Every time a wave crashes ashore in South Carolina,
it washes away a little bit of the state's greatest asset -- one grain at a
time.
In a state where tourism is a $14 billion industry, and the beaches are the
top draw, that's like money washing out to sea.
In a normal year, Grand Strand beaches can lose six inches of sand,
Charleston barrier islands as much as two feet. Sometimes, it's much worse.
Thanks to occasionally brutal hurricane seasons, shifting sands and the
mysteries of coastal erosion, some Lowcountry beaches are simply vanishing.
Parts of Folly, Edisto and Sullivan's Island have no beach at high tide, the
surf lapping up against their dunes. Hunting Island, one of only two public
beaches on the state's southern coast, lost 40 feet of sand last year.
Now, unless Congress spends tens of millions of dollars for beach
re-nourishment projects, the next wave of beach erosion could hit South Carolina
squarely in the wallet.
"We haven't seen a drop in business yet, but if it continues and isn't dealt
with, there will be no beach for people to get on," says LaJuan Kennedy,
broker-in-charge at Fred Holland Realty, which manages many of the rental houses
on Folly Beach. "The beach is everything. It is a tremendous revenue producer;
it's what draws people to Charleston."
Communities all along South Carolina's coast are grappling with beach
erosion, an issue that goes beyond dollars and on which there is plenty of
disagreement.
Some believe re-nourishment is just the cost of doing business, and is vital
to protect waterfront communities. Others say rebuilding beaches harms the
environment and only delays the inevitable.
Last year, Gov. Mark Sanford vetoed state money for the Hunting Island State
Park's re-nourishment project, saying it would be like throwing $5 million into
the Atlantic Ocean. The Legislature overrode the veto because of local protests
and despite warnings from some geologists who say that, in a contest between man
and ocean, the ocean always wins.
Many local officials argue that even if they have to pump a million cubic
yards of sand onto their beaches every decade, doing so more than pays for
itself in tourism and economic activity. More than 120,000 jobs in South
Carolina are directly tied to the tourist trade.
"I don't see how the governmental agencies can turn their back on one of the
greatest assets the state has," Edisto Beach Mayor Burley Lyons says.
EDISTO BEACH
The ghost of Edingsville Beach haunts this quiet island hamlet.
In the mid-19th century, Edingsville was a popular barrier island, famous for
its wide, hard-packed sand beaches where wealthy planters built summer homes. In
the years following the Civil War, two vicious hurricanes devoured Edingsville,
leaving only a sliver of marshland and, supposedly, the spirits of former
residents.
Along the South Carolina coast, the tide generally carries sand south, taking
from one beach and depositing it on the next. For years, Edingsville was
Edisto's natural source for beach re-nourishment.
Today, Edisto's narrow beach is on life-support in the form of 30 groins that
have been trapping sand for years. Without them, scientists say the beach would
be a Piggly Wiggly parking lot two blocks inland.
As it is, there is little beach at high tide. The ocean has taken a couple of
houses and forced the town to condemn a couple more. Winter storms have been
particularly harsh, chewing away several feet of beach and threatening the
town's utilities, whose cables and conduits are buried along Palmetto Boulevard,
the town's main drag. The roughest blows these days drive seawater onto the
road.
"The beach is as vulnerable as I've seen it in my life," Lyons says. "We're
sand-starved, and we have no more drawing cards. Only money will cure this."
Bill Eiser, an oceanographer with the state's Office of Ocean and Coastal
Resource Management, says Lyons' assessment is accurate, and that the island is
at the top of the state's priority list. Still, because of the process
communities must follow and the scarcity of re-nourishment funds, it could be
years before Edisto sees any new sand.
Town officials have raised half the $750,000 needed for a re-nourishment
feasibility study, which is standard practice today. Any community that hopes
for federal funding has to ante up for part of the cost. Private communities
have little hope of public help. Debordieu, a gated community north of
Georgetown, is footing the entire bill, divided among homeowners, for rebuilding
its beach.
The Army Corps of Engineers has gotten approval to do the Edisto study, but
the actual work -- which likely will cost nearly $6 million -- will require the
small town to come up with even more money.
There is little choice for Edisto; the town's livelihood is at stake. Of the
2,400 homes on the island, 80 percent are rental properties. Without a beach,
there is no tax base.
Until replenishment begins, locals can only hope the tides are kind. Although
recent hurricanes have hurt the beach, it is usually January and February
nor'easters that do the most damage. On a recent afternoon, Lyons watched the
turbid Atlantic with concern.
"Winter's coming," he said. "I hope it's kind to us."
HUNTING ISLAND
It looks like a bomb went off.
Trees litter the beach like fallen soldiers, the twisted plumbing of an old
restroom juts out of the ground. The dunes drop off like cliffs, where there are
dunes at all. The ocean often rushes directly into the forest.
For years, the Atlantic has made Hunting Island its favorite punching bag,
and South Carolinians have made it their favorite beach. It draws 1.2 million
visitors a year. People wait for years to rent modest beachfront cabins on the
island, a place that Hollywood routinely uses to shoot jungle scenes.
For locals, though, the beach is where they grew up, fell in love and learned
to love and fear the ocean. Now it's almost gone.
"We lost 40 or 50 feet of beach in a couple of weeks (of 2004)," says Ashley
Berry, assistant park manager at Hunting Island. "You could sit here and watch
foot after foot of these dunes break off."
