Residents of Salisbury Beach, Massachusetts spent over half a million dollars on a last-ditch effort to save their homes from flooding. But after just three days, the sea had washed most of their Hail Mary away.
The project, organized by the community nonprofit Salisbury Beach Citizens for Change, built a human-made sand dune along the beach to block floodwaters from reaching homeowners’ properties. It took four weeks to build, used 15,000 tons of sand, and cost residents $600,000 out of their own pockets.
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What sparked the initiative was a series of “king” tides that have slammed Salisbury Beach since January, Tom Saab, president of SBCFC told Business Insider. King tides are exceptionally high tides cresting at over 10 feet tall, according to Saab.
Two back-to-back storms in January swelled the tide to over 14 feet, eroding the beach significantly. “The properties got killed,” Saab said. Homeowners sustained damage to their decks, stairways, they even had water in their living rooms, he said.
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To make matters worse, the storms swept away the natural dunes that protected the beachfront properties, leaving them even more vulnerable to the next inevitable king tide.
The homes that line Salisbury Beach are worth about $2 billion in total property value, Saab said. And the beach itself is a popular tourist destination that attracts roughly one million visitors each year.
All in all, this one-square-mile beach pays for 45% of Salisbury’s taxes, he said. Losing it would bankrupt the town. And in that case, the State of Massachusetts would have to bail them out.
“That’s why it’s important, and it behooves the State of Massachusetts to continue to help protect Salisbury beach,” Saab said.
In the wake of those January storms, SBCFC reached out to the State for help, but officials made no promises to invest in coastal protections for Salisbury Beach. So, the nonprofit and local residents filed an emergency action to build a human-made barrier dune themselves.
The group raised over half a million dollars in donations from residents and trucked in enough sand to fill 3.75 Olympic-sized swimming pools to replenish the beach. They completed the project on March 7.
But then, the tide rolled in again.
This video posted on the SBCFC facebook page shows the final stages of construction for the Salisbury Beach human-made dune.
On March 10, a Nor’easter sent a 13-and-half-foot tide barreling up the beach. By the time the water receded, half of their dune had washed away. “The $600,000 we put there got clobbered,” Saab said. “We lost $300,000 of sand.”
But thanks to the dune, their homes were protected. While its swift collapse marks a major financial loss for homeowners, it doesn’t mean the project was a failure, Jens Figlus, a coastal engineer and associate professor at Texas A&M University, told BI.
In fact, he thinks this dune did exactly what it was supposed to. If it hadn’t been there, homeowners would likely be picking up the leftover pieces of their damaged homes. The dune saved them.
How human-made dunes protect coastal communities
As climate change raises sea levels and increases storm frequency, seaside homes face increasing risk. Coastal engineers, like Figlus, are tasked with finding ways to protect them.
Engineered sand dunes are one solution. “They’re basically trying to mimic the natural feature that occurs on many beaches,” Figlus explained.
Dunes work as a buffer between on-land infrastructure and the ocean. When beaches erode, coastal homes lose this natural protection. That’s where human-made dunes can fill in. They replace what was lost and take the hit from rising seas so that homes don’t have to.
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“The dune is a sacrificial construct,” Figlus said. When storms hit and tides swell, they’ll erode the dune instead of destroying the front deck or foundation of your home, he explained.
That means that over time, every engineered dune washes away, just like this one on Salisbury Beach. In that sense, “A dune eroding under a storm like this did its job, because if the dune weren’t there, it would be the houses,” Figlus said.
How quickly that happens is a different question.
The fact that a heavy storm occurred only three days after the Salisbury dune was built is “tragic,” Figlus admitted, but totally out of the residents’ control. If this recent storm hadn’t destroyed the dune, another one eventually would have.
Is it worth it to invest $600,000 in sea level protection that could disappear in a matter of days? That’s up for communities to decide, Figlus said. “You get to a point where it may not be economically feasible to put millions of dollars in front of a few homes and watch it wash away.”
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But he still believes that human-made dunes are a coastal homeowner’s best defense against rising seas. “They’re basically buying time,” he said. “That’s still our best option.”
Saab agreed. But he believes the funding shouldn’t come from the pockets of coastal homeowners, it should come from the State. Nevertheless, his repeated pleas to the state of Massachusetts to fund coastal adaptation projects for Salisbury Beach have gone unanswered.
“Our problem is that the state of Massachusetts refuses to help us out. It refuses to contribute any funds, and would rather see the beach collapse,” he said.
In lieu of funding beach restoration projects, the state is addressing the problem through beach access closures and communication with Salisbury residents, according to the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation.
“To ensure the safety of the public, DCR has closed access points 9 and 10 at Salisbury Beach after they sustained damage from the recent rainstorms,” a DCR spokeswoman told BI in a written statement. “The Healey-Driscoll Administration remains in regular communication with representatives from the Town, the legislative delegation and the community and will continue to work with them to address the impacts of erosion at the Beach.”
Saving Salisbury Beach
This week, Salisbury Beach residents met with environmentalists and members of the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation to formulate next steps.
Gary Miles / Flickr
Roughly 170 people gathered for the virtual meeting to plead with State officials to fund coastal protections for Salisbury Beach, Saab said.
In addition to funding future dune projects, they also discussed the possibility of permitting dredging along Salisbury Beach, which involves harvesting sand from the ocean floor and using it to replenish the beach. But currently, Massachusetts is one of the few East Coast states where dredging is illegal.
Among other solutions that Salisbury Beach residents proposed was the use of “sand trap bags,” which are essentially large plastic bags filled with sand that can be used to build a protective wall along the beach.
But State officials made no promises to move forward with either of those proposals, Saab said. Now, SBCFC and local residents are targeting a different solution: planting dune grass. Seeding sand dunes with grass anchors sand in place, fortifying dunes against erosion from waves and wind, according to UMass Amherst.
Ken Wiedemann / Getty Images
“We’re purchasing hundreds of bundles of dune grass, and we’re going to start planting grass on what’s left of our dune,” Saab said. Both the funding and labor for this new project will come from Salisbury Beach residents.
Not all of them are willing to chip in this time, though. Some residents simply aren’t willing to invest more personal funds in efforts to save the beach, Saab said. But he won’t be throwing in the towel any time soon.
“I’ll never give up. We’ll keep fighting — you’ve got to continue to protect your beach no matter what,” he said.
