50 Photos: Coastline Erosion
Living on the Edge
A beachfront home, once the ultimate real estate fantasy.
Now, instead, the latest front in a war with Mother Nature.
Many dream homes are now perched on the edge of oblivion.
From Newport to the National Seashore, beaches are disappearing.
Homes are toppling into the ocean.
The Atlantic coastline has been under a brutal assault by a battery of storms.
Massachusetts regulations prohibit Plum Island residents from building sea walls or rock barriers.
Erosion rates of approximately a foot a year have long been the norm on Plum Island.
These days, storms routinely take 10 or 20 feet of dune at a single pass.
What explains the surge in Plum Island erosion rates?
Islanders blame the jetties at the mouth of the Merrimack River.
Residents say the jetties disrupt the natural flow of sand along the shore front.
That does not explain the increased erosion on the Atlantic coast, from the Carolinas to Cape Cod.
Environmental author Bill Sargent says global warming has led to sea level rise and more frequent, violent storms.
These powerful, dynamic storms have no regard for homes, roads or sewer lines.
Ideally, a natural beach can move, pulsate and reform after every storm.
New England coastal erosion, is not exclusive to areas exposed to the open Atlantic.
Even areas like Cape Cod Bay can see significant erosion occurrences.
Nor'easters can put a ferocious hit on the inner arm of Cape Cod.
Beaches in Dennis lost twenty feet to the February storm of 2013.
In Sandwich, the town's proximity to the Cape Cod Canal compounds the problem.
From his home on Bay Beach, Mike Sheehan has watched the sand vanish.
On Bay Beach in 2009, about 80 feet of sand -- now, 10 to 12 feet.
Many blame the jetty at the Cape Cod Canal.
The jetty was designed by the Army Corps of Engineers, to keep sand from drifting into the channel.
Critic say the jetty also prevents the sand from re-nourishing the Sandwich Beaches.
Aerial photos show the build-up of sand on Scusset Beach in Plymouth, just north of the jetty.
They call it growing rocks.
The soft sand scoured away, exposing a cobbled, rocky beach.
Erosion is about more than losing beautiful beaches.
A long-time resident, Irene Davis says the dunes along Town Neck Beach are all that stand between rising waters and the historic district of Sandwich.
Sandwich is the oldest town on Cape Cod.
This winter's storms have cut eight new breaks through the barrier dunes in Sandwich.
Those breaks allow the water to spill into the ecologically fragile marsh.
War spills during storms, and with almost every high tide.
National Geographic named this boardwalk one of the top ten in the country.
That same Sandwich boardwalk is now condemned.
Residents say the Army Corp of Engineers has listened to concerns about the jetty.
The Corp says a mitigation study, called a "section one eleven", is needed.
Residents were told the "section one eleven" could take ten years.
The restless, shifting nature of barrier beaches on display dramatically -- in Chatham, on Cape Cod.
Much has changed in Chatham in the last five years.
Bob long owns one of the last cottages on North Beach Island.
It was once a thriving, primitive community of forty camps.
On by one, the ocean has taken the cottages.
From the deck of his family's camp. Mr. Long sees what were once protective dunes.
Citing their imminent demise, the Park Service took down the six cottages on North Beach Island.
Mr. Long and others feel the island is deteriorating, and it's just a matter of time.
Though difficult to accept, the ocean is taking over this remote and austere spot.
Chatham, Massachusetts has 6,700, year round, residents.