Shrinking Shores

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

Patricia and Francis O'Malley bought their summer home in Long Island's fashionable Westhampton Beach four years ago. "There used to be a dune in front and a beach in front of that," Patricia recalls. "The very first winter we had a horrible storm, and we lost the dune." Two years later gale- force winds blew the house's roof and top floor off. "We rebuilt a whole new house. Since then, we've lost 8 ft. of sand." Now, she complains, "there's water under the house. The steps are gone. The houses on both sides of ours are gone." She adds bitterly, "And they say you can't lose in real estate." The O'Malleys figure their home will wash away completely by next year. The potential loss: hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Jan and Bill Alford's troubles began during the devastating winter storms of 1982. That January a 15-ft. chunk of earth slid away from in front of their bluff-top home in Bolinas, Calif., about 30 miles north of San Francisco, and crashed to the beach below. A year later another 15 ft. vanished, leaving the house just a few feet from the edge of a 160-ft. cliff. So, in the summer of 1984, the Alfords moved their 1,300-sq.-ft. house 32 ft. back from the edge. Then came Valentine's Day 1985. Following unusually high tides, 30 ft. of land dropped into the sea. The foundation of the house remained just a foot from the precipice, with nothing but air between the guest-room deck and the surf below.

"We loved the lot," says Jan. "On a clear day, you could see all the way to San Francisco. We tried everything to save it, but the erosion just didn't stop." Last autumn the Alfords moved their home again, this time hauling it a third of a mile to a new site more than 300 ft. from the cliffside. The cost of the two moves: $80,000.

The problem is hardly limited to New York and California. The scourge of coastal erosion is felt worldwide, especially in such countries as Britain, West Germany and the Netherlands, where oceanfront property has been heavily developed. In the U.S., entire coastal areas are disappearing into the sea. Virtually every mile of shoreline is affected in every state that borders an ocean, as well as those on the five Great Lakes, where large chunks of waterfront property have been lost or damaged due to record-high water levels in recent years. Some 86% of California's 1,100 miles of exposed Pacific shoreline is receding at an average rate of between 6 in. and 2 ft. a year (the cover photo shows the coast northwest of Santa Barbara). Monterey Bay, south of San Francisco, loses as much as 5 ft. to 15 ft. annually. Cape Shoalwater, Wash., about 70 miles west of Olympia, has been eroding at the rate of more than 100 ft. a year since the turn of the century; its sparsely settled sand dunes have retreated an astounding 12,000 ft., or more than two miles, since 1910.

Parts of Chambers County, Texas, have lost 9 ft. of coast to Galveston Bay in the past nine months. Louisiana has shrunk by 300 sq. mi. since 1970; entire parishes may disappear in the next 50 years. At Boca Grande Pass, an inlet on the Gulf Coast of Florida, some 200 million cu. yds. of sand have been carried seaward by the tidal currents. In North Carolina, where erosion this year alone has cut into beachfront property up to 60 ft. in places, the venerable Cape Hatteras lighthouse is in peril of the encroaching sea. Soon it must either be moved or surrounded by a wall. Otherwise, it is likely to suffer the fate of the Morris Island light, near Charleston, S.C. Once on solid land, it now stands a quarter of a mile offshore.

Coastal erosion is only one of the natural processes that have altered the world's shorelines ever since the oceans first formed some 3 billion years ago. Over geologic time, the daily scouring action of waves and the pounding of storms, as well as the rise and fall of ocean levels, have changed coastlines dramatically. "Sandy beaches are dynamic. They are meant to erode," says Richard Delaney, chairman of the Coastal States Organization, a group that advocates better coastal management in 30 states (including those that border the Great Lakes) and five territories. The problem, however, is Americans' passion for living and vacationing at the seashore. That has led to a boom in the development of U.S. coastal areas since World War II. "When you ; put a permanent structure onto a piece of land that is by nature mobile," says Delaney, "you have a very serious problem."

