They move a lot less if you allow them to grow all sorts plants that stabilize the dunes, but those look messy, block the view, and take up vital real estate square footage.
Plants may slow things somewhat, but if moving water decides it's going somewhere, mere plantings in sand will not stop it.
There's a beach I go to occasionally that is fully native forested right up to the tidal zone. Over the last decade it has moved inland probably 20-30 metres. Storms and king tides just tear the sand from under and around the roots and the trees and shrubs are washed away.
Plants may prevent wind-borne sand movement but they don't stop water.
You can help with it, but that requires a lot of work. See this project in the UK where they use old Christmas trees to kickstart new plants.
https://news.sky.com/story/how-old-christmas-trees-are-helping-to-rebuild-lancashires-last-remaining-sand-dunes-13067535
And in any case this is a plaster more than anything else.
This is the rub. They decided to build their homes where the marshes should be and then somehow decided to block the ocean with one of the fastest moving/eroding substrates possible.
They also could have built all sorts of rock/concrete structures that could minimize wave action, but I refer to the point above about that not being the view they want. 🤦🏻♂️
I grew up in this area. It's been common knowledge that none of this will be here in the future since the 90s. (Probably longer, that's just the furthest back I have memories of.) They taught us this in elementary school when we lived there. It's not even a climate change thing, the beaches around MA are just always changing. They can build the sturdiest barrier wall humanity can conceive and it still wouldn't save those houses.
Also as sea level rises and salt water intrusion occurs, the vegetation in marshes and barrier islands aren’t given enough time to evolve from fresh water plants to saline ones. The vegetation dies the land erodes without the root structure.
Long ago I took an oceanography course in college. The professor's first comment was "if you remember only one thing from this course: barrier islands move. If a house is built on one the land will eventually move and leave the house behind in the ocean."
I don't think the word 'catastrophic' should be used because that implies an unfortunate outcome. This is the *expected* outcome.
But but but, surely this can't be! I have an important job! I have a beautiful wife! I have 2 beautiful kids! This is my investment property! I drive an ESCALADE for fucks sake!
David Byrne predicted this:
> Into the blue again
>After the money's gone
>Once in a lifetime
>Water flowing underground
>And you may ask yourself
>How do I work this?
>And you may ask yourself
>Where is that large automobile?
>And you may tell yourself
>This is not my beautiful house
>And you may tell yourself
>This is not my beautiful wife
>Letting the days go by
>Let the water hold me down
>Letting the days go by
>Water flowing underground
>Into the blue again
>After the money's gone
> Once in a lifetime
>Water flowing underground
>Same as it ever was...
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
>Homeowners invested more than $500,000 to bring in 14,000 tons of sand to protect their properties, but the barrier is now gone.
EDIT: The story from WCBV up top is mostly a video. [Here](https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/salisbury-beach-storm-destroys-sand-wall/) is an article u/StabithaStevens found from CBS if you want some more reading
>On Wednesday, state officials plan to meet with town leaders and residents to talk about a more permanent fix. State Senator Bruce Tarr said the state is considering a plan to bring in more sand on a more frequent schedule. "Regular nourishment, not on an episodic basis, not on a reactionary basis, but taking large volumes of sand and regularly placing it on the beach," he explained.
Jesus christ lmao
> So they spent $500,000 to feed sand to the ocean.
So far. They plan to replace the dune.
Probably better off using large rocks to create an artificial barrier or reef to stabilise things, *then* replace the dune if they are still set on it.
Not sure why, but "Spending money to feed sand to the ocean" feels like something I will hear soon at a meeting with consultants. Or Gartner will release some bullshit white paper with this as the title.
Virginia Beach (and many vacation towns that make money off of beach tourism) does this with the beach itself. It makes the beach bigger for the summer, and the ocean gets fucking deep fast, and erodes down to a much smaller beach by the fall.
Source: grew up in Virginia Beach
I think that was because they were cheap. Had they hired engineers to actually address this, it would have been much higher costs but it would have worked.
Who knows, but what I do know is that a solution that would actually work is not the solution they would be willing to pay for. They want their cake to eat it too. They want their beach and they want their beach not wash away, they also want their shoreline to not wash away,but they can't have their cake and eat it too. They've lost the beach the only way they're gonna have a beach is if they retreat and tear down the homes. But if they want to hold the water back in the shoreline prevent it from receding any further, they need a real solution. A real solution means they don't have a beach anymore.
From another article about it "Some residents are calling for a concrete or stone wall, but (State Senator Bruce) Tarr said state law prohibits what's called a 'hard structure" on that particular beach."
The problem here is that the storm surge is much higher than the controls previously implemented I think.
As the flooding pushes over the control and then back across it, there’s a friction force across the surface that’s dragging shit with it kind of like with tsunamis but with much less force.
They could do as the Netherlands, dredge sand, populate it with beachgrass and shrubs (which it seems exists in some part of the beach but it is nearly all gone). But then they won't be on the beach anymore and this being in America someone will get the bright idea that they should build upon the reclaimed beach. Which will kill the grass, causing erosion, and the cycle repeats.
I know somebody in Florida who illegally cut down mangrove trees on their beachfront property. They got in legal trouble *and* the nice sand they had trucked in was gone a few years later. The mangroves were the only thing holding the beach there.
Those wouldn't do it either, looking at the pictures i very much doubt they would've gotten any halfway competent engineer to put his signature on anything less than a proper concrete seawall and that starts at like 1500$ per feet, flooding is the issue now but in like ten years coastal erosion will be eating at the foundations, those houses should never have been built there period.
