As Fierce Storms Erode Beaches, a Tide of Disputes Washes In : Environment: Residents and business people want the government to replenish the sand, likening it to highway maintenance. But others say it’s futile.

While the ocean steadily eats away America’s shores, those watching are arguing about how--or whether--to keep it at bay and who should pay the staggering bill.

Conservationists, coastal residents and business people agree on one point--the ocean’s daily tides, a steadily rising sea level and periodic major storms will keep moving beaches inland.

A December northeaster that badly eroded shorelines in five East Coast states left many seaside towns, especially on barrier islands, vulnerable. Worries and debate over the storm-protection issue will probably intensify after March’s deadly storm chewed up beaches along the entire East Coast.

Those who own property along the heavily developed Eastern seashore or live off its tourist trade want to halt erosion, preferably with government money.

They argue that rebuilding beaches is just like highway maintenance and costs less than its benefits--protection of billions of dollars worth of coastal condominiums, hotels and homes. Shore tourism, they emphasize, brings in big money, more than $8 billion a year for New Jersey and $28 billion for Florida, for example.

“It’s a tremendous resource, and we should be doing what we can to manage it and preserve it professionally,” said Kenneth Smith, founder of the lobbying group Coastal Advocate Inc. in Ship Bottom, N.J., and a vice president of the California-based American Shore and Beach Preservation Assn.

“To talk about retreating or that we don’t belong there, that’s crazy,” Smith said. “We’re here, people want to be at the coast, they demand tourism facilities adjacent to the beaches, and we’ve provided it.”

Smith advocates protecting that investment through beach engineering--widening beaches with dredged sand and building dune systems between beaches and buildings. So do his clients and others with a financial stake in East Coast shore tourism and real estate.

Environmentalists, and some university and government experts on beach erosion, give different advice.

“Run away!” said D. W. Bennett, executive director of the American Littoral Society based in Sandy Hook.

The engineering solution is very expensive and, Bennett warned, “will lead people to a false sense of security.”

Bennett said U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ estimates for its planned beach-replenishment project next year, stretching from Sea Bright 15 miles to the south, run to $1 billion. It will cost more, he thinks, and the sand won’t last the predicted 50 years.

“I don’t think we can afford to” keep replenishing beaches, he said. “The other side will say we can’t afford not to.”

The longstanding debate over shoreline erosion is getting louder. A new Administration is trying to trim federal spending, weather experts are predicting a round of hurricanes in the Northeast and new beach technology companies are hawking erosion cure-alls.

A Federal Emergency Management Agency report, issued in New Jersey after the northeaster caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage from Delaware to Massachusetts, suggests that the state at least consider retreating from repeatedly battered areas.

Since 1979, FEMA has doled out more than $3.6 billion in disaster aid for coastal storms alone, $1.4 billion of that in the last year.

The National Academy of Sciences Committee on Beach Nourishment and Protection, established in September by the corps and FEMA, is studying the issue and plans a report early next year.

The committee also will review the record of protective structures like out-of-fashion seawalls and groins--boulder piles stretching into the surf--both of which worsened erosion in many areas, and new technologies for slowing erosion.

Manufacturers promoted their products in February at New Jersey’s second Shore Summit, a state-sponsored gathering of erosion experts, politicians and business interests in Long Branch, a northern New Jersey shore resort.

Last year’s summit produced a lobby that helped pass state legislation guaranteeing $15 million annually for shore protection projects. This year’s summit ended with organizers pledging to seek tighter laws governing coastal development.

Shoreline development is a hot issue in coastal states, according to state environmental officials. Some states bar building in sensitive areas, but many restrictions were imposed only after the coast was extensively developed over the last three decades, when the Northeast had no major hurricanes.

Weather experts say there is a new hurricane cycle coming for the Northeast, where cooler air and other factors make hurricanes move faster than they do farther south. Under the worst-case scenario, a powerful northbound hurricane could devastate “the most highly urbanized coast in the world,” according to Nicholas K. Coch, a coastal geologist at Queens College.

The experts’ predictions intensify debate over the wisdom of costly beach replenishment projects.

Some argue that it is folly to widen beaches when future hurricanes are bound to whisk them all away.

In fact, some New Jersey shore towns decided after December’s devastation not to rebuild all the wiped-out boardwalks and pavilions. Even Smith, the lobbyist, concedes that some spots just aren’t defensible.

But people in towns like Ocean City, N.J.--spared any major damage in the December northeaster because of a corps replenishment project last summer--counter that without wider beaches, hurricane damage will be much worse.

If the beach replenishment lobby wins that argument, there is still the question of who pays the ever-increasing bill.

Between 1930 and 1985, the Corps of Engineers spent $138.5 million on beach replenishment projects. This year it has budgeted $36 million for such work, with state and local governments generally splitting 35% of each project’s cost. The beach replenishment work is a minuscule part of the corps’ $9-billion annual budget this year.

Shore interests keep pushing legislatures to spend more on such work. Some are calling for hotel taxes and beach user fees, already standard in some areas. Environmental officials in Delaware, Florida and other states note that the return on beach nourishment--tourism revenues--exceeds the price.

Bennett, of the American Littoral Society, sees it differently.

“I think the beneficiaries should pay a much higher percentage of the cost,” he said, “the people who live in the town.”

BACKGROUND

Coastal engineers keep experimenting with ways to stop shoreline erosion, but they’re up against an inexorable process. The wide beaches of the Atlantic coast have been formed over the centuries by wind and wave action. The coastline is a border between land and ocean and subject to powerful forces. A current flowing parallel to the beach, the littoral drift, for example, carries beach sand with it and continually reshapes the shoreline.