Note: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers this month begins the most ambitious and expensive beach-renourishment (or reconstruction) project in Flagler County history, along the shore from North 6th Street in Flagler Beach to the north border of Gamble Rogers State Recreation Area. When Flagler County signed the agreement in 2019, it was conceived as a 50-year, $100 million plan, requiring similar “renourishments” every 11 years. By 2023, the cost of the original renourishment had doubled and the plan itself had to be redesigned. The county had money in hand only for that initial segment beginning this month.
The county has not secured future funding. Sea-level rise and the frequency and the violence of storms mean the 11-year span between renourishments is likely unrealistic. (See: “Exorbitant Costs to Save Beaches, and Doing Nothing is Not an Option, Flagler Commissioners Are Told” and “$27 Million Contract Awarded as 9-Month Dredging to Rebuild Beach North and South of Pier Starts in Weeks.”)
By Craig Pittman
When my kids were little, they loved visiting the beach. They’d splash around, build sandcastles, and collect seashells.
But one afternoon, one of my boys let out a scream that brought me on the run. He’d picked up an impressive lightning whelk shell to add to his collection, but that turned out to be a mistake.
“It squirted me!” he hollered in surprise.
I pointed out the “foot” of the living creature that still occupied the shell. That’s what squirted you, I said. Then I suggested we take some pictures of the shell and put it back where he found it so this mollusk could mosey along the way it wanted.
I think of that story every time I hear about some Florida community that’s planning to “renourish” its beach by hauling in sand from somewhere else.
Beaches are more than just a party spot for Frankie and Annette, or a place to build sandcastles and collect shells (squirting or not). They’re part of a system of barrier islands that surround our state’s coastline like a team of bouncers outside a club. They serve as barriers to protect the mainland from crashing storms and their surges.
To do so means they must move around, waxing here, waning there. They’re pushed and pulled as the waves wash their sand this way and that. Scientists call this rope-a-dope routine “littoral drift.” Literally!
Like that whelk my son found, the barrier islands have a natural purpose that doesn’t necessarily match what we humans want.
This wasn’t a problem until we started building stuff on top of them, trying to cash in on the high-priced ocean view. Houses, shops, condos — none of those could move the way the islands did. They have to stay in one spot or they crumble.
The barrier islands keep moving, which we foolish humans label “beach erosion.” We keep trying to bend nature to our will by trucking in lots of sand from somewhere else for millions of dollars.
The people who pay for it often don’t live anywhere near the water. Ever wonder where your tax dollars go? Like college kids on spring break, lots of them go to the beach — even if you don’t. “3,600 truckloads of sand: How Hillsboro Beach plans to beef up its eroded beach,” the South Florida Sun Sentinel said recently about one $5 million project.
“In fight against erosion, Pass-a-Grille Beach will get a multimillion-dollar influx of sand,” the Tampa Bay Business Journal announced.
Meanwhile, WJXT-TV reported, “Army Corps of Engineers launches 16-week renourishment project for Duval County beaches.” The cost of that project, which will dump new sand on 10 miles of beaches: $32 million.
The Corps, the government agency in charge of playing in such big sandboxes, always claims they’re “saving” the beach from disappearing. They aren’t, says Orrin Pilkey, a Duke University geology professor who’s an expert on beaches and barrier islands.
“We’re just saving a lot of people’s investments,” he told me.
It’s not cheap, either — especially these days, when our elected leaders keep calling in the Army to recreate a beach that just washed away.
“Treasure Coast governments have spent well over $100 million during the last five years on beach-renourishment work along our shorelines,” TCPalm.com noted in one editorial.
In a news story last month, the same paper laid out the problem in plain language: “Millions spent each year repairing beaches, only to have storms, erosion hit them again.”
I noticed these projects seem to be happening a lot more often than they used to, so I asked several experts about it. They said my observation was correct.
Once you could re-sand a Florida beach and you wouldn’t need to do it again for a decade or so, said Wayne Daltry, formerly the “smart growth” coordinator for Lee County. Not anymore. He summed up the reason in just three words.