The sea level has risen 10 inches in the last 100 years, it is a dire issue for *other* reasons but it has next to nothing to do with this, this is happening due to the willful ignorance of coastal erosion, which was a well understood phenomenon long before those houses were built.
What shouldn't be done is tax payers spending money to fight a recurring situation. While I feel for the homeowners, they reap the benefit and also have to deal with the risk. Anyone who lives near the water had better know the risks...and accept them. We all love the ocean and other bodies of water but when I see a pretty house that is close to the water I feel like it's just a matter of time in this period of time. Years ago maybe a once in a lifetime storm could happen, now it's a once ever few years storm that will almost definitely happen.
They fuck up "the beachfront view." These kinds of people dont want to see shit like that.
Given the state of sea rise and climate destabilization, they wont have house to worry about in 10 years anyways.
This. As a civil engineer, I guarantee there are ways to make this work. We learn soil slope stability as a separate topic in geotechnical engineering, these guys probably hired a contractor to do guesswork and there was no real engineering involved.
Someone with experience with shoreline erosion would have been the person to call. First, having just sand there will do nothing - the waves will relocate that sand really quick. What was there before they built? Sand dunes and wetlands with plants and grasses; their root systems help keep the sand in place. This is why we need to build homes further away from the shore, and protect native ecosystems.
>This is why we need to build homes further away from the shore, and protect native ecosystems.
"That just sounds like commie hippie liberal shit. What we really need to do is exploit every square inch of the planet as possible to increase shareholder value and appease supply-side Jesus."
/s
It’s like building in a floodplain. Rivers move. Beaches move. People think the physical world was static before they showed up, and then get surprised that their riverfront house is in the river, or their beach front house is in the ocean.
A lot of those people made their money offshoring stuff, so they should be pretty familiar with it.
EDIT:
Fair's fair, some of that sand was bought with covid funds sent as job relief to companies, and it vanished the same way without doing what it was meant to do.
Not only that, they're doing more than the rest of the world with respect to agricultural production. We can take a page or two out of their book.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/netherlands-agriculture-technology/
You can remove the “/s”. That’s literally what is going to happen here due to the people affected by this actually going to their city council meetings.
A similar scenario probably has already taken place either in your city or the city of one of the people who upvoted your comment.
Brought to you by government subsidized flood insurance...insurance companies won't insure you if you live in a place like that because it's just a giant money pit for them. The risk is...well it's 100%.That's not really a risk, it's a certainty, they're going to get flooded. So You, the tax payer, gets to pay for their flood insurance through taxes.
The ocean has been staging an up rising for decades, but it thinks we won't notice if it does it slowly. But we have noticed and will surely unite to put a stop to it.
I clicked on link to see if the article mentioned the name of an engineer/company/anything.
That is literally the article. Nothing more needed to be said🤣
Beach nourishment is actually really effective when done correctly, but 14,000 yards is like fighting a fire with a water balloon.
Edit: And in reading further articles from before construction, it seems like the residents understand this but were desperate to do *something*.
They do something similar in Britain but the trick is to get things in the sand first.
So after Christmas they bury their Christmas trees from the entire town in rows on the beach and then cover them with sand.
The dunes then have a structure that they can build up on.
Any kid who built a sand castle to close to the ocean could have told them what would happen.
Wouldn't concrete or even wood barriers be better? Serious question. I'm not an engineer.
Edit: I want to thank everyone for their answers, this seems like a pretty complex situation sadly. They may need to change laws to save the the land.
Sand works if it's done well. Meaning with PLANTS in it. An established dune has grass all over it that constantly traps more sand as the wind blows it around the beach. It gets a little higher every day.
The water can still wash it away, but with grass it's harder PLUS if the grass isn't all gone after the storm... The grass starts repairing and building again.
I dunno if this happened before they established their grass well enough or they are just stupid.
I'm from the area and the dunes up until this winter were very healthy with a lot of dune grass and heavy build up but one of the last storms completely undid all the work that took place over the last 15 years since the last major damage was done. So they are bassically trying to stop gap it until the summer when more sand will start to build up again.
People ITT shitting all over the local community that actually generally knows what it’s doing and got unlucky
They were building up new dunes to protect the buildings since the old dunes were wiped out by a bad season
3 days after they pumped in the sand, before they had a chance to plant vegetation and build snow fences, an historic high tide washed out the sand
But it also protected the homes, it just didn’t have a chance to be more permanently established because of a freak tide and bad timing
>"These dunes...if they weren't put here over the last four weeks, the ocean would have come right through, hit the property, and went out onto Route 1A," he said.
Depends how dire the situation is. Most northern Beaches have sand dunes and can maintain with just those. Idk what the situation was here- but there's a point where it's too dicey to establish a dune bc it'll get washed away too often without enough time in between to replenish.
Sand works if it's done well. Meaning with PLANTS in it. An established dune has grass all over it that constantly traps more sand as the wind blows it around the beach. It gets a little higher every day.
The water can still wash it away, but with grass it's harder (cause the grass acts as a net to keep more sand from leaving) PLUS if the grass isn't all gone after the storm... The grass starts repairing and building again.
I dunno if this happened before they established their grass well enough or they are just stupid.