"If we had known 30 years ago what we know now, New Jersey and much of the rest of the country would be in better shape," admits Governor Thomas Kean, a strong believer in shoreline protection. "We wouldn't have built in those areas, and we wouldn't allow people to build in those areas." Even now, however, billions of dollars worth of coastal development -- some would say runaway overdevelopment -- cannot simply be abandoned. Says Chris Soller, management assistant of the National Park Service's Fire Island National Seashore, off Long Island: "It's a tough tightrope to walk. Our whole concept of property rights clashes with the natural process."

Along with property, receding U.S. coastlines threaten the survival of shore-dwelling wildlife. Florida's sea turtles, for example, including loggerheads, green turtles and others, cross hundreds of miles of ocean to lay eggs on the same sections of the same beaches. If the beach has eroded badly, a turtle is forced by instinct to use it anyway, dooming the eggs to be washed away or eaten by seabirds and raccoons. Least terns, Gulf Coast shellfish and beach-spawning fish, like the California grunion, are also in danger.

In the past few decades, as property owners began to demand that coastal areas stay put -- by buying up seaside property and erecting multimillion- dollar beachfront houses, condominiums, hotels and resorts on the shifting sand -- the natural process of erosion began to matter to growing numbers of Americans. Along with the roads, parking lots, airfields and commercial interests that serve them, development projects not only put more people and property in harm's way but also unwittingly accelerated the damage to U.S. coastal areas.

How? On the West Coast, houses perched atop cliffs create new runoff patterns for rainfall and irrigation; combined with seepage from septic systems, the drainage weakens the land itself. On the East and Gulf coasts, the major problem is destruction of beaches and sand dunes that normally check the ocean's force. Of particular concern are the 295 barrier islands -- strips of sand dune, marsh and sometimes forest -- that protect most of the U.S. coast from Maine to Texas. Not surprisingly, they are considered prime development spots: Atlantic City, N.J., Virginia Beach, Va., and Hilton Head, S.C., among others, were all built on barrier islands.

It is mainly the dunes, explains the National Park Service's Soller, that keep coastal areas, including barrier islands, intact. "The natural process is for dunes to roll over on themselves," he says. When the ocean breaks through, "what was once the secondary dune becomes the primary dune. The beach retreats as the ocean level rises. When you have houses on the beach, there's no place for the dunes to move."

In Ocean City, Md., developers hoping to reinvent Miami Beach, where a single mile of oceanfront is now worth an estimated $500 million, began building high-rises on the dune line in the 1970s. So that people on the lower floors could have an unimpeded view of the ocean, the dunes were simply bulldozed away. Since then, the ocean has come to see the tourists: beneath many buildings, pilings are exposed to the waves. At Garden City, S.C., just south of Myrtle Beach, where big condos dot the waterfront, crumbled seawalls and wrecked swimming pools testify to the power of storms unchecked by protective dunes.

Sand dunes can also be destroyed in subtler ways. For a dune to form in the first place, sand must somehow be trapped, much as a snow fence traps drifting snow. That something is dune grass. After the dunes form, the roots anchor the sand in place. "Dune grass is pretty hardy stuff," explains Stephen Leatherman, a University of Maryland coastal-erosion expert. "It can take salt spray and high winds. But it just never evolved to take heavy pedestrian traffic or dune buggies." Since the plants depend on chlorophyll in their green leafy parts to convert sunlight into food, he says, and since there is only so much food reserve in the roots, "a couple of weekends with a few hundred people walking back and forth to the beach, or a single pass from an off-road vehicle, kills off the dune grass."

On the Gulf Coast, the erosion of dry land is only part of the problem. Vast areas of wetlands normally protected by barrier islands off Louisiana are disappearing as well. In both Louisiana and Texas, where channels deep enough for barges have been cut through marshes, the dredging and waves caused by ship and boat traffic have accelerated the normal process of shoreline loss. What is more, salt water from the Gulf of Mexico has flowed into the marshes, endangering local fisheries.

