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Salisbury Beach residents have raised funds for dunes to protect their homes from coastal erosion.
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But only three days at high tide the “king” half of the man-made dunes.
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An ocean engineer says the dune did exactly what it was meant to do.
Residents of Salisbury Beach, Massachusetts spent over half a million dollars in a last ditch effort to save their homes from flooding. But after three days, most of his Hail Mary was washed away by the sea.
The project, organized by the non-profit community Salisbury Beach Citizens for Change, built man-made sand dunes along the beach to block flood waters from reaching homeowners’ properties. It took four weeks to build, used 15,000 tons of sand, and cost residents $600,000 out of pocket.
The initiative was prompted by a series of “king” tides that have hit Salisbury Beach since January, SBCFC president Tom Saab told Business Insider. Royal tides are very high tides at over 10 feet in height, according to Saab.
Two back-to-back storms in January raised the tide to over 14 feet, severely eroding the beach. “The symptoms were killed,” said Saab. Homeowners damaged their decks, their stairs, they even had water in their living rooms, he said.
To make matters worse, the storms destroyed the natural dunes that protected the beachfront properties, making them even more vulnerable to the next inevitable king tide.
After those storms, SBCFC approached the State for help, but officials made no commitment to invest in coastal defenses for Salisbury Beach. So, the nonprofit and local residents filed an emergency action to build a man-made barrier dune themselves.
The group raised over half a million dollars in donations from residents and trucked enough sand to fill 3.75 Olympic size swimming pools to replenish the beach. They finished the project on March 7th.
But then, the tide rolled in again.
This video was made available on the SBCFC facebook page shows the final stages of construction for man-made sand dunes on Salisbury Beach.
On March 10, a Nor’easter sent a 13-and-a-half-foot tidal wave up the beach. By the time the water receded, half of their dunes had been cleared. “The $600,000 we put there got clobbered,” said Saab. “We lost $300,000 of sand.”
But thanks to the dunes, their homes were protected. While that quick drop is a big financial loss for homeowners, it doesn’t mean the project has failed, Jens Figlus, a coastal engineer and associate professor at Texas A&M University, told BI.
In fact, he thinks this dune did exactly what it was supposed to. If it wasn’t there, homeowners would probably be picking up the pieces left over from their damaged homes. The dune saved them.
How man-made dunes protect coastal communities
As climate change raises sea levels and increases storm frequency, oceanfront homes are at increased risk. Coastal engineers, like Figlus, are tasked with finding ways to protect them.
One solution is engineered sand dunes. “They’re basically trying to mimic the natural aspect that occurs on many beaches,” Figlus explained.
Dunes act as a buffer between infrastructure on land and the ocean. When beaches erode, coastal homes lose this natural protection. That’s where man-made sand dunes can be filled. They replace what was lost and take the victory from rising seas so that houses do not have to.
“The dune is a sacrificial construction,” said Figlus. When storms hit and tides change, they will erode the dune instead of destroying the front deck or foundation of your home, he explained.
That means that over time, all engineered dunes, just like this one on Salisbury Beach, wash away. In that sense, “Dunes eroding under a storm like this did his work, because if the dunes weren’t there, the houses would be there,” said Figlus.
How quickly that happens is another question.
The fact that a severe storm occurred just three days after the Salisbury dunes were built is “tragic,” Figlus admitted, but completely out of the residents’ control. If this recent storm hadn’t destroyed the dune, there would have been another one eventually.
Is it worth investing $600,000 in sea level protection that could disappear in a few days? It is up to the communities to do that, said Figlus. “You get to a point where it might not be economically feasible to put millions of dollars in front of a few houses and watch it wash away.”
But he still believes man-made dunes are a coastal homeowner’s best defense against rising seas. “They are basically buying time,” he said. “That’s still our best option.”
Saab agreed. But he believes the funding should not come from the pockets of coastal homeowners, it should come from the State. However, his repeated pleas to the state of Massachusetts to fund coastal adaptation projects for Salisbury Beach have gone unanswered.
“Our problem is that the state of Massachusetts refuses to help us. It refuses to give any funds, and the beach would rather collapse,” he said.
Instead of funding beach restoration projects, the state is addressing the problem by closing beach access and communicating with Salisbury residents, according to the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation.
“To ensure public safety, DCR has closed access points 9 and 10 at Salisbury Beach following damage from the recent rainstorms,” a DCR spokesperson told BI in a written statement. “The Healey-Driscoll Administration remains in regular communication with Town representatives, the legislative delegation and the community and will continue to work with them to address the impacts of erosion on the Beach.”
Salisbury beach saved
This week, Salisbury Beach residents met with environmentalists and members of the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation to devise next steps.
About 170 people gathered for the virtual meeting to plead with state officials to fund coastal defenses for Salisbury Beach, Saab said.
As well as funding future dune projects, they also discussed the possibility of allowing dredging along Salisbury Beach, which involves removing sand from the ocean floor and using it to replenish the beach. But right now, Massachusetts is one of the few states on the East Coast where dredging is illegal.
Other solutions proposed by Salisbury Beach residents included the use of “sand trap bags,” which are basically large plastic bags filled with sand that can be used to build a protective wall along the beach.
But State officials have made no commitment to move forward with either of those proposals, Saab said. Now, SBCFC and local residents are focusing on a different solution: planting dune grass. Seeding sand dunes with grass anchors sand in place, strengthening dunes against erosion from waves and wind, according to UMass Amherst.
“We’re buying hundreds of bales of dune grass, and we’re going to start putting grass on what’s left of our dunes,” said Saab. The funding and labor for this new project will come from the residents of Salisbury Beach.
Not all of them are willing to chip in this time, however. Some residents are unwilling to invest more personal funds in efforts to save the beach, Saab said. But he won’t be throwing in the towel anytime soon.
“I will never give up. We will continue to fight – you must continue to protect your beach no matter what,” he said.
Read the original article on Business Insider