Yeah, sand dunes are up there as one of the most impressive natural features, making something made up out of generally very powdery material into something solid
They aren't solid though, that's the amazing thing. They fucking move across the desert! A 5m sand dune can "walk" nearly 20m a year just under windy conditions. Water would demolish that shit, especially if you're in an arra wkth storms. Need some hella boulders to build a foundation, if not a full on breakwater.
While this is mostly true, there are coastal dunes that are too large or just don’t have the vegetation needed to secure them in place. See my previous comment on Jockey’s Ridge!
There are absolutely coastal dunes. Poland is very famous for them, it's a spectacular sight. It has to be noted though that they do retreat, slowly but surely.
It takes years for the sea oats and sea grapes to establish a root system stable enough to hold the sand in place. They need to come up with an interim plan. Maybe temporary barriers offshore a few feet that can be moved once the dunes are reestablished.
The ocean will go where it wants to go. The secret is to work with it. They need to get an engineering company from one of the southern Atlantic states to create a plan that the EPA can approve.
I saw something about old Christmas trees being buried in beaches in the UK. The buried trees are better able to catch sand, and serve as something to help those dunes build up and for dune plants to grow into.
In lake Michigan these idiots have invested in putting concrete bunkers and random shit on the PUBLIC beach that are now a huge hazard to try and stop the erosion
The result is now you have to walk over all this dangerous bullshit that is now halfway under water.
Fucking criminals man
Lake Michigan gets weird. It can rise and fall 10 feet in just a few years due to changes in rainfall, snowfall in Canada, and water usage patterns in cities it supplies. Then throw in erosion on top and beaches come and go with regularity.
I would be pretty shocked if there was any real civil or environmental engineer involved in this at all
I’m guessing it was a sand salesmen advising on the sand project
Likely yes. Probably was the only, shitty desperate option the consultants could offer. They've been dealing with the erosion for years in this particular area, all sorts of consultsnts involved. Lots of work been going on in the area with plum Island as well. Homeowners associations have been doing all kinds of stuff, trying to get the state to act. They just can't reconcile Barrier islands make nice beaches, bad places to build houses that their families built decades ago. Genius concept, I know.
Not sure, speculating the here state wouldn't let them armor the shore front. Went there many years ago when I was in school, studying coastline geology. Was a pretty well known shit show then, too
Well if you actually read about it instead of just a headline, you'll see it's not that they just piled sand on sand and hoped for the best. They brought in the sand and were about to plant grass but unfortunately a historic weekend of high tides wiped it out before the grass went in. Probably would have been fine without the freak and unexpected "historic" high tides and they got the chance to get the grass in and established.
You're still fighting the ocean but it's not like they just threw half a million at piling sand on sand without also planning on making an actual dune with grass and vegetation.
https://www.theinertia.com/news/mass-community-spent-565k-on-sand-dune-project-and-the-ocean-washed-it-away-in-3-days/
> The project brought in 14,000 tons of sand and was finished just in time for a historic high tide. It was all gone three days later.
> Construction of the dunes began in February and was wrapped up on Friday, March 8 before a weekend of high tides (literally) wiped all of the work, and money, away. According to Salisbury Citizens for Change, there were still plans to plant dune grass and install snow fences, as well.
That’s still extremely short sighted. It’s not like you just plant some grass and the dune magically becomes sturdy enough to stand up to the Atlantic Ocean. It would take ***years*** for sand grasses and other native plants to create a root system strong enough to keep the dunes in place against erosion.
If it hadn’t gotten washed away now from bad timing/luck of a very high tide, it would have washed away in a month or a year. A pile of sand with some newly planted grass isn’t going to hold out against the next nor’easter that hits in the fall. EDIT: also “record high water levels” are the new normal that keep occurring, not a once in a century freak incident like they used to be
I could argue that the fact you could've predicted this precisely means you do have a basic underrating of erosion.
But I don't even have a basic understanding of the of the basics of understanding so....
Any child who has played on the beach could have told them that this would happen. Four year-old me could have told them. This is just next level idiocy,
It is said of Muad'Dib that once when he saw a weed trying to grow between two rocks, he moved one of the rocks. Later, when the weed was seen to be flourishing, he covered it with the remaining rock. "That was its fate," he explained.
> And last of all the mounting wave, green and cold and plumed with foam, climbing over the land, took to its bosom Tar-Míriel the Queen, fairer than silver or ivory or pearls. Too late she strove to ascend the steep ways of the Meneltarma to the holy place; for the waters overtook her, and her cry was lost in the roaring of the wind.
Christmas trees? I've watched solid bulkheads made out of logs larger than telephone poles, driven 5 meters down into the beach, blown out overnight in a single king-tide storm.
Nothing will save this community long-term. It is doomed.
"Let’s say the sea levels rise by five or ten feet and it puts coast areas under water. Wouldn’t people just sell there houses and move?"
\-Ben Shapiro
I just read a NYT focus group interview on politics and someone said she wishes Ben Shapiro would run for president, because he's really smart and researches stuff.
Yeah, there's no surprise there after the W years. People just care about voting for the letter by the name and whatever Murdoch tells them to vote for.
I remember years back there was a person interviewed on CNN that was like "I hate how much time I have to spend defending Trump's tweets."
It's like, you could just not. But politics is just team sports. And you ride with your team until the end of time.