“Nothing has changed from the futile and expensive sand rearrangement as the public agencies try to replace the littoral drift,” he told me, “except that it has gotten more expensive with sea level rise.”
With the hurricane season that starts Saturday predicted to be “extraordinary,” get ready to see lots more new sand washed away this summer.
A sandy Band-Aid
“I don’t like sand,” whines Anakin Skywalker in his pre-Vader form in Attack of the Clones. “It’s coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere.” (If only the Rebels had attacked him with a sand bomb, they would have beaten the Empire much more quickly.)
Unlike Darth, we Floridians loooooooove our sand. Twenty years ago, a state legislator told me, “Sand is to Florida what snow is to Colorado.”
Engineers have been using new sand to boost the size of beaches nationwide since 1922. That’s when Coney Island needed some “enhancement,” the way some fading Hollywood stars turn to plastic surgery to roll back their odometers.
Since then, from 1922 through May 2018, “more than 818 miles of beaches were restored using in excess of 1.5 billion cubic yards of material,” says the American Sand and Beach Preservation Association (more on them in a bit). “The total cost of these projects is estimated at $6.1 billion.”
Six years later, you can bet those numbers are considerably higher, especially since some places have had to be redone repeatedly.
“It was not a good idea a century ago [and] it is even more baffling today,” historian Gary Mormino, author of “Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida,” which includes an extensive history of how Florida regards its beaches, told me in an email this week. He compared these projects to “giving billionaire sports moguls new sport palaces.”
Take a wild guess which state has called on the federal taxpayers to fix its dwindling beaches the most in the past decade. If you said that it was the one whose name starts with F, give yourself an A+.
California is No. 1 for the century, said Nicole Elko, executive director of the sand and beach association, mostly for work it did in the 1960s and 1970s. Florida runs a very close second, she said.
You’d be amazed at how many Florida politicians who call themselves fiscal conservatives suddenly turn into fans of free-spending, big-government programs when the subject is beach renourishment. Back up that star-spangled dump truck, Uncle Sam!
More than half of Florida’s 825 miles of beaches are now classified as “critically eroded,” thus making them eligible for renourishment, said Emma Haydocy of the environmental group Surfrider Foundation.
She calls beach renourishment “a sandy Band-Aid.”
As climate change makes the sea level creep higher, applying that Band-Aid “happens more frequently and is more expensive,” Haydocy told me. Higher seas make even smaller storms more destructive than they used to be, she pointed out.
For instance, when Hurricane Nicole (no relation to Elko) made landfall on Florida’s East Coast in 2022, it was rated a mere Category 1. I have known longtime Floridians who regarded a Cat 1 as barely sufficient justification for throwing a hurricane party.
But this one hit at high tide, and as a result “caused devastating storm surge and coastal flooding along the east central Florida coast,” says the National Weather Service.
“Projects where sand had previously been placed were completely undone in just a couple of hours,” Haydocy said.
Butts on the beach
If you’re writing about beach renourishment, you have to call the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association.
The association, founded in 1926, represents the 470 communities nationwide that depend on these renourishment projects for the continued existence of their beaches. No beach means no tourists.
“These communities need butts on the beaches to sustain themselves,” said Elko, who earned her Ph.D. in geology from the University of South Florida while serving as the coastal coordinator for Pinellas County.
One thing she said that surprised me is that Florida used to obtain all its sand for rebuilding beaches from offshore dredging — but not anymore.
Now, she said, most Florida beaches are being rebuilt using sand from the ancient dunes that form the Lake Wales Ridge, which runs down the spine of the state.
The state’s own website on the ridge says it’s “home to one of the highest number of rare plants and animals in the United States” and that “85% of the original, dry uplands habitat on the Lake Wales Ridge has been lost to agriculture and development.” But I’m sure mining what’s left just to build up our beaches isn’t causing a single problem, or the Florida Department of Environmental Who Cares wouldn’t allow it.
Elko told me that climate change and sea level rise are indeed tearing apart lots of rebuilt beaches before the sand can invade too many swimsuits.
She also agreed with Haydocy that a major problem is with some of the buildings on the beaches. Some have been built in places that make them extremely vulnerable to rising seas. They need saving more often than Mary Jane Watson in a Spider-Man movie.
