Imagine you're on a beach.
It's flat, it's wide. With pristine sand.
Looks nice, right?
Unfortunately, many beaches don't look this way.
They’re narrow, with steep cliffs, and waves breaking close to the property line.
This is a beach that’s experiencing erosion.
In America, about 80 to 90 percent of sandy coastlines
have this problem.
So the government spends billions to expand some of the most rapidly eroding beaches in an
effort to defend the coast.
But this effort, while effective in the short term, can actually hurt beaches in the long run.
It's because every shoreline on the planet is subject to erosion.
Beach erosion occurs when waves and currents remove sand from the shoreline.
The loss of sand makes the beach narrower and lowers its elevation.
This erosion becomes a problem when it reaches structures built by humans along the coast.
Especially for beaches that generate tourism.
The visitors enjoy the sandy coasts while the cities and towns nearby enjoy the revenue gained.
But the driving factor there is the beach — a place like Miami Beach wouldn’t have
the same draw if there weren't lots of sand.
In fact there was a time when it didn’t look this way at all.
In the 1970s, a seawall turned
the beach in Miami into a narrow strip.
But by the '80s, the beach in Miami re-emerged
nice and wide.
How?
Well, coastal engineers rebuilt it through a process called "beach nourishment."
Beach nourishment is a shore protection strategy to try to counter the loss, the natural loss of sand.
The typical way to do this is with dredging.
Boats will dig up sand from a borrow site and move it onto the beach.
You'll have a big pipe pump and you'll suck up the sand.
Then it's transferred to the coastline.
Where it's dumped or pumped out onto the beach
and then bulldozers move it around to try
to mimic what the natural beach was like before the project took place.
The result is a nice wide beach.
The new profile will better defend the property line from damage during more intense weather
like storm surge flooding.
In the United States, beach nourishment is the main strategy
used to protect coastal properties from risky
erosion.
But there’s a problem.
The protection doesn’t last.
As the constant beating of waves and wind takes the sand away
from the shore.
And it soon it looks like it did before the nourishment occurred.
Every 2 to 8 years, on average, the nourishments need to be repeated.
Like this beach in Florida.
Well this morning, Lido Beach is under a local state of emergency —
Just look at how powerful the wind was earlier today —
— problem getting worse by the hour.
Lido Beach, on the Gulf Coast of Florida, got an emergency nourishment
in 2018 after damage from storms reduced the
beach to a narrow strip.
But the beach had already gotten new sand 15 times since 1964.
And Lido Key isn’t an outlier.
More than 200 of the 400 miles of critically eroding coastlines in Florida have received
one or more nourishments.
And across the United States, there have been nearly 3000 known-nourishment events since 1923.
The funding for these projects gets a little wonky, but here's what's important: The federal
government pays for a lot of these nourishments.
Up to 65% of the cost.
State and local funds will make up the rest.
But not all beaches that want or need nourishment will get it.
The Army Corps of Engineers — the group that approves and designs nourishments —prioritizes
defending some beaches over others, based on the potential loss of value.
According to ProPublica, the Corps only funds nourishments where the expected benefit is
2 and a half times as high as the cost.
Poorer communities won’t often meet that criteria.
So places like Miami Beach, Florida, and Ocean City, Maryland,
are more likely to get a lot of nourishment.
They have the expensive shorefront developments that make the investment worthwhile.
And for beaches that don’t make the cut for nourishment, continued erosion can lead
to damaged or destroyed property.
Nourishments aren't just about protecting buildings, but also protecting the economies
tied to them and the beach.
Consider the 200 million dollars spent on nourishments in Florida from 1995-2001.
That might seem like a lot of money, until you see the revenue from coastal tourism — it was $21.6 billion
in just one year — 2001.
On average, the State of Florida generates more than 5 dollars of revenue for every dollar
invested in beach nourishment.
Which is why nourishment is so appealing.
It make economic sense.
But they do present one major problem.
According to research published by the American Geophysical Union, there is a feedback loop.
Nourishment tends to happen along beaches that generally have expansive properties and
they also seem to drive development along the same shores, despite the risk of future
erosion.
If you were in a place that had nourished its beach, the houses behind that nourishment
project were significantly larger, in every case, than in a place that had never nourished
its shoreline at all.
Research found that areas with nourished beaches had homes that were about three times bigger
than non-nourished ones.
And this excessive development is a real problem, because it's based on false security.
According to the researchers, "beach nourishment may actually mask or reduce the apparent impact
of coastal hazards without changing the natural processes that drive them."
In fact, building more property in these areas
only increases the potential damage from future erosion.
So, while beach nourishments protect property and local economies in the short run, they
also trick us into thinking it’s safe to build in places that aren't.
Which sets up coastal communities for an ugly reckoning at the shore... sooner or later.