What should make you angry is the National Flood Insurance program. It's essentially a free handout to idiots who build homes where they do not belong, courtesy of the taxpayers. [One house in Louisiana has been rebuilt more than 40 times](https://e360.yale.edu/digest/thousands_of_us_homes_keep_flooding_and_being_rebuilt_fema_insurance_louisiana) sometimes not even being fully rebuilt before another claim was made, and 2,100 properties have been fully rebuilt more than 10 times each.
This is just another example of a well meaning program run amok. Simple and reasonable rules like, 'OK, your house is totalled. Here's a check. We own it now.' or a limit on the number of claims within a period of time, seem to be absent.
I've been to this beach. Trust me, most of them are not particularly wealthy. Salisbury Mass is fairly run down and looks destitute. These people aren't bankrupt of course, but they aren't as wealthy as you think
Edit: I'm not making any sort of political statement. I am simply being pedantic.
As someone who has over a decade of erosion control experience including dune building and beach protection, I can say they made several mistakes.
Sand alone will not stop wave erosion, period. Sand needs to have protection from the wind as well. Sand fences, dune grass, and other ground cover help with wind erosion, but unless you protect the toe of the dunes with a rock or sand bag revetment, you are just pissing away money by replacing the sand.
Sea walls may be ugly, but they serve a purpose. That purpose is keeping your multimillion dollar cottage out of the ocean.
They need to do stuff like what they do in the UK where they take every used Christmas tree and spend a couple weekends just burying them in the sand to help the dunes.
We use "armorstone" here. Just big rocks that keep everything behind it in place and don't wash away. The beaches here disappear every winter from the storms and can take years to come back. Seems kind of stupid.
Barrier beaches move. If you build stuff on a barrier beach, eventually the stuff you built will move, too.
They move a lot less if you allow them to grow all sorts plants that stabilize the dunes, but those look messy, block the view, and take up vital real estate square footage.
Plants may slow things somewhat, but if moving water decides it's going somewhere, mere plantings in sand will not stop it. There's a beach I go to occasionally that is fully native forested right up to the tidal zone. Over the last decade it has moved inland probably 20-30 metres. Storms and king tides just tear the sand from under and around the roots and the trees and shrubs are washed away. Plants may prevent wind-borne sand movement but they don't stop water.
You can help with it, but that requires a lot of work. See this project in the UK where they use old Christmas trees to kickstart new plants. https://news.sky.com/story/how-old-christmas-trees-are-helping-to-rebuild-lancashires-last-remaining-sand-dunes-13067535 And in any case this is a plaster more than anything else.
So instead of sand, they could have just invested in plants
They would also have to have invested in marshes and wetlands instead of beachfront property.
This is the rub. They decided to build their homes where the marshes should be and then somehow decided to block the ocean with one of the fastest moving/eroding substrates possible. They also could have built all sorts of rock/concrete structures that could minimize wave action, but I refer to the point above about that not being the view they want. 🤦🏻♂️
I grew up in this area. It's been common knowledge that none of this will be here in the future since the 90s. (Probably longer, that's just the furthest back I have memories of.) They taught us this in elementary school when we lived there. It's not even a climate change thing, the beaches around MA are just always changing. They can build the sturdiest barrier wall humanity can conceive and it still wouldn't save those houses.
Beaches in general always change. Water moves sand around. Building a house on or right up against the beach is just ignoring nature.
It was a foolish man who built his house up the sand
Also as sea level rises and salt water intrusion occurs, the vegetation in marshes and barrier islands aren’t given enough time to evolve from fresh water plants to saline ones. The vegetation dies the land erodes without the root structure.
Long ago I took an oceanography course in college. The professor's first comment was "if you remember only one thing from this course: barrier islands move. If a house is built on one the land will eventually move and leave the house behind in the ocean." I don't think the word 'catastrophic' should be used because that implies an unfortunate outcome. This is the *expected* outcome.
You’re talking about people that spent 500 grand on sand to defend sand. The sand salesman and the contractors that built the dune are laughing.
Honestly if they wanted to preserve their homes they should have built a seawall, but those aren't pretty and reduce real estate value.
His first comment? That guy really liked barrier islands
But but but, surely this can't be! I have an important job! I have a beautiful wife! I have 2 beautiful kids! This is my investment property! I drive an ESCALADE for fucks sake!
David Byrne predicted this: > Into the blue again >After the money's gone >Once in a lifetime >Water flowing underground >And you may ask yourself >How do I work this? >And you may ask yourself >Where is that large automobile? >And you may tell yourself >This is not my beautiful house >And you may tell yourself >This is not my beautiful wife >Letting the days go by >Let the water hold me down >Letting the days go by >Water flowing underground >Into the blue again >After the money's gone > Once in a lifetime >Water flowing underground >Same as it ever was...
My god, what have I done?
Same as it ever was.
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?" Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down Letting the days go by, water flowing underground Into the blue again, after the money's gone Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
Well? How did I get here?
How do I work this? Where is that large automobile? This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife!
Like how they’re gonna move tax dollars to save these rich idiots from consequences.
>Homeowners invested more than $500,000 to bring in 14,000 tons of sand to protect their properties, but the barrier is now gone. EDIT: The story from WCBV up top is mostly a video. [Here](https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/salisbury-beach-storm-destroys-sand-wall/) is an article u/StabithaStevens found from CBS if you want some more reading >On Wednesday, state officials plan to meet with town leaders and residents to talk about a more permanent fix. State Senator Bruce Tarr said the state is considering a plan to bring in more sand on a more frequent schedule. "Regular nourishment, not on an episodic basis, not on a reactionary basis, but taking large volumes of sand and regularly placing it on the beach," he explained. Jesus christ lmao
So they spent $500,000 to feed sand to the ocean.