Along a broad expanse of southern Louisiana, between the Atchafalaya and Mississippi rivers, a million acres of wetlands have disappeared since 1900. ^ Scientists now estimate that an additional 60 sq. mi. are vanishing every year -- a rate that could double by 1995. "It's a catastrophe that's happening to the wetlands. You're looking at the genocide of an entire ecosystem," says Oliver Houck, a Louisiana environmental lawyer. Indeed, the loss of the state's marshes affects more than just local residents: the area provides almost 30% of the nation's fish harvest and 40% of the fur catch, and is a winter habitat for some two-thirds of the migratory birds in the Mississippi flyway. Says Oysterman Matthew Farac, speaking of the 32-mile stretch from the mouth of the Mississippi to Empire, La.: "There is no land left. It's all gone now."

In the bayou country, the intrusion of salt water from the Gulf has been aided by miles of canals and pipeline rights-of-way dredged by oil and gas companies. Ordinarily, much of the salty water would be forced out of marsh areas by seasonal freshwater overflows from the nearby Mississippi. But the river now rarely floods, thanks to massive levees built along its banks to protect riverside land. The combination of saltwater intrusion and freshwater cutoff, says Houck, leaves the wetlands "caught in a double whammy. You couldn't do a better job of screwing up Louisiana if you planned it."Wilma Dusenberry, a Chauvin, La., restaurant owner, reflects the fears of many who depend on the bounty of the wetlands: "If we lose the marsh, we lose our livelihoods."

Shoreline erosion, however, is exacerbated by less well understood -- and perhaps more ominous -- factors. Over the past 100 years, the ocean has risen more than a foot, a rate faster than at any time in the past millennium. Sea- level fluctuations are part of a natural cycle, but scientists suspect that this one may be different. They believe it is magnified by a fundamental change in world climate caused by a phenomenon called the greenhouse effect. Since the Industrial Revolution, people have been burning greater quantities of fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas. One by-product is carbon dioxide, which has entered the atmosphere in ever increasing amounts.

While carbon dioxide allows the warming rays of the sun to reach the earth, it blocks the excess heat that would normally reradiate out into space. As a result, the atmosphere is gradually growing warmer, thus melting the polar ice caps and raising sea levels. It may be years before scientists determine just how significant the greenhouse effect is -- but they know the process is accelerating. Sea levels are expected to rise at least a foot in just another half-century.

While the oceans are rising, some coastal land is actually sinking. Much of the East Coast, for example, is made up of silt sediments deposited from rivers, bays and inlets over the past 5,000 to 8,000 years. As the sediments gradually compress under their own weight, the surface sinks lower. On the Gulf Coast, a process called subsidence, caused in part by the extraction of groundwater and petroleum from subterranean layers of sand and clay, has forced the land, already virtually at sea level, to drop 3 ft. a century. In all, the coastline of the northeastern U.S. may recede an average of 200 ft. in the next 50 years; in some parts of Florida, where the land is flatter, the sea might move in as much as 500 ft.

There is an additional complication on the West Coast. Periodically, a warm- water current in the Pacific shifts eastward in a pattern called El Nino, a Spanish eponym for the Christ Child, so called because it appears off South America around Christmastime. The result: higher sea levels, unusually high tides and severe winter storms along the western coast of the Americas. During the most recent major occurrence of El Nino, in the early 1980s, sea levels along the California coast rose an average of 5 in. With the added tides and storms, the effects were catastrophic. Thomas Terich, a professor of geography at Western Washington University, warns that even a slight permanent rise in the average sea level could wreak worse havoc. Says he: "The sites with the highest value -- the sandspits and low beachfront -- are going to be severely threatened."

