Calvin Coolidge was president when the federal government began paying to pump sand onto what was arguably the nation’s first beach resort town: Coney Island, New York. A century later, President Joe Biden has continued one of the most cash-bleeding civil works programs ever conceived by Washington, known as “beach renourishment.” As I write today, weaning Long Beach, New Jersey, or any other popular beach destination off of taxpayer-subsidized sand has proven extremely difficult. Americans’ demand for wide and sandy beaches along saltwater coasts is insatiable — even as sea-level rise and intensifying coastal storms erode public beaches at faster rates Experts say the cost of pumping and spreading sand, bundled under a suite of Army Corps of Engineers programs called Coastal Storm Risk Management, will spiral to new spending heights because of climate change. Nourishment is so ingrained in U.S. coastal policies, and so sprawling in scope, that no one knows how much the government has spent to rebuild beaches over the last century, including Congress and the Army Corps of Engineers. Since 2010, the Army Corps has spent roughly $3 billion on sand placement. The lion’s share — $1.8 billion — came via supplemental post-disaster spending bills. And when a beach is deemed to have been destroyed by a coastal storm, as opposed to normal erosion, the Army Corps picks up 100 percent of the tab. Since 2018, the emergency spending tab has climbed to nearly $600 million. “There’s no way the Corps stops pumping sand onto beaches until there’s no money or no sand left to put out there,” Andrew Coburn, associate director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University, which tracks government spending on beach projects, told me. Buying time
The alternative isn’t pretty. Lost beaches conjure grim visions of coastal blight where apartment towers and shoreline businesses become teardowns or collapse into the ocean. It’s already happening in places like Rodanthe Beach, North Carolina, where locals are desperate for sand. Congress and the Army Corps aim to please, even as routine beach nourishment has far exceeded — both in dollars and duration — what Congress intended when it first began authorizing 50-year periodic nourishment projects in the 1960s. Many projects have exceeded their original sunset dates and have been reauthorized for decades longer. The five largest beach projects have been replenished a combined 57 times since the early 1960s, requiring more than 30 million cubic yards of sand, according to Army Corps figures. That’s enough to fill nearly 340,000 transoceanic shipping containers. Molly Mitchell, an assistant professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, said the projects offer a near-term solution to keeping local economies alive. But as seas rise and storms strengthen, current engineering standards and construction practices for beach building will become obsolete. There will come a day when sand infusions will no longer be practical much less affordable. “We can look to the past and say that beach nourishment has been a very effective strategy, but we’re really just buying time until we come up with a better solution,” Mitchell said.
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