> So they spent $500,000 to feed sand to the ocean. So far. They plan to replace the dune. Probably better off using large rocks to create an artificial barrier or reef to stabilise things, *then* replace the dune if they are still set on it.
What if they just tried more sand? /s
Half a million dollar sand castle
For half the price I would have stood there with a homemade sign saying NO, OCEAN and I would have been at least as effective.
The contractor is stoked
Not sure why, but "Spending money to feed sand to the ocean" feels like something I will hear soon at a meeting with consultants. Or Gartner will release some bullshit white paper with this as the title.
A fool and his money are soon parted
Salesman should approach them again and offer 14,000 tons of sandbags.
No, no ,no. The problem was that they needed more sand - the salesman should sell them 14,001 tons of sandbags…
Has anyone considered a monorail? It sure put North Haverbook on the map!!
"mono" means one, and "rail" means rail!!
And dredge it up right offshore
They're actually doing this in gulf shores and orange beach down in Alabama. Lmao
Virginia Beach (and many vacation towns that make money off of beach tourism) does this with the beach itself. It makes the beach bigger for the summer, and the ocean gets fucking deep fast, and erodes down to a much smaller beach by the fall. Source: grew up in Virginia Beach
The key is bags!!
It's about the bags...
Is this a Cones of Dunshire reference?
Yes, my lowly farmer!
You forgot the essence of erosion management… it’s about the *bags*
That gave me a real good laugh. Lmfao good work out of you
I think that was because they were cheap. Had they hired engineers to actually address this, it would have been much higher costs but it would have worked.
I'm not sure the cost would even be that much higher
How much do those "Lego block" concert barrier pieces cost? (Approx 3 x 3 x 4 ft)
Who knows, but what I do know is that a solution that would actually work is not the solution they would be willing to pay for. They want their cake to eat it too. They want their beach and they want their beach not wash away, they also want their shoreline to not wash away,but they can't have their cake and eat it too. They've lost the beach the only way they're gonna have a beach is if they retreat and tear down the homes. But if they want to hold the water back in the shoreline prevent it from receding any further, they need a real solution. A real solution means they don't have a beach anymore.
From another article about it "Some residents are calling for a concrete or stone wall, but (State Senator Bruce) Tarr said state law prohibits what's called a 'hard structure" on that particular beach."
I wonder if piled rock counts. I've seen that used on eroding beaches before and for jetties.
The problem here is that the storm surge is much higher than the controls previously implemented I think. As the flooding pushes over the control and then back across it, there’s a friction force across the surface that’s dragging shit with it kind of like with tsunamis but with much less force.
That's called "rip-rap" or something like that.. I've seen them make entire breakwaters out of it, usually around marinas.
They could do as the Netherlands, dredge sand, populate it with beachgrass and shrubs (which it seems exists in some part of the beach but it is nearly all gone). But then they won't be on the beach anymore and this being in America someone will get the bright idea that they should build upon the reclaimed beach. Which will kill the grass, causing erosion, and the cycle repeats.
I know somebody in Florida who illegally cut down mangrove trees on their beachfront property. They got in legal trouble *and* the nice sand they had trucked in was gone a few years later. The mangroves were the only thing holding the beach there.
Those wouldn't do it either, looking at the pictures i very much doubt they would've gotten any halfway competent engineer to put his signature on anything less than a proper concrete seawall and that starts at like 1500$ per feet, flooding is the issue now but in like ten years coastal erosion will be eating at the foundations, those houses should never have been built there period.
When they were built they probably weren't all that close to the water. Sea level rise hasn't always been at the forefront of environmental issues.
The sea level has risen 10 inches in the last 100 years, it is a dire issue for *other* reasons but it has next to nothing to do with this, this is happening due to the willful ignorance of coastal erosion, which was a well understood phenomenon long before those houses were built.
10 inches up can go a long way on a shallow incline
What shouldn't be done is tax payers spending money to fight a recurring situation. While I feel for the homeowners, they reap the benefit and also have to deal with the risk. Anyone who lives near the water had better know the risks...and accept them. We all love the ocean and other bodies of water but when I see a pretty house that is close to the water I feel like it's just a matter of time in this period of time. Years ago maybe a once in a lifetime storm could happen, now it's a once ever few years storm that will almost definitely happen.
They fuck up "the beachfront view." These kinds of people dont want to see shit like that. Given the state of sea rise and climate destabilization, they wont have house to worry about in 10 years anyways.
This. As a civil engineer, I guarantee there are ways to make this work. We learn soil slope stability as a separate topic in geotechnical engineering, these guys probably hired a contractor to do guesswork and there was no real engineering involved.
Or at least an engineer could have concluded that there was not a way to make it work at their price point before spending the money.
Someone with experience with shoreline erosion would have been the person to call. First, having just sand there will do nothing - the waves will relocate that sand really quick. What was there before they built? Sand dunes and wetlands with plants and grasses; their root systems help keep the sand in place. This is why we need to build homes further away from the shore, and protect native ecosystems.
>This is why we need to build homes further away from the shore, and protect native ecosystems. "That just sounds like commie hippie liberal shit. What we really need to do is exploit every square inch of the planet as possible to increase shareholder value and appease supply-side Jesus." /s
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It’s like building in a floodplain. Rivers move. Beaches move. People think the physical world was static before they showed up, and then get surprised that their riverfront house is in the river, or their beach front house is in the ocean.
