Weighing Best Ways to Fight Beach Erosion

July 21 -- Every summer, thousands of people flock to the coasts to hear the soothing sound of lapping waves. But Gerrard Stoddard has witnessed the destructive side of water’s perpetual motion against the shore.

“I’ve seen severe storms come up to houses and eat the bottom out from underneath them,” says Stoddard, a Fire Island, N.Y., homeowner and vice president of the American Beach and Shore Association. “Some of that sand is replaced, but there’s no question that the island as a whole has eroded significantly.”

The gradual corroding of Fire Island’s shoreline is worrisome for Stoddard, who believes the erosion threatens beaches and homes on Fire Island as well as the mainland that the barrier island is intended to protect.

Fire Island’s shores aren’t the only ones at risk.

Constant Corrosion

Across the country, rising water levels, coupled with a series of intense El Niño-related storms in recent years, have eaten away at the nation’s beaches. A survey released last month by the Federal Emergency Management Agency estimated that erosion will corrode an average of 3 to 4 feet of beachfront every year for the next 60 years.

For districts across the United States, threatened beaches means threatened economies. In California alone, it’s estimated that beaches generate about $12 billion in annual revenue from recreation and tourism.

That’s why a number of regions have spent millions of dollars to scoop up sand from offshore locations and pump it onto existing beaches in a process called beach nourishment.

Among projects pending this summer, New York is considering a $5.6 million beach nourishment project for its barrier islands, including Fire Island. And the state of Delaware has proposed a $7 million beach nourishment project that would be the largest in the state’s history.

But beach nourishment and other, older beach rebuilding measures have come under fire in recent years by geologists, who claim they are ineffective, expensive and sometimes even destructive.

“We simply cannot engineer our way out of this problem even though we seem think we can,” says Orrin Pilkey, a geologist at Duke University who has been an outspoken critic of beach rebuilding programs.