Federal disaster relief is being wasted on NC beaches

After a Nor’easter last November, a WECT-TV reporter went to see how the storm had affected Topsail Island, a long barrier island between Morehead City and Wilmington that is especially susceptible to beach erosion. On the beach he spoke with Topsail resident Laura McCormick. She gave this assessment:

“We have at least lost, I would say, two thirds to three quarters of the beach that was just put back last year, and now we’ve lost it in one storm that wasn’t even that bad,” she said. “So my concern is during the next storm, which nobody knows when that’s going to be, how much of it is going to be gone?”

Last week, she got an answer: Less. For a while, anyway.

It’s not that the island’s beach dynamics have changed; erosion pressures are likely getting worse with climate change and sea level rise. But for a few years, the beaches will be expanded by a windfall of federal dollars. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced last week that it will spend $237 million to rebuild dunes and widen the beach on 10 miles of Topsail Island shoreline.

That’s great news for homeowners and visitors to the towns of North Topsail Island and Surf City, which will get four and six miles of beach improvements, respectively. The Army Corps also had good news for another barrier island to the north, Bogue Banks, which will receive $44.5 million to build nearly six miles of dunes and widen 22 miles of beach.

The cost of the projects is stunning. The federal government has, in effect, chosen to dump more than a quarter-billion dollars into the ocean. According to a Western Carolina University database, federal state and local governments have spent at least $909 million in real dollars since 1939 to renourish North Carolina beaches. This year’s outlay will be more than a quarter of that 80-year total.

Robert Young, a geology professor who directs the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina, said, “I understand the value of rebuilding beaches to the local community, but I’ve never understood the federal interest in spending that much money on a local coastal economy. We’ve been spending billions.”

What makes the expense especially excessive is that it is coming out of funds for disaster relief. Those funds should go toward preventing storm damage in small towns in rural areas that can’t afford to protect buildings, homes and roads from flooding. It’s good that the Army Corps of Engineers is spending $39 million to build a new levee in oft-flooded Princeville, but much more is going to protect beach homes.

Orrin Pilkey, Duke emeritus professor of geology and an expert on coastal erosion, said in a letter to The News & Observer: “These projects can only be characterized as madness. The sea-level rise is clearly accelerating, increasingly intense storms are expected as has happened in the last four years, and the amounts of money spent on these beaches will need to be expended again and again for years into the future.”

North Carolina Sens. Richard Burr and Thom Tillis and Rep. David Rouzer did impressive work in wrangling such an enormous amount of federal cash for local beach projects. The added sand will help in the short run, but in the long run the sea is coming for these islands. Burr, Tillis and Rouzer said as much in a June letter to the Assistant Secretary of the Army that asked for federal funding for the beach projects. They noted that on Topsail Island, three hurricanes in the 1990s took 25 feet of beach and today “shoreline erosion continues at a rate of two to three feet per year in some portion of the project area.”

Piling cash into the sand won’t stop that for long.