I cannot think of a dumber way to piss away half a million
I bet the sand hauler knew and just chuckled the entire time.
The sand isn't exactly gone. The ocean just relocated it a bit farther offshore.
A lot of those people made their money offshoring stuff, so they should be pretty familiar with it. EDIT: Fair's fair, some of that sand was bought with covid funds sent as job relief to companies, and it vanished the same way without doing what it was meant to do.
You magnificent bastard.
Just wait, it'll be back and then you'll see. **Then you'll all see!!**
Are you saying the ocean is in on this sand bar scam??
You mean the Netherlands didn't just throw a big pile of sand on the beach to defeat the ocean?
They *partially* do it. But it is only one part of their many layered flood protection.
Not only that, they're doing more than the rest of the world with respect to agricultural production. We can take a page or two out of their book. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/netherlands-agriculture-technology/
Paywalled do not entirely sure what the article's about. But nitrogen is a big issue for them due to how intensive their ag is
It's about the technology and not the food being produced. Egg candling, automated plant nurseries, large scale sorting machines etc.
They also had a seance and conjured up old Canute to do some shouting.
So protection of their homes costs $166k a day. Time to make everyone else pay for it! /s
You can remove the “/s”. That’s literally what is going to happen here due to the people affected by this actually going to their city council meetings. A similar scenario probably has already taken place either in your city or the city of one of the people who upvoted your comment.
Brought to you by government subsidized flood insurance...insurance companies won't insure you if you live in a place like that because it's just a giant money pit for them. The risk is...well it's 100%.That's not really a risk, it's a certainty, they're going to get flooded. So You, the tax payer, gets to pay for their flood insurance through taxes.
The ocean always wins.
The ocean has been staging an up rising for decades, but it thinks we won't notice if it does it slowly. But we have noticed and will surely unite to put a stop to it.
Naah, it's just environmental nonsense. And they'll keep saying that, even as the water rises around them.
I clicked on link to see if the article mentioned the name of an engineer/company/anything. That is literally the article. Nothing more needed to be said🤣
https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/salisbury-beach-storm-destroys-sand-wall/
"So that didn't work out but hear me out, what if we did it *regularly*"
On the tax-payers dime! 😃
$500,000 every 3 days is almost cheaper than rent.
You brought sand...to a beach...to stop the ocean...have you never built a sand castle before?
Beach nourishment is actually really effective when done correctly, but 14,000 yards is like fighting a fire with a water balloon. Edit: And in reading further articles from before construction, it seems like the residents understand this but were desperate to do *something*.
They do something similar in Britain but the trick is to get things in the sand first. So after Christmas they bury their Christmas trees from the entire town in rows on the beach and then cover them with sand. The dunes then have a structure that they can build up on. Any kid who built a sand castle to close to the ocean could have told them what would happen.
\
"Look at these idiots selling cheap beachfront property because of the global warming hoax. I bet a few sandbags will fix it right up"
They should just tell the ocean that climate change isn’t real so it goes away.
Draw a new coastline on a map with a sharpie.
Wouldn't concrete or even wood barriers be better? Serious question. I'm not an engineer. Edit: I want to thank everyone for their answers, this seems like a pretty complex situation sadly. They may need to change laws to save the the land.
State/epa wont allow them is what the local News said last night
Local laws disallow them from building those.
Because they typically cause negative impacts elsewhere on the coastline
And other than cotton candy, wouldn't sand be pretty much the worst? Also not an engineer, but I've built sand castles
Sand works if it's done well. Meaning with PLANTS in it. An established dune has grass all over it that constantly traps more sand as the wind blows it around the beach. It gets a little higher every day. The water can still wash it away, but with grass it's harder PLUS if the grass isn't all gone after the storm... The grass starts repairing and building again. I dunno if this happened before they established their grass well enough or they are just stupid.
I'm from the area and the dunes up until this winter were very healthy with a lot of dune grass and heavy build up but one of the last storms completely undid all the work that took place over the last 15 years since the last major damage was done. So they are bassically trying to stop gap it until the summer when more sand will start to build up again.
People ITT shitting all over the local community that actually generally knows what it’s doing and got unlucky They were building up new dunes to protect the buildings since the old dunes were wiped out by a bad season 3 days after they pumped in the sand, before they had a chance to plant vegetation and build snow fences, an historic high tide washed out the sand But it also protected the homes, it just didn’t have a chance to be more permanently established because of a freak tide and bad timing >"These dunes...if they weren't put here over the last four weeks, the ocean would have come right through, hit the property, and went out onto Route 1A," he said.
Depends how dire the situation is. Most northern Beaches have sand dunes and can maintain with just those. Idk what the situation was here- but there's a point where it's too dicey to establish a dune bc it'll get washed away too often without enough time in between to replenish. Sand works if it's done well. Meaning with PLANTS in it. An established dune has grass all over it that constantly traps more sand as the wind blows it around the beach. It gets a little higher every day. The water can still wash it away, but with grass it's harder (cause the grass acts as a net to keep more sand from leaving) PLUS if the grass isn't all gone after the storm... The grass starts repairing and building again. I dunno if this happened before they established their grass well enough or they are just stupid.
