Nature vs. Tybee beaches: Sand restoration could get funding boost 
by Brad Swope

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Nature vs. Tybee beaches: Sand restoration could get funding boost

By Brad Swope

Last fall, Tybee Islanders built themselves some sand dunes. More precisely, they hired contractors--with the state of Georgia picking up the tab--to truck 20,000 cubic yards of sand to the island's sand-starved north end and spread it over 2,200 feet of waterfront, creating a berm about six feet high and 30 feet across. Then, 10,000 sea oats were planted atop the artificial dunes, in hopes the grasses' spreading roots would keep the low sand hills in place and so buffer the houses just behind them from the Atlantic Ocean's watery force.

But by springtime, high tides had cut vertical erosion marks into the base of the new dunes: the sea was already chipping away at a $325,000 project that took two months of work and 1,500 truckloads of sand to complete.

It was just another example of the lopsided tussle between nature, which continually wants to rearrange sand on barrier islands like Tybee, and islanders who want wide beaches to protect their tourism-based economy and, in some cases, their own scenic property. "I've learned a lot about sand in the last year and a half--you can't stop it from moving when it wants," said Louis S. Off, the island's beach task force chairman, whose own new house stands just behind the new dunes.

The solution to protecting the new dunes, Off said, would be hauling in enough new sand--or possibly pumping it in from offshore--to raise the nearby beach's base elevation by one or two feet, thus widening the beach itself and shoring up the new dunes' base. "We'd stop having that erosion and our sand dunes would grow naturally," he said while giving a reporter a mid-May beach tour.

There's no money for that new sand at the moment, but greater help could be on the way for such erosion "hot spots" along Tybee's entire length.

Legislative wrangling is now underway at state and federal levels to provide supplementary funding sources to the federal Shore Protection Act, which will expire, or "sunset," in 2025 unless renewed, Off said. Such new sources could allow restoration of Tybee beaches more often, if necessary, than the seven years that's now provided for under Shore Protection. "The overall state of the beach is pretty good," Off said. "Right at the moment, there is not an emergency, but wind and storms could change all that."

Effects of shipping channel?

Yet it's not just nature that keeps the elusive art and science of beach "renourishment," as it's officially known, a perennial issue on Tybee. Savannah's shipping industry apparently aggravates any natural toll on Tybee's beaches.

Each year, estimates one study done for the Georgia Ports Authority, about 320,000 cubic yards of sand that normally would drift south from Hilton Head Island onto Tybee, instead falls into the intervening bar channel, a 10-mile-long groove cut into the ocean floor to guide big ships into and out of the Savannah River.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency in charge of shipping channel dredging and maintenance, has reviewed that research, which was done as part of a larger environmental impact statement for a proposed harbor deepening. But "we have not validated the study yet," said Jim Parker, a spokesman for the corps' Savannah district.

Meanwhile, state legislators already have sought--so far in vain--to make the corps responsible for compensatory sand pumping. House Bill 1021, approved by the Georgia General Assembly earlier this year, called for the corps to recover for Tybee's use any "beach quality" sand removed from the the 44-foot-deep bar channel during annual maintenance dredging done to keep it from silting shut.

But, as Parker points out, laws passed by states usually are not binding on federal agencies like the corps. And right now, he said, the corps doesn't have authority to put that dredged material anywhere but a pre-approved disposal site out in the ocean, which is judged the "least-cost, most environmentally acceptable" option.

"For anything that would cost more"--namely, pumping the material onto Tybee-- "someone would have to pick up the difference," Parker said,

So as of early June, task force members were working with the state Department of Natural Resources and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to try to get the beach restoration work funded under the federal Coastal Zone Management program. The program, administered by NOAA, is supposed to assure that member states like Georgia have a say in federal activities, such as harbor maintenance, that affect their interests. "We should know" this month if this funding route proves successful, Off said.

Other trouble spots; a return on investment

The Shore Protection Program that provides for beach renourishment every seven years on much of the island, most recently in 2000, doesn't include the northernmost mile and a half of beach where the new dunes went in, Off said.

So local officials are lobbying to have the whole island included in those renourishments, which typically cost about $10 million each; the federal government pays 60 percent of that, Off said, with town, state and county governments paying the rest.

Even a few areas already covered under Shore Protection could use restoration more often than seven years. Case in point: the erosion-prone spots around Second Street, where the beach comes to a point near the dogleg in U.S. 80, and where both wind and tidal action eat hungrily at sand. The area, badly eroded before the 2000 renourishment, now has about 150 feet of beach at high tide. But still, Off said, "we've probably lost about 30 to 40 percent of the sand that was put here" three years ago.

Another erosion hot spot is on the island's south tip along the Back River shore. A sand-catching jetty along the nearby oceanfront was recently "notched"--that is, had some concrete sections removed--to try to redirect sand toward the river beaches, where a number of homes stand.

Traditional renourishment has involved pumping sand from nearshore areas through big pipelines that direct it onto the beach in slurry form. But that method often leaves clay and silt mixed with the desirable beach sand; an alternative method that might be used for future renourishment, Off said, would instead deposit the slurry in shallow waters near the beach, and allow the sand--now in cleaner form--to wash ashore.

The expense and effort of beach restoration has been worth it to date, says Off, a former Atlantan who now runs a design and construction management firm, LoRec Inc., from his house. He points to a corps study estimating that "shoreline protection"--including beach restoration--brings Tybee nearly $7.7 million a year in "recreational benefits," namely tourism dollars; and another $852,000 in "storm damage reduction" to homes that might otherwise be washed away. In comparison to that $8 million-plus total, he calculates, spending on island beach restoration, when prorated annually, has worked out to about $1 million a year--an 8-for-1 return on investment.

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