Yet she didn’t foresee any changes to our policy of doing whatever is necessary to save those places, no matter how foolish it may seem.
“In the next decade, I think we’ll keep doing what we’re doing,” she said
But what would happen if we let some of those places fall into the ocean?
Dollars down the drain
This is known as “managed retreat,” through which we as a society back away from some of our worst building decisions and save our millions in tax dollars for more worthy projects.
Pilkey, the Duke scientist, is one of the first people I ever heard — more than 20 years ago — talking about the concept of managed retreat. He even wrote a recent book on the subject: “Retreat from a Rising Sea: Hard Choices in an Age of Climate Change.”
The concept sounded crazy in the ’90s, this idea of letting some buildings fall into the sea. When Pilkey and other geologists first brought it up “we really got kicked around,” he told me. “I got some real hate mail.”
Now it’s become an accepted practice in some parts of the world. When a storm called Xynthia hit the French Atlantic coast in 2010 and 47 people died in the flooding, France bought what was left of the houses at pre-flood prices and destroyed them.
“We will not let people move back into homes situated in areas where there is a life-threatening risk,” then-President Nicolas Sarkozy said.
Our approach in Florida has been somewhat … oh, let’s just say “different.”
The governor and Legislature have not only deleted the words “climate change” from most of the places they appeared in state law. They’ve also blocked local governments from trying to keep people from rebuilding in the exact same spot as the homes and stores that were washed away in prior storms.
The only managed retreat in Florida is the retreat from common sense.
Instead, our “fiscal conservatives” will continue to spend our tax money on rebuilding beaches sure to be washed away in the next storm, which is one step removed from just pouring dollars down the drain.
We don’t have an official sport in Florida, but if we did, I think it would be pounding sand.
Craig Pittman is a native Floridian. In 30 years at the Tampa Bay Times, he won numerous state and national awards for his environmental reporting. He is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller Oh, Florida! How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country, which won a gold medal from the Florida Book Awards. His latest, published in 2021, is The State You’re In: Florida Men, Florida Women, and Other Wildlife. In 2020 the Florida Heritage Book Festival named him a Florida Literary Legend. Craig is co-host of the “Welcome to Florida” podcast. He lives in St. Petersburg with his wife and children.
Jeremy says
When is the last time your glass of ice water overflowed because the ice melted? Why do all the people that sell “sea level rising” stories own property on the beach? It’s erosion, it’s not the sea level rising. Calling me foolish because you believe some absolute nonsense, you paraquat.
PeachesMcGee says
Mother Nature gets her way. Always.
JW says
Interesting!
This is the sad part of America. We like to play in the sand box but have no idea about how to preserve the sand box for the future.
Why: it is ignorance as a result of an inferior educational system (K-12). It is only visible if you look from the outside in (from Europe for example). Most Americans don’t even know what foreign educational systems offer. Everything is better here, right?
Other countries INVEST in the future of their people; America invests primarily in its military to be protected from foreign infiltration. We invest very little in domestic infrastructure, including education, to support our people.
The internet offers many tools (Wikipedia) that will show you the long history in other countries of water management and ongoing current investment in protecting its people from rising sea levels, storms and the impact of climate change in general.
It amazes me that, in our county, people who have their home at the coast love the beach restoration but a much better investment would be building a more permanent wall to protect us for a much longer time. But, oh no, you can not take away (part) my view of the beach and ocean.
THINK about that.
We urgently need MUCH better education (and less sports) and teach young people to think. SAT tests are a joke (sorry).
This reminds me of of a quote by W.E.B Du Bois (1905) who said:
“EITHER THE UNITED STATES WILL DESTROY IGNORANCE or IGNORANCE WILL DESTROY THE UNITED STATES”
How far did we get from 1905? Many politicians and religious leaders rather opt for doing away with democracy and focus on sports and entertainment so the voters are happy?
Please THINK about this before you are going to the voting booth! Substance matters.
