[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
As we saw in yesterday’s post, using a crisis-presuming Boston Globe (December 15, 2013) article, if a beach needs to be built up to protect houses built right along the shoreline, whose responsibility is that?
“It’s called the sand wars,’’ said S. Jeffress Williams, a coastal geologist and scientist emeritus with the United States Geological Survey in Woods Hole and the University of Hawaii. The disputes, happening across the coastal United States, “are only going to get more intense,” he said.
Mr. Williams lecturing on the Nile delta
Massachusetts is now reexamining the possibility of mining sand offshore, and a special commission on coastal erosion has been established by the state Legislature.
Fishermen and their regulators have opposed the mining of offshore sand because they worry it will harm sea life. Environmental officials say bulldozing it across beaches can accelerate erosion and harm bird nesting grounds.
Environmentalists don’t like anything that people bring with them – cars, homes, and cities.
John Ramsey said fishing interests have prevented the conversation here, but elsewhere “sand mining is accepted — and encouraged — as a method of shore protection.”
Fine sand is a lovely substance for a shoreline: it’s smooth, accommodating to the feet, easy to walk upon, and visually fascinating because it changes both color and texture when going from wet to dry and back again.
Have you got a permit for that?
Mining and trucking sand from inland sources to beaches can be more than four times as expensive, damage roads, and produce sand that is often darker and a different texture.
So be it if the sand is a different texture. That is a changing ecosystem.
Some communities, such as in Barnstable County, banded together with the state’s help to buy a dredge that allows them to mine sand-clogged channels and inlets, providing sand that can be as much as 70% below the market rate. But other coastal communities do not have such options and must look elsewhere. Duxbury Beach Reservation Inc., a nonprofit group, spent more than $1 million this year rebuilding dunes with imported quarry sand.
“We are always looking for sand,’’ said Margaret Kearney, president of the group.
Duxbury Beach in a winter storm
That amount is minuscule compared with the billions being spent to protect and replenish beaches farther south in the wake of Hurricane Sandy — yet coastal specialists say demand for sand is guaranteed to rise for public and private beaches.
So whose responsibility is it?
4. Responsibility
Every living creature modifies its environment for its own benefit, usually with minimal reflection on the impact to other creatures.
Ant colony, rendered visible
Ants.
And plenty of biomass underneath too
Termites.
Great for the beavers, not so great for other species
Beavers.
Good thing no hurricanes hit Malibu
As officials frown upon the construction of new seawalls because it can exacerbate erosion, sand is becoming increasingly valuable as the first line of defense against the ocean.
Sand is nature’s shock absorber, and a byproduct of nature’s shocks – created by stones grinding against stones. It’s a non-structural material, to be shoved around by weather. That means sand comes and goes, as rivers and coastlines change shape.
Sand comes, sand goes
Several homeowners were allowed by the state [of New York] and Army Corps to take sand from the beach to place in front of homes last year right before Sandy, as an emergency measure. Yet state and federal officials rarely approve this measure, called beach scraping, because it can harm bird and other wildlife habitat and exacerbate erosion, because it changes a beach’s contours. Now, a larger group of homeowners is expected to apply this year for approval of beach scraping — setting up a possible showdown with regulators.
5. Who pays?
In the end this story, like so many others, is mainly about money, and whether the public interest warrants spending your and my tax dollars protecting some people’s homes.
“We need to protect beaches,’’ said Bob Connors, a Plum Island resident whose Newbury beachfront house is threatened by the sea. The beach, he added, provides “protection for roadways and other structures behind them. If we want to have beaches in Massachusetts we have to sustain them — it’s just like painting a bridge.”
Actually no, Mr. Connors, though credit for a clever bit of sophistry. Beaches exist wherever the ocean meets the shore, and with the wide Atlantic right out there, the ocean will always find the shore somehow.
Many coastal dwellers and communities argue that the state and federal governments need to take care of beaches much the way they maintain roads. But others, often those farther away, say constantly replenishing beaches, many in front of second homes, with taxpayer dollars is a losing proposition.
This is a losing proposition too
And bridges or roadways can be protected whether or not there’s a lovely sandy beach to their waterside.
Recordkeeping is poor on New England sand replenishment, and costs are often shared among multiple government and even private entities. Massachusetts, however, has begun to develop a database to track the use of sand. Using that database and in interviews with coastal communities, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting conservatively estimates more than $40 million in federal, state, and local funds have been spent to place sand on Massachusetts’ public beaches in the past 10 years.
The Globe doesn’t mention that the source its author cites is in fact the author’s employer …. This is all a little
A little too cute: reporter turned advocate …turned reporter?
Among the seaside squabbles, some residents in Salisbury want $300,000 in state taxpayer dollars for sand to help protect private homes from the ocean’s fury.
And in ocean-battered Nantucket and Plum Island, residents want to pay privately for sand to stand sentry against the encroaching ocean — but are running into regulators’ opposition over how best to protect property.
Can’t we compromise somehow?
In fact, and unmentioned by the Globe article, most voters are unwilling to spend government money to protect beaches (AP, March 29, 2013):
More than 4 out of 5 Americans want to prepare now for rising seas and stronger storms from climate change, a new national survey says. But most are unwilling to keep spending money to restore and protect stricken beaches.
The poll by Stanford University released Thursday found that only 1 in 3 people favored the government spending millions to construct big sea walls, replenish beaches or pay people to leave the coast.
Then too, at least one environmental advocacy group has a different perspective:
“I don’t think taxpayers have any idea what they are paying for,’’ said Peter Shelley, senior counsel for the Conservation Law Foundation, a legal advocacy group. He said public dollars are needed to protect Boston’s infrastructure to ensure the region’s economic hub is protected, not “people’s beach houses. These beach replenishment projects are temporary at best.”
Exactly; what is the best use of public dollars?
That depends who you ask, doesn’t it?
Ray Champagne heads the Salisbury Beach Betterment Association, which wants a $300,000 earmark to be used to put sand on the state beach, in front of homes.
Salisbury oceanfront owners spent upward of $5,000 each in the last year to re-create dunes in front of their homes that were washed away by last year’s storms. But the state beach in front of the homes remains low, raising fears that the ocean may come in even faster this nor’easter season and overcome their dunes and flood homes.
Work on a Plum Island and Salisbury Beach renourishment project continued in this October 2010 photo
Their earmark was vetoed by Governor Deval Patrick –
When even Governor Patrick vetoes a bill, that tells you something about its merits.
– but overridden by the Legislature.
The sand people are easily startled, but they will soon be back, and in greater numbers.
