Posted on August 31, 2026
Bulldozers for months paced Grand Strand beaches in 1,000-foot sections, elevating them with sand mined from the bottom of the ocean floor just a couple miles out.
Seemingly never ending pipes lined the coast while constant beeping echoed through the night. In a matter of hours, an eroding beach was renewed with life and possibility, like it had been there all along.
Beach renourishment is the nation’s most widely accepted measure to restore and protect threatened shorelines. In August, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wrapped its $72 million, federally funded project to rebuild nearly 28 miles of the Grand Strand coast in an effort to reduce the impacts of storm surge, replacing sand that was washed away during Hurricanes Ian and Debby.
The contractor, Great Lakes Dredge and Dock, placed 1.5 million cubic yards of sand on beaches.
Corps engineers view the project, which butted into peak tourist season in the Myrtle Beach area due to equipment delays, as a “short-term inconvenience for long-term protection.”
Yet beach renourishment is only temporary. Sand washes back out, as it’s supposed to, and more projects will need to occur to keep up with the pace of erosion. The cost associated with beach renourishment has risen dramatically over the last several years.
Rob Young, director for the Study of Developed Shorelines, helped develop a database for nearly every beach nourishment project completed in the country. Since 1950, beach renourishment projects have cost over $600 million in South Carolina, and the cost and frequency will likely increase.
Some experts think the Grand Strand communities should pay for their own projects instead of using federal money due to the rising cost of upkeep and the likelihood of more frequent renourishments.
One day renourishment projects will no longer keep up. As sea levels rise and the rate of erosion also increases, infrastructure along the coast will be threatened unless it’s withdrawn from the shoreline.
Yet there is no robust state, regional or national plan that addresses the steps to get there, Young said.
“At the end of the day, it’s done sort of community by community, place by place, whatever you can get, whatever you can do,” Young said. “We spend a huge amount of money on what you might call resilience or coastal protection, but it’s done in a way that’s not very forward-looking.”
The evolution of beach renourishment
Beach nourishment came onto the scene in the 1920s and ‘30s in New York. Places like Coney Island relied on a healthy beach for tourism, and renourishment could provide that. It boomed around the rest of the country in the 1980s and ‘90s at a time when many coastal states, including South Carolina, began to ban seawalls, which were determined to increase the rate of erosion.
Around the same time, South Carolina developed its Beachfront Management Act. The initial version identified managed withdrawal as the best method for protecting the coastline, yielding a move away from the shoreline over a 40-year period, but the practice never really materialized.
The federal government identified the Grand Strand’s beaches as an important economic protection, and the Corps developed a 50-year renourishment plan that is still used today. Areas within the Grand Strand mapped outside the original footprint that need renourishment are not eligible for federal funding through the Corps because they were deemed healthy during the initial evaluation of Grand Strand beaches.
