Orrin Pilkey, always good for a blog quote, authored an article in the Fayetteville Observer this weekend. A primer:
As time passes, the beach continues to retreat in front of the wall, narrowing until it eventually disappears. The lost beach means that breaking waves can no longer transport an adequate amount of sand to adjacent beaches — that is, the sand supply from these beaches is removed and their erosion rate increases. This can lead to a need for more seawalls, which is why seawalls, whether sand bags or concrete, are a no-compromise issue. If you allow any, you must eventually allow all, which would be a disaster.
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As the density of development along our shoreline increases, challenges to good beach management will be ever more common as beachfront property owners try to save their houses at any cost — including the loss of the beach. The legislature needs to have a vision for the future of our beaches and continue to recognize that jetties sacrifice much for the sake of preserving houses of people so devoid of vision that they actually built next to an eroding ocean beach.
