Posted on August 28, 2024
Janice and Steve Hyman spend their summers just a few houses away from Wrightsville Beach, near Wilmington. Janice has been coming here since the 1940s and says the ocean has always flowed where it wanted.
“The beach, when I was a child … where the oceanfront house is, the house that was there at that time had water (at) high tide. There was water under the house. A real high tide, the water would trickle down the street,” she said.
That was two decades before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the modern Wrightsville Beach, by pumping sand from offshore. The corps repeats the process every four years or so to replenish sand washed away by storms and other erosion driven in part by climate change. Stephen Hyman said last winter’s project was badly needed. The beach was all but gone.
“It was quite narrow. At this end of the beach, they always keep a road for the patrol to go up and down. It was all the way to there at high tide. There was no road,” he said.
Army Corps’ contractors pumped nearly a million cubic yards of sand back onto the beach – equal to 100,000 standard dump trucks. The nearly 15-million-dollar project had been delayed a year because of a lack of funding and a legal dispute over where the fresh sand should come from. It was finally completed in March. Now, Stephen Hyman says, the beach is dramatically improved.
“It’s the widest it’s ever been. It’s absolutely beautiful,” he said.
Nature calls the shots
Janice and Steve Hyman
Down on the beach, Peter Maguire was surfing with his son. He likes the wider beach, but worries it might not last long.
Joe (left) and Pete Maguire at Wrightsville Beach.
“The actual physical beach is much bigger than it was. But that’ll all change by the end of hurricane season. Nature always calls the shots. They can, they can dredge all they want. They’ll, they’ll still be faced with the same problems year after year,” Maguire said.
That’s the dilemma facing communities up and down the coast that rebuild beaches.
In 1956, Congress authorized the Army Corps to sign 50-year contracts with oceanfront communities to build and maintain beaches. They’re called Coastal Storm Risk Management projects, or CSRMs. The cost is typically paid with 65% federal dollars and 35% state and local funds. Today, those projects cover about 350 miles of coastline, mostly on the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico.
In North Carolina, the corps has long-term projects at Wrightsville, Carolina, and Kure beaches in New Hanover County, and Ocean Isle Beach in Brunswick County. Bob Keistler, chief of civil programs and project management with the Army Corps’ Wilmington District, said other beaches could be added “pending interest from the non-federal sponsor, and also the availability of federal funds.”
Bob Keistler of the Army Corps of Engineers
“Many of these beaches that we’re talking about … have all done private projects, and it’s their decision whether they want to continue to do it themselves, or turn and look for federal support,” Keistler said.
Those could include four more projects authorized in North Carolina, but never funded — at Topsail, Surf City and North Topsail, Atlantic and the Dare County beaches. And Keistler said the Army Corps is considering others.
“We’re in the process of doing a study right now, looking at a CSRM study to justify or determine federal interest for both Holden Beach and Oak Island. So if they go through and are approved and authorized, then we would have to request funding to do initial construction in the future,” Keistler said.
Growing number and cost
Demand for sand is rising at a time when costs are also climbing. In North Carolina, 289 beach renourishment projects since the 1950s have cost nearly a billion dollars. Of that, more than 80% was spent in the past two decades, as projects become more frequent and inflation and demand push up costs. That data comes from Western Carolina University’s Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, which has a database listing more than 2,500 beach renourishment projects nationwide going back to 1923.
“The costs have continued to go up,” said Andy Coburn, the program’s associate director. “We used to say … you can figure a million dollars a mile for nourishment. Now, we’re saying 5 million dollars before you even get a grain of sand on that beach.”
Part of that is inflation, but part is competition for crews and equipment from the five or six companies nationwide that can do the work, said the Army Corps’ Keistler. That’s echoed by Rob Young, a coastal geologist and director of Western Carolina’s shoreline program.
“At the moment in the US, we’re trying to build one beach, almost literally, from Saco, Maine to Padre Island, Texas. So there’s more competition for getting a dredge on site and getting the project done,” Young said.
Young also said long-term climate trends and natural shifts in North Carolina’s barrier islands are changing the economics of the beach renourishment game. Sand is eroding faster than it used to, because of big storms and sea level rise. That means beaches need renourishment more often – in some cases every couple of years, Young said.
“I mean, that’s just staggering to think about,” Young said. “I don’t think anybody ever imagined that we would be pumping sand that frequently. You know, that really shouldn’t be a surprise because we have sea level rising going on in the background and we’re trying to hold a beach in place that really wants to be moving landward.”
The North Carolina coast has seen about two dozen beach rebuilding projects in just the past four years — from the Outer Banks south to Ocean Isle Beach. Data gathered by Young and his team show the annual miles of beach repaired, the volume of sand pumped and the dollars spent have been higher in the past two decades than at any time since these projects began.
Beach communities go it alone
Army Corps-led projects aren’t the only way beaches get rebuilt. Many communities have cobbled together state and local money and federal disaster-recovery funds to do their own projects. Some raise revenue through hotel and other tourism taxes. And a few, like Oak Island, have tacked on an extra “sand tax” to property taxes.
An aerial photo shows how narrow Wrightsville Beach had become before the Army Corps of Engineers 2024 rebuilding project.
For many beachgoers, all this is money well spent. Debbie Smith, the mayor of Ocean Isle Beach, said of the beach:
“It’s our economic engine. It’s our home. It’s our recreational playground. And we also provide (a) recreational playground for many thousands of visitors every year. These beach protection projects not only protect private property, they protect public infrastructure, our roads, water, sewer,” Smith said.
Is it sustainable?
But can these projects go on indefinitely? Many communities are trying to plan for that. Oak Island spent $29 million in federal and local funds in 2021 and 2022 to repair its storm damaged beach. It’s now using the sand tax and grants to build a fund that will finance a new long-term beach management plan. Oak Island also could one day become one of those Army Corps-maintained beaches.
The much wider Wrightsville Beach after the Army of Corps project ended in March.
“It’s important for any town, especially a coastal town that deals with this threat on a regular basis, to have the contingency in place and have those funds set aside,” said Oak Island’s town communications manager, Mike Emory.
Oak Island plans another project this fall to build the entire beach up to a new baseline standard, Emory said.
Sand replenishment at Wrightsville Beach has cost nearly $60 million dollars the past two decades. New Hanover County’s Coastal Protection Coordinator Layton Bedsole said regular maintenance, including rebuilding dunes, replanting vegetation and replacing sand, slows long-term erosion. It’s hard to say if the money will be there in the future to keep it up, Bedsole said.
“Boy, that’s the million-dollar question,” he said.
He said, at least, for now, these projects return far more to the local economy than they cost.
“That’s protecting public and private investment, public and private property, and the industry that drives a lot of North Carolina, which is tourism,” Bedsole said.
The Army Corps of Engineers says every project has to weigh costs and benefits, and there may come a time when they no longer make sense. Coastal geologist Rob Young believes we also need to acknowledge humans’ role in erosion and rethink how we develop our beaches.
“The reason that we’re having beaches disappear today is because we have infrastructure in the way – roads, buildings, sea walls, things like that. … So this is a purely man-made problem. And trying to hold those things in place, it’s just gonna get harder and harder and more expensive with time,” Young said.
Updating rules about beachfront development is important, but local officials also have to deal with more immediate crises — like the next hurricane or high-tide flooding.
Our series “Rising Waters” continues Wednesday with a story about how sea-level rise is leading to more high-tide or sunny-day flooding.
The town of Oak Island spent $29 million to rebuild its beach in the past few years. It charges residents a “sand tax” to help with beach restoration,.