For all the danger, people still want to own seafront property. And why not? They are still protected -- and encouraged -- by knowing that they can write off storm damage on their taxes.* In many cases, they can depend on federal flood insurance for at least partial reimbursement in case of disaster. Environmentalists believe the insurance program actually encourages building in high-risk locales. Says Town Councilman Neil Wright, of Surfside Beach, S.C.: "It's an incentive to build in dangerous places. The feds need to change the rules."

Federal flood insurance has traditionally reimbursed owners for rebuilding, rather than for relocating houses to safer ground. The owners of the Sea Vista Motel on Topsail Island, N.C., whose property was damaged in 1985 by Hurricane < Gloria, wanted to move inland, but their federal insurance would not cover the $150,000 cost. It would, however, pay $220,000 for repairs and renovations. The motel stayed put. Then came last winter's New Year's storm, which tore out all 15 of the first-floor units. Says Manager Frances Ricks: "There's a feeling we can't win."

That does not stop people from trying. The growing damage to oceanfront property has generated a host of makeshift solutions to erosion. On Galveston Bay, desperate ranchers have positioned junked cars on the shore to prevent the waters from washing away roads. Conservation officers are planting dense patches of cordgrass just offshore in an effort to buffer the bay's clay banks from the relentlessly lapping waters. To protect the transplants until they take hold, conservationists have jury-rigged a protective barrier of old Air Force parachutes in the water to absorb and attenuate the force of the waves. Harry Cook, a Texas shrimper, is considering wire mesh and old tires to keep the bay waters from chewing away any more of his bluffs, which he is losing at the rate of 10 ft. yearly. On Long Island, beach residents shore up dunes with driftwood and old tires. And in Carlsbad, Calif., the community has come up with a number of ideas, from planting plastic kelp to laying a sausage-like tube along the beach in order to trap sand normally washed away during high tide.

There are more substantive approaches to beach protection. When properly designed and built, they can slow beach erosion. Nonetheless, most are ineffective in the long run and can actually exacerbate damage. A seawall, for example, may protect threatened property behind it, but it often hastens the retreat of the beach in front as waves dash against the wall and scour away sand. Louis Sodano, mayor of Monmouth Beach, N.J., knows the process firsthand. "When I moved here 28 years ago, you could walk the whole beach," he remembers. "Now the waves slap against the wall. We've lost 100 ft. of beach in the past 28 years."

A variant on the seawall that can also hasten erosion is riprap -- rocks and boulders piled into makeshift barriers to absorb the force of incoming waves. While seawalls and riprap run parallel to the beach, groin fields extend directly out into the water. Made up of short piers of stone extending from the beach and spaced 100 yds. or so apart, they can slow erosion by trapping sand carried by crosscurrents. But down current, the lack of drifting sand can result in worse erosion. "It's like robbing Peter to pay Paul," says Leatherman -- a concept the O'Malleys of Westhampton Beach understand all too well, since it was a neighboring groin field that robbed their beach of replenishing sand.

Jetties can cause beach larceny on an even grander scale. Long concrete or rock structures, they jut out into the water to keep inlets and harbors navigable by keeping sand and silt from drifting in. Like groin fields, jetties can keep sand from replenishing beaches down current. The construction 90 years ago of a pair of jetties to improve the harbor at Charleston, S.C., altered currents and natural sand drift so drastically that there is no beach left at high tide at nearby Folly Beach. In Florida an estimated 80% to 85% of the beach erosion on the state's Atlantic Coast is caused by the maintenance of 19 inlets, all but one of them made or modified by man to link the open ocean and inland waterways.

There is one anti-erosion scheme, however, that can be effective: beach nourishment, which simply involves replacing sand that has washed away. Between 1976 and 1980, a ten-mile stretch of Miami Beach was rejuvenated with a brand-new, 300-ft.-wide beach. Oceanside, Calif., has struggled for more than 40 years to maintain its sandy beaches, ever since the creation of a boat basin at nearby Camp Pendleton during World War II interrupted the flow of sand down the coast. More than 13 million cu. yds. of sand have been dredged from offshore or trucked in from nearby rivers to replenish the Oceanside beaches.

