Posted on August 21, 2024
When Hurricane Debby lashed beaches around the Tampa Bay area earlier this month, it marked the third time in less than a year that a storm has substantially eaten at the region’s shoreline.
Debby’s damage, experts said, was not as bad as that of Hurricane Idalia, which last August left dramatic cliffs of sand and erased decades of dune development along Pinellas’ already eroded barrier islands. Nor has it presented the same kind of setback as the winter storm that undid months of the dune-restoration work begun in Idalia’s wake.
But early estimates suggest Debby still took about 300,000 cubic yards of sand from Pinellas beaches, said Kelli Hammer Levy, the county’s public works director — enough to fill about 92 Olympic-size swimming pools. Among the areas with the most damage were Sunset Beach, on Treasure Island; Belleair Beach; and the north end of Indian Rocks Beach.
Pass-a-Grille Beach, which the county is in the process of renourishing, was largely unscathed, Levy said. The harder-hit beaches are among those overdue for renourishment amid a long-running standoff between the county and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In those places, Levy said, restored dunes took more damage but did their job by preventing water from encroaching on the land beyond them.
“We knew the dune was potentially going to be sacrificial,” she said. “I feel like with every single one of these events we’ve had after Idalia — the December storm and now Debby — that dune is providing protection.”
Sand pulled from the beaches by Idalia was dumped offshore and, over the past year, gradually returned to the beach, Levy said. Debby undid that process. Over the next few months, she said, the county will watch to see if the same sand returns yet again.
Debby also dealt damage on the other side of Tampa Bay. Ping Wang, a professor in the University of South Florida’s School of Geosciences, studies coastal erosion and has been working on a resiliency study on Tampa’s Ben T. Davis Beach. Wind patterns over the bay had already been gnawing at the small beach along the eastern end of the Courtney Campbell Causeway, and Debby wrecked much of what remained.
“I just so happened to stop by there after the storm,” Wang said. “I didn’t expect it to look so bad.”
The storm may have pushed the beach past a tipping point, he said. It pulled sand away from palm trees, exposing their roots, and left a thin strip of grass as the road’s only protection from high water. Without intervention, he said, water will reach the guardrail in the next four years.
Wang plans to work on designs for a beach restoration and an artificial reef to protect it from storm damage. Until then, he said, storms could put the road at risk.
“My position would be, if we get another storm that’s similar to Debby, the sand is going to get washed onto the road,” he said.