The Villa Beach Walker says
I’m not a climate change denier. Actually I’m a believer that society should do more to protect our natural environment and especially the shoreline. But when it comes to the rate of sea level change in the Atlantic Ocean over the past 30 years if you look at data from NASA you’ll see that the rate is increasing.
https://sealevel.nasa.gov/faq/8/is-the-rate-of-sea-level-rise-increasing
But the annual measurement of change is 3.4 millimeters per year. That’s .13 inches. That is increasing but in increments of 1/10 of an inch or less.
Clearly storms and hurricanes that hug the coastline make more of an impact on beach erosion. But that’s where our elected officials should step in to create and enforce more reasonable building regulations that prohibits new construction within 200 – 250 feet of the high tide line and at a minimum of 10-15 feet above sea level. Moving buildings back from the beach will aid efforts to stabilize the shoreline and in the long run save billions of dollars in storm related insurance claims.
In the short term what every citizen can do is treat the beach as the valuable resource that it is. Don’t park on the dunes. Don’t leave litter beachside. Pick up debris that washes ashore and dispose of it properly.
Hammock Huck says
Here’s a thought for obsessive climate people and those familiar with the Beverly Beach Camptown seawall. How many beach renourishment projects have occurred there since the seawall was built nearly 50 years ago? For you simpletons, it’s NONE. One hundred million dollars of sand pumped onto the beach when the 1.3 miles of sea wall built along north A1A cost $24 million? Whoever controls the decision-making and checkbook must move on and let commonsense take over. Stop pandering and protecting the wealthy’s investments on the taxpayer’s dime. Build a wall and be done with it. Sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it?
Pogo says
@The missing data
…the usual suspects omitted.
https://www.google.com/search?q=coastal+land+sinking
(sea rising) + (land sinking) = kiss your dumb ass goodbye.
Lance Carroll says
The sea level is rising. The ice isn’t really in the glass at this point. Although, if you add and add ice to the glass, it will overflow. Bringing in more sand will not stop the ice from being added to the glass.
Respectfully,
Lance Carroll
Bill C says
Just keep adding more and more ice and see what happens!
Mr. Bill says
As Johnny Carson used to say…”I did not know this”…
A national research paper mentioned in Burbank’s article says the federal government gets $230 in taxes for every dollar spent on renourishment projects.
from: https://www.theinvadingsea.com/2024/05/22/beach-renourishment-cost-florida-coastal-erosion-treasure-coast-sand-hurricanes-tourism/
Sherry says
@. . . well jeremy, you actually are uneducated. Please read the evidence regarding climate change from the actual scientists at NASA: https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/evidence/
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/activity/whats-causing-sea-level-rise-land-ice-vs-sea-ice/
Let me put it very simply for you. Melting glaciers are on land, often in mountains, and that runoff water is causing the seas to rise.
Kris says
BS , liberal, propaganda!
Wow says
Great article, backed up with facts. Anyone who can deny the changes in the beach environment has their head in the – yup – sand.
Good point about those anti-spending Small Government hypocrites who are the first to show up – hat held out – for their piece of the government pie.
FEMA should not rebuild flood damaged homes. The money should be spent to rehome and retreat.
But time will tell. Eventually the climate deniers will have ocean front property. From the roof.
Boomers and their CT's says
Yes, because ALL of the ice on the planet is currently floating on water – wow you are just so crazy smart. Why did we not think of that?? Problem solved? No? Cough cough.. thermal expansion. It’s not a conspiracy theory (CT) as you like to see it.
DaleL says
If the ice is floating on the water, then yes the water will not overflow as the ice melts. However, there is a lot of ice which is sitting on land in Greenland and Antarctica. The elevation at the south pole is 9,300 feet above sea level. The ice there is 8,900 feet thick. As the Earth warms, all that ice is slowly melting and flowing into the oceans.
Just a little over 10,000 years ago, much of North America, Europe, and Asia were covered in ice. With all that water locked up in ice on land, sea levels were much lower. The Bering Strait between Alaska and Asia is only 300 feet deep. People could walk from Asia to North America and they did.