Beach nourishment, however, is expensive. Just off the southern tip of Key Biscayne, Fla., an Army Corps of Engineers' hydraulic pump ran 24 hours a day, from mid-April to early July, sucking up sand from the ocean bottom and piping it to the beach half a mile away. By the time the dredge had finished, it had moved some 400,000 cu. yds. of sand at a cost of $1.55 million, much of it from the pockets of local businesses. In the early 1980s, the Army Corps brought in sand to widen the dwindling strip at Wrightsville Beach, N.C., by 200 ft., as well to construct and regrass new dunes. Price tag: $2.95 million. That is small change, however, compared with a program begun in 1976 for the New York City Rockaway beach project. Total cost for the twelve-year, 11.5 million-cu.-yd. project: $52 million in federal, state and city funds.

But even beach replenishment is a temporary measure. At the sprawling resort complex of Myrtle Beach, S.C., the community had little choice but to haul in 854,000 cu. yds. of new sand along ten miles of beach that had dwindled to a 10-ft. width in places, creating a glistening 100-ft.-wide strip at high tide. Ex-Mayor Erick Ficken says the community will be paying for the $4.5 million project over the next ten years. Naturally, he wonders, "How long will it last?" There are no guarantees. John Weingart, director of coastal resources for New Jersey's department of environmental protection, recalls one of that state's first replenishment projects. The 2 million-cu.- yd., $5 million nourishment of the beach at Ocean City was unfortunately timed; it was completed just before the stormy fall season. "Within ten days of finishing," he says, "we had several really bad local storms. Over 60% of the sand was washed away."

In Louisiana, the Army Corps has several ideas for reclaiming wetlands endangered by the encroaching sea. Among them: a series of major diversion schemes that will pipe fresh water from the Mississippi and spread it over marshland areas. By early 1988, the corps hopes to launch the first large project, a $25 million culvert system that will fan fresh river water out on the marshes near Breton Sound, which have been overrun and heavily damaged by saltwater intrusion. Says Cletis Wagahoff, chief of the corps's planning division for the New Orleans district: "It's not the ultimate answer -- I don't foresee one -- but I'm confident we can slow erosion down." A program already under way has created 3,000 acres of new marshland with sediment dredged up in the process of maintaining waterways.

Despite such efforts, anti-erosion measures that might be expected to last for years can be wiped out by a single big storm. The worst to hit the Northeast in this century was the hurricane of 1938, which killed at least 600 people on the East Coast. Property damage was assessed at $3.2 billion (in 1987 dollars). A future recurrence of that kind of debacle worries experts like Norbert Psuty, director of the Center for Coastal and Environment Studies at Rutgers, who notes that the eastern U.S. has enjoyed the relative peace of a "low-storm phase" for the past 25 years. He believes the lull cannot last. "Because of continued development in high-hazard areas," he predicts, "the longer this phase continues, the worse the damage will be when a big storm finally hits." Gered Lennon, a geologist with the South Carolina Coastal Council, concurs: "There's always a bigger storm down the road."

Restricting shoreline development has fallen largely to individual states. Since 1971, 29 of the 30 states with coasts have adopted coastal zone management programs (the lone holdout: Texas). New Jersey and New York, for example, have programs to prevent beach erosion and stem development in high- risk areas. The former is welcomed by property owners and tax-base-hungry municipalities; the latter is not -- and is, therefore, politically difficult to maintain. Although a 1981 law permits New York State to redesignate coastal areas "not for development" after major storm damage, a 1985 amendment requires a twelve-month delay before redesignation, leaving ample time for rebuilding.

