After getting pounded by storms and offshore hurricanes, what will wounded NC beaches do?

• Recent storms caused significant beach erosion along the North Carolina coast, even without a direct hurricane landfall.
• Experts suggest that current coastal development and protection strategies are becoming unsustainable due to rising costs and climate change.
• Potential solutions include managed retreat from erosion-prone areas and allowing foreign companies to bid on beach nourishment projects.

On Topsail Island, chunks of sand that had been pumped onto the beaches in Surf City and Topsail Beach in the past year have washed away.

In Wrightsville Beach, the pounding waves from the slow-moving early October subtropical storm left large escarpments along much of the New Hanover County town’s beach and residents worried if the town’s beach would survive until a scheduled federal nourishment project in 2027.

Down in Ocean Isle Beach in Brunswick County, the recent storm and heavy surf from several tropical systems that have passed by the East Coast while staying offshore have amplified an existing erosion problem on the barrier island’s east end and raised questions about the effectiveness of a terminal groin built three years ago to stabilize the beach.

But nowhere along the N.C. coast has this hurricane season’s damage been worse than on the Outer Banks, where nine homes in Buxton collapsed into the Atlantic over a two-week span in late September and early October and left highway crews struggling to keep N.C. 12, the islands’ lifeline, open on Hatteras and Ocracoke islands.

The damage, albeit highly localized to beachfront areas, shows that it doesn’t necessarily take a landfalling hurricane to make it a bad hurricane season for coastal communities.

But experts say it also highlights that how we live, develop and try to protect our coast is increasingly becoming untenable, especially as costs for beach nourishment projects continue to rise and climate change promises to fuel higher seas and stronger storms in the coming years.

“The trajectory we’re on is unsustainable,”said Dr. Robert Young, director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University.

Why are the beaches so beaten?

When a large subtropical storm started forming in the Caribbean, officials knew it could be a problem for the East Coast − especially since many coastal areas had already been pounded this summer by strong swells from several hurricanes that had passed by offshore.

But this storm was different, from its path close to the coast to its big footprint.

“This storm was a real beach-eater from Florida to Long Island (N.Y.),” Young said.

The unnamed storm has left beach officials wondering what measures they can take to protect some of the most valuable real estate in their coastal communities, never mind also having an attractive asset to draw visitors back to fuel their tourist-dependent economies.

But Young said damaged and, in some cases, completely eroded beaches along 1,000 miles of U.S. coastline won’t be an easy problem to fix.

There are logistical issues, including a very small pool of U.S. contractors to actually do nourishment projects. Then there are the financial questions, especially in this political environment, if spending money to pump sand that might quickly wash away is the best use of taxpayer dollars.

And then there’s the practical question.

“We need to allow ourselves to consider slightly changing the map of our coastal communities, and concentrate our money and sand on areas that can be saved,” Young said.

He said this is especially true in communities where local taxpayers, sometimes with the state’s help, fund their own nourishment projects instead of having the federal government pick up most of the beach-building costs, as is the case in New Hanover County’s three beach towns. Already, officials in North Topsail Beach and in Dare County on the Outer Banks have said they don’t have the funds to nourish parts of their beachfront. And in Surf City, residents are in an uproar over a 30% increase in property taxes this year that town officials say is partly needed to help pay for beach nourishment.

While surrendering erosion-prone areas of North Topsail Beach and the Outer Banks, for example, to Mother Nature might not be popular, managed retreat is really the only option if we want to save other parts of our coastal communities where it is feasible to try and protect property and vital infrastructure, Young said.

“It’s already a burden for many of these small towns and the economics for continuing to do it are becoming more and more sketchy,” he said of the rising costs of beach nourishment and other erosion-control projects.

What’s going to happen?

While putting a Band-Aid on wounded beaches isn’t a long-term solution, it’s something coastal officials might have to look at in the coming weeks and months. Actions could include trucking in fresh sand; knocking down escarpments to makes beaches safer for visitors and to allow wave energy to be dissipated to some degree; and fast-tracking small beach-building projects, such as dredging sand from easily acceesible inlets or other coastal waterways. Federal and state officials also could see about securing funding to help finance projects, although the current government shutdown could stymie that.

But big-scale nourishment projects, the favored way of dealing with beach erosion woes, take time to plan, design and finance.

Young said another option that could help coastal communities recover is to wave a century-old federal law, the 1906 Foregin Dredge Act, that limits dredging to U.S. companies. Opening beach nourishment work to foreign companies, primarily European, could help increase competition, lower prices and allow more work to be done within the sometimes restrictive environmental windows designed to protect nesting sea turtles and shorebirds.

The rising cost of beach nourishment work has already been felt in the Wilmington area, with the federal project to nourish Carolina and Kure beaches delayed a year until this winter after the initial bids came in well over budget.

Another option is to hope that the upcoming nor’easter season is a mild one and that a lot of the sand that has washed away is just offshore and will eventually be pushed back onshore over the next few weeks and months.

Beaches naturally ebb and flow, so wide changes and shifting sands aren’t unusual. But Young said almost all of North Carolina’s beaches today have been engineered and modified one way or another by human hands.

“I think it’s fair to say a lot of that sand simply isn’t going to come back,” he said. “It’s just gone.”

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