The Earth is a dynamic planet. As the Antarctic ice melts, the land will rise. As the sea levels rise, the ocean floor will be pushed down by the extra weight. These movements in the Earth’s crust will trigger more volcanic activity. All this will occur over lifetimes, not in just a few years.
Ray W. says
What a singular perspective!
A paraquat is, “a mean and selfish person.”
A glacier is, “a large perennial accumulation of crystalline ice, snow, rock, sediment and often liquid water that originates on land and moves down slope under the influence of its own weight and gravity.
Water (H2O) – a molecule comprised of hydrogen and oxygen atoms – can take three forms: gaseous, liquid and solid (crystalline). Hydrogen and oxygen atoms, alone, can take two forms: gaseous and liquid.
Water, when crystalized, is unique among molecules. Solid steel, when dropped into molten (liquid) steel, will sink, because its density is greater than molten steel. But crystalline water (ice) is less dense than liquid water; it floats when dropped into water. Gaseous water is far less dense. When water is heated into its gaseous form, it expands to approximately 1600 times the volume of its liquid form. Finally, water is most dense at 34 degrees. As liquid water heats above 34 degrees, it expands.
Let’s think this through. 80-degree water is less dense than 78-degree water, so warming water in a full glass will overflow the glass, if only slightly. Melting ice at 33 degrees contracts into a denser form at 34 degrees, so melting ice will not overflow the glass.
So far, so good, Jeremy.
The problem with your hypothesis is that glaciers, by definition, are above the water level, not floating in it. A glacier that is floating in water is called an iceberg. When a glacier breaks off into an iceberg, that means that crystalline water is added to the glass. If your glass of water had three ice cubes in it when full to the brim, when the crystalline ice melts, the liquid water will not overflow the brim. But, when you add three ice cubes to the already full glass, it will overflow. If you add 30 ice cubes to the glass, it will really overflow.
FlaglerLive readers may be familiar with what I type next. A person can be right and wrong at the same time. Jeremy is right in his limited real-world example. In more expansive real world, Jeremy is wrong. Worse yet, he will never be right in the more expansive real world. In scientific terms, Jeremy is wronger than wrong, because he can never be right on the subject of sea-level rise due to global warming.
If the largest Antarctic glacier in the world were to drop into the sea, it would immediately cause sea water levels to rise rapidly. If the Greenland ice sheet were to fully melt, it would cause sea water levels to rise more slowly.
Finally, the author, Mr. Pittman, might truly be a paraquat. I don’t know one way or the other. But even if he truly is a paraquat, he also is a scientifically correct paraquat. A person can be more than one thing at a time. He might be a loving husband and still be a paraquat. He might contribute to the betterment of mankind and still be a paraquat. I suppose I will never know.
But here is the most important response to your comment. If you do your own study and confirm that adding land-based ice to the liquid form of sea water causes the sea level to rise all around the world, then you will agree with me that you were simply partially ignorant at the time of the writing of your comment, i.e., you were right and wrong at the same time. I am ignorant of so many things, which is why I look things up before I comment. Even then, someone else who knows more than me can add even more to my knowledge, if I let her. This is why I state that I want other well-educated conservative voices to add to the FlaglerLive commenter threads. I think such voices are crucial to a well-rounded discussion.
However, if after you have properly educated yourself to the fact that adding crystalline water to liquid water causes the liquid water level to rise, you continue to write what you wrote, you would no longer be partially ignorant, you would be stupid. The definition of stupidity is “a failure to use one’s cognitive abilities effectively.” Another definition of stupidity is, “a consequence of a failure to be aware of one’s own limitations.”
I have many limitations. Some due to age (I will never regain my youthful, boyish figure), some to gender (I cannot give birth), some to ignorance (the more I know the more I realize just how little I know), some to hardened pre-conceived beliefs (I will always oppose the vengeful among us). You just displayed one of your limitations to all FlaglerLive readers. Whether you can learn, and change is up to you.
The idea that I would not change my own beliefs when I learned I was wrong (stupidity) scares me. I don’t want to become a vengeful and hateful Republican. I want to remain a true conservative.