Without dune grasses (and other assorted factors), erosion works real quick on sand. I know people want their summer beaches, but like…
Yeah, sand dunes are up there as one of the most impressive natural features, making something made up out of generally very powdery material into something solid
They aren't solid though, that's the amazing thing. They fucking move across the desert! A 5m sand dune can "walk" nearly 20m a year just under windy conditions. Water would demolish that shit, especially if you're in an arra wkth storms. Need some hella boulders to build a foundation, if not a full on breakwater.
That's desert dunes. Coastal dunes tend to have quite a lot of plants growing on them, and tend to not move too much because of said plants.
While this is mostly true, there are coastal dunes that are too large or just don’t have the vegetation needed to secure them in place. See my previous comment on Jockey’s Ridge!
There are absolutely coastal dunes. Poland is very famous for them, it's a spectacular sight. It has to be noted though that they do retreat, slowly but surely.
The Great Lakes have huge sand dunes as well.
And the whiners in south haven want the poors to pay to fix their private beaches
I was about to say, I visited some large ass coastal dunes in North Carolina on vacation one year
Nah man. Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes up in Michigan are gorgeous, there’s some erosion but it’s not like they’re disappearing immediately.
>Without dune grasses I was looking for this comment, did they think the sand would just sit there? Something has to hold it in place.
It takes years for the sea oats and sea grapes to establish a root system stable enough to hold the sand in place. They need to come up with an interim plan. Maybe temporary barriers offshore a few feet that can be moved once the dunes are reestablished. The ocean will go where it wants to go. The secret is to work with it. They need to get an engineering company from one of the southern Atlantic states to create a plan that the EPA can approve.
Get me some sea yogurt and I'll whip up a great breakfast
I saw something about old Christmas trees being buried in beaches in the UK. The buried trees are better able to catch sand, and serve as something to help those dunes build up and for dune plants to grow into.
Exactly! Looking at the video you can see that where the vegetation is, it's still intact.
Who could have guessed that Sand dunes consist of more than just sand piled on top of sand.
I wanna know what engineer looked at this problem and thought "ahh yes; a mound of sand should to the trick"
No engineer needed. The home owners are all wealthy and therefore believe their thinking is superior to any other person.
I mean, if those engineers were so smart, they’d be rich, because that’s how life works!
The engineers are smart. That's why they don't have homes there and agreed to do the project and know it will be repeat business.
I’m a Sea Level Rise Mitigation Engineering Guru and repeat business is booming. I just never let the clients know why I live on a hill.
>live on a hill As someone who has a geology degree, "This is the way."
I grew up on a “hill” in Kansas if you can believe it. The Cretaceous Ocean’s return had nothin’ on me. ;)
They did their own research.
Tidal currents are a liberal hoax!
In lake Michigan these idiots have invested in putting concrete bunkers and random shit on the PUBLIC beach that are now a huge hazard to try and stop the erosion The result is now you have to walk over all this dangerous bullshit that is now halfway under water. Fucking criminals man
Lake Michigan gets weird. It can rise and fall 10 feet in just a few years due to changes in rainfall, snowfall in Canada, and water usage patterns in cities it supplies. Then throw in erosion on top and beaches come and go with regularity.
I would be pretty shocked if there was any real civil or environmental engineer involved in this at all I’m guessing it was a sand salesmen advising on the sand project
I cant see a civil ( geotechnical) engineer signing off on a just sand approach.
Likely yes. Probably was the only, shitty desperate option the consultants could offer. They've been dealing with the erosion for years in this particular area, all sorts of consultsnts involved. Lots of work been going on in the area with plum Island as well. Homeowners associations have been doing all kinds of stuff, trying to get the state to act. They just can't reconcile Barrier islands make nice beaches, bad places to build houses that their families built decades ago. Genius concept, I know. Not sure, speculating the here state wouldn't let them armor the shore front. Went there many years ago when I was in school, studying coastline geology. Was a pretty well known shit show then, too
Well if you actually read about it instead of just a headline, you'll see it's not that they just piled sand on sand and hoped for the best. They brought in the sand and were about to plant grass but unfortunately a historic weekend of high tides wiped it out before the grass went in. Probably would have been fine without the freak and unexpected "historic" high tides and they got the chance to get the grass in and established. You're still fighting the ocean but it's not like they just threw half a million at piling sand on sand without also planning on making an actual dune with grass and vegetation. https://www.theinertia.com/news/mass-community-spent-565k-on-sand-dune-project-and-the-ocean-washed-it-away-in-3-days/ > The project brought in 14,000 tons of sand and was finished just in time for a historic high tide. It was all gone three days later. > Construction of the dunes began in February and was wrapped up on Friday, March 8 before a weekend of high tides (literally) wiped all of the work, and money, away. According to Salisbury Citizens for Change, there were still plans to plant dune grass and install snow fences, as well.
That’s still extremely short sighted. It’s not like you just plant some grass and the dune magically becomes sturdy enough to stand up to the Atlantic Ocean. It would take ***years*** for sand grasses and other native plants to create a root system strong enough to keep the dunes in place against erosion. If it hadn’t gotten washed away now from bad timing/luck of a very high tide, it would have washed away in a month or a year. A pile of sand with some newly planted grass isn’t going to hold out against the next nor’easter that hits in the fall. EDIT: also “record high water levels” are the new normal that keep occurring, not a once in a century freak incident like they used to be
They should have planted more trees there
I feel like someone with a basic understanding of erosion could have predicted this
I don’t even have a basic understanding of erosion and I could’ve predicted this.
