Posted on November 9, 2026
Flagler County’s 18 miles of beaches and dunes were battered and in parts ravaged by last month’s nor’easter and king tides, with sacrificial dunes doing their job but also eroding significantly and with increasing severity the further south one goes, based on a FlaglerLive survey of the beaches. The resilience to the north and steeper losses to the south repeat a pattern set during last year’s nor’easter, in October 2025.
It also again amplifies a message county, Flagler Beach officials and beach advocates have been voicing for years: it isn’t futile to rebuild dunes and beaches. It works. But it is expensive, and one-time rebuilds don’t work. They defeat the purpose of sustained beach management, which by definition is a process as politically and financially ongoing as a beach’s ecology is a naturally ongoing one.
“For me from a public safety emergency management perspective,” Emergency Management Director Jonathan Lord said, “the dunes did what they were supposed to do. They sacrificed themselves” to help protect the properties along State Road A1A and the road itself. But the sacrifice means the dunes must be rebuilt so the protection continues. “It is a very expensive undertaking with local dollars and state dollars and federal dollars and sometimes private dollars with the HOAs that proves effective when we have these storm systems. But there’s obviously a cost building them back each time.”
With rising seas, hurricanes and tropical storms are no longer the only forces that severely erode beaches. Mere storms and king tide events do similar damage, so even if the county is not struck by a named storm in the next few years, it still faces cumulatively critical erosion along its shore. Flagler County has adopted a beach management plan. But it has yet to adopt a permanent funding mechanism to implement it beyond localized projects. Voters’ approval of Amendment 3, which will erode local tax revenue as severely as the seas are eroding beaches, will make funding that much more difficult to secure.
