Hitting the Beach

Floridians have a legal right to laterally traverse the sandy beaches of the state. But by removing beaches, seawalls usurp that right. When state and county bureaucrats allow a community to build a seawall, they are sacrificing a public beach for the express benefit of private property owners and developers.

Once the beach is gone the only option is “beach renourishment”—a euphemism for making a fake beach. Usually the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers attends to this by using huge dredges to strip-mine sand from the ocean floor (along with juvenile turtles and entire benthic communities, including crustaceans, mollusks, worms, sponges, corals, and sea grasses). The resulting turbidity can last for months, clogging the delicate gills of filter feeders and starving sight feeders such as pelicans, terns, gulls, gannets, loons, cormorants, sea ducks, and all manner of predatory fish. A billion dollars in federal, state, and municipal funds has been spent in Florida for fake beaches, and 90 percent of these fake beaches have washed away within five years.

In the process of sucking up offshore sand, the Corps smothers coral reefs, critical habitat for juvenile sea turtles of five species, all of which are protected by the Endangered Species Act. Then, when adult turtles make landfall, the alien sand may be too coarse for them to dig through or so fine that it falls back into their egg chambers as fast as they dig. The habitat of shorebirds is destroyed. Invertebrates are smothered. Maybe the beach ecosystem recovers; maybe it doesn't. It's as if you dumped five feet of dry, gritty dirt on your front yard. Something will grow there eventually, but not your lawn.

My guides arrived at noon the following day—David Godfrey, Gary Appelson, and Renée Zenaida, all of the Caribbean Conservation Corporation, the world's oldest sea turtle research and protection outfit. Godfrey, the CCC's director, drove us to a typical seawall, tucked up against the refuge's southern boundary, in Wabasso. Seventeen oceanfront cottages supposedly protected by the wall had been torn up in 2004 by hurricanes Frances and Jeanne; of these, eight had been totally destroyed. The 1,800-foot seawall had broken in half and caved in. Most of the beach—prime turtle nesting habitat—was gone. Instead of protecting the cottages, the wall had destroyed most of the beach in front of it and severely damaged 200 yards of beach to the south. “Over there was Wabasso Park,” said Godfrey, pointing to a gravel-lined gully on our right. “That's where the public bathrooms used to be. Gone. And the people who buy these lots are going to come back and build something bigger and feel like they're safe because of the [repaired] wall.” Godfrey related a confrontation he'd had with one of the homeowners when the wall was going up: “The guy came out on the beach and started grilling me: ‘Who are you? What do you want?' I told him we were concerned about sea turtle nesting and had differing opinions about how to deal with beach erosion. ‘Well, this is my house, and I'm gonna do what I need to protect it, and blah, blah, blah.' Well, that's how he ‘protected' his house.” Godfrey pointed to a gray floor—all that was left.

The new buildings that will go up will be subsidized by state and federal flood insurance. And now that the seawall has removed most of the sand, residents will demand perpetual beach renourishment. “This is just a tiny snapshot,” declared Appelson.

And Godfrey added: “Rather than allowing this monstrosity on the beach, the state should have bought these dinky little bungalows. Granted, I wouldn't want my home destroyed if it were on the beach, but the sea is here, and rather than protecting every one of these buildings, we ought to identify places where we can move back. If there's not a high-rise, we should be buying these people out.”

As a classic example of what not to do, the Wabasso seawall fiasco has proved a net benefit to sea turtles. Beachfront development interests had pushed a law through the Florida legislature in 1995 that allowed local governments to authorize seawalls sans state permitting in the event of “emergencies.” Construction had to start within 60 days of the emergency, and the seawall had to be “temporary.” Suddenly “emergency” seawalls were popping up all over the state. One of the first armoring projects under the new law was the Wabasso seawall in Indian River County. Construction began more than a year after the emergency, and there was nothing “temporary” about it (at least until the hurricanes ripped it apart). The Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service looked the other way. So the CCC sued the county for illegal seawall authorization. It then asked the DEP to issue a statement that the project was illegal. The department demurred. The CCC asked the Fish and Wildlife Service to issue a statement explaining that authorization of the wall resulted in a “take” of sea turtles and was therefore unlawful under the Endangered Species Act. The service demurred. However, the discovery process forced the state to admit that the wall was illegal.

Had it filed for an Endangered Species Act violation, the CCC might have gotten the county and the homeowners to provide mitigation for the wall through a habitat conservation plan, but the group saw an opportunity for a great deal more. It went after and obtained a settlement for a habitat conservation plan for the entire county that included a moratorium on all seawall construction pending Fish and Wildlife Service approval. The plan, approved in 2004, finally forced the service to admit that seawalls do indeed result in a take of sea turtles, and it requires the county to monitor turtle nesting along its beaches, sponsor sea turtle education programs, protect nests from such predators as skunks and raccoons, place a cap on the number of seawalls it authorizes, and enforce a strict coastal lighting code so that adult turtles aren't repelled and hatchlings don't become disoriented and move away from the sea.

From Wabasso we drove north to a beachfront cottage in Brevard County that had supposedly been made storm safe by tubes—portable, plastic seawalls that are filled with sand and that hold back the sea about as successfully as did King Canute. The county has a ban on seawalls, but the tubes' developers got around it with shrewdly applied political pressure and by putting on a medicine show in which they asserted that their device shouldn't count as a seawall and that it was the next best thing to Dr. Kickapoo's Elixir for Rheum, Ague, Blindness, and Insanity. The developers have even tried to push through legislation that changes the definition of “dunes” to include their tubes. The tubes I saw, erected inside the refuge and after the hurricanes of 2004 had blown out the cottage's walls, were also “protecting” a vacant lot (illegally, because the tubes are regulated differently than hard seawalls).

“The kindest thing I can say about these tubes is that they're experimental,” said Godfrey. “Engineers who have looked at this stuff say it's essentially worthless. We're laying out this experimental crap in the middle of the densest sea turtle-nesting beach in America to protect homes that are already destroyed. It's ridiculous. It makes me want to vomit when I see this. State, federal, local governments, and the Richard King Mellon Foundation spent over $100 million buying land for this refuge. There should be a mechanism for the state to evaluate a house like this and force it to be moved back.”