pickax-shaped island, is West Germany’s northernmost point, its northern tip about six miles off Denmark. It is one of Europe’s most popular holiday sites, swelling the year-round population of 19,700 to more than 400,000 in summer.

The big attractions are Sylt’s air, said to have restorative qualities; its pristine beaches, and its innumerable sand dunes, blanketed by heather and other colorful flora. Sylt also is noted as a haven for nude sunbathers and all-night beach parties.

Battling the North Sea is nothing new to the islanders. Dikes and dams have been put up over the centuries, and even the natives’ houses are banked in earth.

Sylt was once an extension of the mainland, but floods in the 17th Century severed the two. A rail causeway recreated a land link in 1926 and remains the island’s main connection with the outside world.

Fishing was for a long time the island’s major resource, but in this century, tourism became the No. 1 moneymaker.

For the last several years, islanders have been waging a never-ending battle to replace beaches devoured by sea. Special vessels working just offshore suck up thousands of tons of sand from the ocean floor. The sand is then dumped onto beaches and spread by workers. More than $32 million has been spent on the project to date.

Boysen said more needs to be done to protect the island but that until local, state and federal officials can find a cost-effective idea, the sand-replacement operation is sufficient.

Matthiesen said more needs to be done sooner and favors building a breaker around the entire island.

“Who knows,” he said, “without the right protection, perhaps this island could disappear in 200 years.”