If I have a bad idea and someone else poses a less bad idea, I should abandon my bad idea and accept their less bad idea (sometimes there are no good choices in life – either we passed stimulus packages to counter the economic disruption of the pandemic at the cost of inflation, or we didn’t pass stimulus packages at the risk of depression. No good choices there!).
If I have a good idea and Ed P poses a better idea, I should abandon my good idea and accept his better idea.
This is how life should work, but it so seldom works that way. Some think that religious extremist Jewish settlers should be able to murder Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank with impunity. They think that all Palestinian Arabs should be subject to random murder wherever they are because Hamas invaded Israel on October 7th. These are the stupidest people among us; they simply cannot learn. Me? I abhor and condemn both the murderous Hamas invaders and the murderous religious extremist Jewish settler responders. They both fit the definition of evil.
Look up the definition of evil for yourselves.
dave says
Yes the water is raising. The sky is falling and our world is overcrowded. What can we do about any of it. Not a damn thing. The damage is done. I’ve been in Fla, born here longer than this guy. 75 years. The glut and greed of real estate, property developers and wacked out city and country personnel that make the deals all for these tax dollars and most will be dead and buried long before the issues get super severe, I see the not my problem attitude and stupid grins when you ask them.
So the raising water at the beaches so what are they the FED’s, States and Cities, Counties going to do. NOTHING !. Let’s make temporary sand reinforcement, add a few columns and raise insurance prices and pay to have these homes repaired after they are flooded. Why not condemn every darn beachfront home a hundreds’ of feet back, why because people will complain, “this was my dream home, I worked hard for this home or for my investment property”. A buyout would bankrupt the State, county Fed governments if they purchased and/or condemning all coastal property. Look at Galveston TX , flat as a pancake, but the media TV sells shows show people buying up these flat barren lots. All for those people moving from up north and from out west to the southern US coast.
I always wonder why the State or Feds just don’t put in some types of jetties, rock shorelines structures like the ones at Marineland which seem to work. Why, the cost, its cost too much to get the material here, Hell simple nor-easters wipe away the sand on the dunes.
Away, the problems are real, but nothing will ever be done to make some semi=permanent impact. It’s a county, state, city, fed cover my ass and move on and pass the buck to the next official that gets the problem.
Harry says
Jeremy – please cut down on fox – fake – entertainment and do a little web surfing. If you do you will be amazed how wrong you are.
Alice says
All the engineers in the world can think by piling up sand it is going to stop erosion from happening is just taking the towns money because it is not going to stop the waves from breaking down the sand. It will never work so stop wasting time and money.
Mark says
Do not pass Go, Jeremy. Here is your answer, if you wish to get some education.
https://sealevel.nasa.gov/news/261/melting-ocean-ice-affects-sea-level-unlike-ice-cubes-in-a-glass/
Fin whale says
If ya don’t believe that billions of humans consuming isnt destroying our ecosystems then I think your the foolish one.
You see the planet is round so sea level rise isn’t the same everywhere at the same time. Just Thwaitie a little longer and those numbers can go up fast, naturally. Florida will likely be the example of what not to do.
oldtimer says
Barrier islands move, it’s what they do, they were not meant to be built on period!
Denali says
It is the melting of the snow pack and the coastal glaciers which is adding to the volume of water and ice already in your glass that is causing the sea level rise. Erosion is also a huge issue but secondary to the water level rise.
And how is calling a weed killer an insult?
Vegeta says
In mountains??
dave says
Hey Hukc, I agree, it sucks when pure logic is ignored. Sand is easy, big rocks, jetties, sea walls require more effort and this county is all about the easy.
MeToo says
I was trying to figure out the weed killer too.
Don miller says
The last dune compromise was recently south of gamble Rodger’s and was caused by rain run off. What we going to do about that from over building ? sea seems to rising from more and more runoff being poured knto to it instead of absorbed by land because of corrupt higher density re/zoning requests. Look at Miami and Houston. No one can deny overbuilding and paving over land with inadequately planned infrastructure. I’d go after the low hanging fruit first and stop that while redoing infrastructure. They filled in he swamps and on the coastal areas. What did you think would happened after government wad warned. Now instead of accepting blame , they blame everything else. Thats government for you