Erosion Prompts Battle Over Sea Walls Along Washington Coast

Rocks piled 15 feet high on a public beach to shield exclusive condos from the hungry Pacific Ocean are causing a mountain of controversy.

Should Washington state allow such sea walls or any kind of “beach armoring” to protect homes and to stem erosion?

Property owners, developers and some local officials say yes, at least to this 850-foot-long wall. Neighboring Oregon has already said no, choosing to let nature take its course.

Without intervention, sea wall supporters say, millions of dollars in property will be lost to beach erosion, which, for reasons not entirely understood, has been quickening in recent years.

The beach at Ocean Shores, for instance, receded by 35 feet in the winter of 1996, after the rock wall was installed. But geologists say without the wall the beach would have receded another 35 feet and taken out the exclusive condos.

The wall “has been absolutely fabulous. It has done more than we had hoped for,” said Terra Tosland of Point Brown Resort, which manages the wooden time-share condos for out-of-towners.

“We’re fighting to protect the properties, but obviously in the back of everybody’s mind is that there’s a possibility these properties just won’t be here,” she said.

State regulators, environmentalists and a national expert on beach erosion say that they’re fighting to protect Washington’s ocean beaches too. They just disagree over how to do it.

Sea wall opponents say armoring actually destroys beaches, is costly and often does not even protect the structures it was designed to save. At best, they say, what little beach is left eventually gets washed away, leaving only the sea wall. Gone is an open beach for strollers, surfers, clammers and beachcombers.

At worst, these foes say, the sea works around the wall, isolating it as an island.

“Construction of this wall flies in the face of a huge national experience with sea walls beginning in New Jersey 150 years ago,” says Duke University geology professor Orrin Pilkey, a national expert on beach erosion.

“Newjerseyization of the southwest beaches has begun,” he said in a 1997 study titled “Management of Washington’s Ocean Beaches: A Banana Republic Approach?”

Pilkey, director of Duke’s Study of Developed Shorelines, dismisses state regulators’ characterization of the wall here as a “temporary measure.”

“That’s not a temporary wall. It’s going to get bigger and longer. That’s speaking statistically,” he said.

Pilkey and other geologists say pent-up wave energy simply transfers to the unprotected beach at each end of such walls, increasing erosion there and requiring construction of more wall.

In fact, the city has already asked the state for permission to extend the barrier with 600 feet of “geotube,” 12-foot-wide plastic tubing filled with sand.

Despite apparently tough environmental laws, Washington has no coherent policy for dealing with beach erosion, even though states on both coasts have already addressed or resolved the problem.

Four other coastal states--Maine, Rhode Island, and the Carolinas--flatly ban sea walls, according to Pilkey, and stiff regulations in several other states make them all but impossible.

One of those states is Oregon, where Gov. John Kitzhaber recently refused to bend his state’s beach laws to allow a sea wall that might save homes threatened at an exclusive, gated development.

Ocean Shores’ wall, also called a “wave bumper,” is the first on Washington’s oceanfront. It could set a precedent for other troubled spots, from Fort Canby near the Oregon border to as far north as Taholah at the mouth of the Quinault River.

The wall, just north of the city’s north jetty, was erected in October 1996 as the ocean licked at five condominium complexes. Building the wall under emergency decree, the city bypassed the state’s Shoreline Management Act.

Scientists blame erosion on the loss of replenishing sand once flowing from the Columbia River and carried north on ocean currents. Such sand, scientists believe, is now trapped by 14 dams constructed along the river since 1930, shrinking beaches up and down the southwest coast.

The erosion left government officials short on policy and long on confusion. “A lot of this stuff is like going back to the drawing board, and unfortunately we don’t have a lot of time,” says Sue Patnude, city planner for Ocean Shores.

Key state regulators reluctantly lowered environmental hurdles, requiring the wall’s removal after two winters. Fish and Wildlife worried about the habitat of the surf smelt. Ecology fretted about setting a precedent. “If armoring is permitted at this location, we may have great difficulty arguing against it anywhere else on ocean beaches,” state geologist Hugh Shipman told superiors.

The debate continues as the state decides whether to extend the temporary permit or order homeowners to tear out the wall.

Duke’s Pilkey denounces the wall, saying the designers ignored a key principle of modern shoreline engineering: “Always try the inexpensive and soft solution first.” Ocean Shores’ sea wall construction, he says, would be unacceptable in East and Gulf Coast communities, and states with more experience in managing shorelines.

But as consultant Harry Hosey sees it, Pilkey isn’t “living in the real world.” And that’s where Chuck Gale, a state negotiator who championed the sea wall, sees great impact: “People are scared.”