I could argue that the fact you could've predicted this precisely means you do have a basic underrating of erosion. But I don't even have a basic understanding of the of the basics of understanding so....
I'm high on PCP and I predicted this entire conversation. Now someone get these spiders off me.
Can't, they're under your skin
Like a child who builds sandcastles on the beach to see them wash away with the waves.
Any child who has played on the beach could have told them that this would happen. Four year-old me could have told them. This is just next level idiocy,
Did they just DIY a half million dollar project? No engineer was ever consulted?
It is said of Muad'Dib that once when he saw a weed trying to grow between two rocks, he moved one of the rocks. Later, when the weed was seen to be flourishing, he covered it with the remaining rock. "That was its fate," he explained.
* singing woman sound as timothee chalamet stares deeper into the camera *
It's called LAMENTING
LISAN AL GAIB!!!
Kwisatz Haderach… CLIMB UP… RISE
"Tell me about the waters of your homeworld Massach*usul*."
> And last of all the mounting wave, green and cold and plumed with foam, climbing over the land, took to its bosom Tar-Míriel the Queen, fairer than silver or ivory or pearls. Too late she strove to ascend the steep ways of the Meneltarma to the holy place; for the waters overtook her, and her cry was lost in the roaring of the wind.
Lisan al gaib!
What a dick move!
Nature doesn't give a feck about the size of your investment portfolio.
Man, nature fucks!
The homeowners need not worry: climate change will take care of the whole problem soon enough. There will be no houses left to protect.
It’s free real estate - Aquaman
The bar owner interviewed in the report says "nothing you can do about it" but that's only true if he votes Republican.
They forgot that Ground type is weak to water.
Sand Attack < Surf
Surely just a big pile of sand could never be washed away
Time for dune 2
MY DUNE
Dude, Where's My Dune?
Lisan Al Gaib!
As it was written!
Some beach towns have started burying xmas trees to reinforce their dunes.
Christmas trees? I've watched solid bulkheads made out of logs larger than telephone poles, driven 5 meters down into the beach, blown out overnight in a single king-tide storm. Nothing will save this community long-term. It is doomed.
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Maybe when enough expensive beachfront property gets destroyed the hyperwealthy will start voting for the environment.
They'll just scream for a federal bailout while complaining about their taxes being used to help the poors.
Only when the general public stops getting fleeced for footing the bill to rebuild or subsidize their insurance.
B-but wind turbines will ruin the view.
"Let’s say the sea levels rise by five or ten feet and it puts coast areas under water. Wouldn’t people just sell there houses and move?" \-Ben Shapiro
I just read a NYT focus group interview on politics and someone said she wishes Ben Shapiro would run for president, because he's really smart and researches stuff.
Yeah, there's no surprise there after the W years. People just care about voting for the letter by the name and whatever Murdoch tells them to vote for.
I remember years back there was a person interviewed on CNN that was like "I hate how much time I have to spend defending Trump's tweets." It's like, you could just not. But politics is just team sports. And you ride with your team until the end of time.
Sell to who?
Fucking Aquaman!
Big friggin market for houses that don’t exist and are underwater.
What should make you angry is the National Flood Insurance program. It's essentially a free handout to idiots who build homes where they do not belong, courtesy of the taxpayers. [One house in Louisiana has been rebuilt more than 40 times](https://e360.yale.edu/digest/thousands_of_us_homes_keep_flooding_and_being_rebuilt_fema_insurance_louisiana) sometimes not even being fully rebuilt before another claim was made, and 2,100 properties have been fully rebuilt more than 10 times each. This is just another example of a well meaning program run amok. Simple and reasonable rules like, 'OK, your house is totalled. Here's a check. We own it now.' or a limit on the number of claims within a period of time, seem to be absent.
Imagine building homes on sand dunes and flipping out when the sand is eroded away .There was a story in the bible about this kinda stuff .
Not "catastrophic" when rich people's second or third beach homes may become at risk.
I've been to this beach. Trust me, most of them are not particularly wealthy. Salisbury Mass is fairly run down and looks destitute. These people aren't bankrupt of course, but they aren't as wealthy as you think Edit: I'm not making any sort of political statement. I am simply being pedantic.
Don't you know? If someone has something that looks remotely nice they are immediately a billionaire and deserved to be eaten
Oh no! Anyway
As someone who has over a decade of erosion control experience including dune building and beach protection, I can say they made several mistakes. Sand alone will not stop wave erosion, period. Sand needs to have protection from the wind as well. Sand fences, dune grass, and other ground cover help with wind erosion, but unless you protect the toe of the dunes with a rock or sand bag revetment, you are just pissing away money by replacing the sand. Sea walls may be ugly, but they serve a purpose. That purpose is keeping your multimillion dollar cottage out of the ocean.
They need to do stuff like what they do in the UK where they take every used Christmas tree and spend a couple weekends just burying them in the sand to help the dunes.
It's almost like the Parable of the foolish man building a house on the sand in the Bible was something people could relate to real life...
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Ocean unimpressed by sand, continues to eat the rich.
Everyone knows the ocean can’t move sand…
What in the hillbilly barrier did they think would happen to a pile of sand thrown in front of a wave?
We use "armorstone" here. Just big rocks that keep everything behind it in place and don't wash away. The beaches here disappear every winter from the storms and can take years to come back. Seems kind of stupid.
Maybe… we don’t need to live directly next to the ocean. Just a bit further back could help.