In North Carolina, developers cannot build large projects any closer than 120 ft. from the first line of dunes. The state outlaws permanent seawalls and other man-made barriers, a policy irreverently referred to as "fall back or fall in." Florida controls seaside construction by requiring approval by the Governor and state cabinet for any new building closer than about 300 ft. to the water's edge. For buildings granted past exemptions, Florida can and does take a stingy line in doling out reconstruction permits after hurricane or storm damage. Michigan offers low-interest loans in order to help move houses back from the shoreline. In South Carolina, on the other hand, there are scarcely any limits to where builders can build. They can go just about to the surf's edge. If their property is threatened, they can usually get a permit to erect a seawall.

A major problem in the battle against coastal erosion is the lack of statewide coordination. Says Dick McCarthy, a member of the California coastal commission: "We have a series of fractionalized local efforts that has each community involved in its own projects, often without taking into account the effects its protective measures may have on adjacent areas."

The Federal Government's record on beach protection is spotty. In 1982 Congress removed about 600 miles of coastline and 187 islands -- about 1% of U.S. coastal areas -- from eligibility for federal flood insurance on new construction. The Senate is considering a bill, passed by the House in June, that would help people relocate their houses away from eroding beaches. But the Reagan Administration is cool toward a proposal now before Congress, introduced in March by Democratic Senator John Breaux of Louisiana, that would identify all threatened coastal wetlands and provide as much as $40 million over two years for their protection.

One problem with getting the Federal Government involved in coastal management is that there is no single responsible Government agency. The Army Corps of Engineers comes closest, but it is often hamstrung by its dual mission: it is charged with both protecting vulnerable wetlands and keeping waterways navigable. In Louisiana, complains Environmental Lawyer Houck, when there is a conflict, the waterways win every time. This does not have to be the case, contends Bill Wooley, planning chief for the corps's Galveston office. While he concedes the task is formidable, he insists that "we can manage both. It's a matter of how much we want to spend."

Environmentalists criticize the Army Corps for relying on anti-erosion schemes -- seawalls, jetties and groin fields -- that often cause more problems than they solve. "The Army Corps of Engineers has had a long, checkered history," says Gary Griggs, a professor of coastal geology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Still, he admits, the Army Engineers "have done better recently." Says Charles Rooney, the corps's chief of civil projects in New York: "The state of the art in coastal engineering has improved. We understand more than we used to. We build smaller to allow the bypassing of sand. We try to be less disruptive. Done correctly, groin construction and jetty construction can stabilize beaches without causing problems."

The simplest and most effective response to coastal erosion would be to prevent people from living at the edge of the sea. The nonprofit, Washington- based Nature Conservancy encourages just that by buying threatened coastal areas and refusing to develop them. The group has made 32 separate purchases in eight states, sheltering more than 250,000 acres, including 13 barrier islands off the coast of Virginia that it bought for $10 million. Says Orrin Pilkey, a Duke University geologist and one of the country's top experts on beach erosion: "Retreat is the ultimate solution. Property owners must pack up and move."

That is not likely. "Abandonment is a joke," scoffs Folly Beach Mayor Richard Beck, noting that his island is almost completely developed and that tourism is just too valuable an income source. Indeed, unless it is voluntary, any restriction of land use, even for good environmental reasons, must respect , property rights. Two recent Supreme Court decisions served as timely reminders that local governments have a constitutional responsibility to protect property owners. Even so, those who resist a balanced policy of coastal management, whether they are motivated by greed or by genuine concern for the well-being of coastal communities, will probably lose in the end -- to the sea. Says Coastal Geologist Griggs: "In the long run, everything we do to stop erosion is only temporary." John Tesvich, a Louisiana oysterman, perhaps puts it more feelingly, "The land has shrunk. It looks like a lake out there. My heart sinks to see the land get lost to the sea."

FOOTNOTE: *Since damage lowers the value of an investment, owners can deduct the amount as a capital loss.

With reporting by Christine Gorman/New York, Nancy Seufert/Bolinas and Richard Woodbury/Topsail Island