Park officials are worried that the ocean will cut into the lagoon on the
south end of the island. When that happens, Hunting will effectively be cut in
two.
This barrier island's erosion problems have persisted for years, though the
reasons for that aren't entirely clear. While beaches at nearby islands are in
decent health, the ocean seems to delight in carrying Hunting's sand just
offshore, where it forms dangerous sandbars that threaten ocean traffic.
"There's always the same amount of sand out there, but it's never in one
spot," Eiser says. "Why some beaches erode differently is a good question. They
get the same waves, and different results."
Hunting has become ground zero for the debate on beach re-nourishment. Orrin
Pilkey, a Duke University geologist, says islands should be allowed to erode and
accrete as nature intends, and that taxpayer dollars should not be used for
re-nourishment or to bail out property owners who persist in the "foolish act"
of building on the shore of a constantly evolving barrier island.
That reasoning was partly why Sanford vetoed the $5 million to help rebuild
Hunting's beach.
"We were shocked when he vetoed that money," says Roberta Gunderson,
president of the Friends of Hunting Island. "He's very familiar with the beach.
He went there as a kid; his mother still lives in the area. He knows it's the
only public beach in northern Beaufort County."
Sanford spokesman Will Folks said even state law considers erosion a natural
process, and there is little hope of circumventing nature.
"One storm could completely wipe out a re-nourishment project like this one,"
Folks said. "This is not going to stop coastal drift."
Geologists such as Pilkey say beach re-nourishment interferes with natural
erosion and accretion and kills every animal in the sand that is moved. Other
environmentalists counter that without healthy beaches, sea turtles will have
nowhere to lay their eggs and nest, perhaps leading to their extinction.
For now, the fight to preserve Hunting Island will continue. The Army Corps
of Engineers has declared the park's beach eligible for emergency funds because
of hurricane damage, and a larger re-nourishment project could come as soon as
next winter.
By then, though, a lot of people worry there may not be much left to save.
"We are losing this little by little," Gunderson says.
FOLLY
A couple of years ago, Mary Lane Gray could watch Atlantic sunrises from her
porch with 150 feet of Folly Beach stretching out below her.
At high tide today, she could fish from that porch.
"In the last year, I have just watched the beach wash away," Gray says.
If erosion were a disease, the northern end of Folly would have a terminal
case. In the last few years, one of Charleston's favorite beaches has withered,
partly because of hurricanes chewing on the coastline and partly because of
erosion caused by the Charleston Harbor jetties.
The jetties, built by the federal government in the last years of the 19th
century to protect the harbor channel, disrupted the southern flow of sand,
starving Folly and Morris Island beaches. After years of denying it, the
government conceded culpability in Folly's problems, which shores up the
island's chances of getting federal money for re-nourishment.
The problems at Folly have been personified by JoAnn Schultz and her legal
battles to build a permanent seawall in front of her house. Some people consider
her home, perched on the dune line, a monument to the perils of building too
near the beach. In a way, it's a bad rap: when her house was built in 1998,
there was a lot of beach in front of it.
Schultz's problems aren't entirely natural. They have been aggravated by the
growing number of seawalls and sandbag bunkers built around other island
property.
Manmade remedies for erosion often aggravate the problem. Property owners can
build seawalls beyond the high tide line without a permit. When the beach
recedes so far that the surf hits the wall, the flow is re-diverted to weaker
dunes. One home's protection is another's peril.
On the beleaguered northern end of Sullivan's Island, where the tide actually
creeps under some homes, Bob Ellis and Tom McWethy regularly fill bags with sand
to lay under one house.
"After about a million bags, a foundation will build up," McWethy says.
"Theoretically."
Mostly though, seawalls and sandbags can shift sand on beaches and even cut
off access to public beaches. When that happens, the state gets involved.
"The beaches are for the public, people need to be able to get to it," Eiser
says.
Not long ago, there wasn't much of Folly Beach to get to. After 1989's
Hurricane Hugo, high tide ran to the dune line until the Corps of Engineers
rebuilt the beach with 2.5 million cubic yards of sand in 1993. Experts
suggested the rebuilt beach would last eight or 10 years, and it held up better
than expected until the 2004 hurricane season.
When a slew of storms chewed up the coast, they consumed about 1 million
cubic yards of sand, said Folly Beach City Administrator Toni Connor-Rooks.
Officials had estimated the beach needed 1.7 million cubic yards of sand before.
Now they say 2.7 million will do the job.
Folly has a better shot of a major re-nourishment than any other South
Carolina beach. There are currently two projects in the federal pipeline --
emergency funding to repair storm damage and a routine re-nourishment. Lisa
Metheney, a planner with the Army Corps of Engineers, says the agency wants to
do both jobs at the same time this spring. Combining the jobs would save
taxpayers about $1 million on the $14 million project.
Folly officials dismiss any notion that beach re-nourishment is not worth the
investment. Not only are hundreds of rental properties the foundation of its tax
base, but there is $300 million in oceanfront property there, according to
island building inspector Tom Hall.
That in itself makes beach re-building a vital investment, Folly officials
say.
And that is ultimately the bottom line. Building homes, condominiums and
high-rise hotels at the water's edge might not make much sense, but it makes a
lot of money.
For most people, the allure of the sea -- that smell of saltwater in your
living room -- is worth the price of a rock seawall and the constant concern
that the tide will never stop coming.
"If you live on the coast, it's just the price you pay," Gray says.
Contact Brian Hicks at 843-937-5561 or bhicks@postandcourier.com.
