The Isle of Palms has been blessed with some of the most beautiful beaches anywhere in this land. It is sad to see these beaches being destroyed by policies that make little sense in this day and age. The results to an untrained observer who walks from the pier to Breach Inlet are in plain sight – a destruction of the beaches, the coastline and the properties along the coastline. From never having properties in emergency conditions – defined as an asinine 20 feet from a habitable structure – we had one or two properties in emergency earlier this year, and we now have 10 out of 21 properties on that section of the beach that qualify as emergencies.
Why all this destruction? Some of the reasons are ones you have heard – so-called natural ebb and flow of the tides and the rise of ocean levels. Some reasons are not so obvious – the inlet is blocked, either due to sand migrating from other renourishments north of us or sand migrating from elsewhere. Overhead pictures of the inlet over the last three years are dramatic. It looks like an individual with an unhealthy heart three years ago to a heart having a full-fledged heart attack and being almost completely blocked today. Water has to go somewhere, and it is going onto our beaches.
The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control is subject to the Beach Management Act, which assigns them the task of working with local municipalities to continually renourish the beaches to maintain a dry sand beach at high tide and a stable dune system. The city of Isle of Palms produced its own Beach Management Plan that mirrored these priorities. All of this was ignored for years. On some portions of the beach in question, there has been zero renourishment since 2018 and zero work done on the dune system that regularly saw water and slowly deteriorated. In April of 2023, many parts of the southern tip of IOP had no dunes whatsoever. Over the last five years, photographic evidence shows the level of the beach has dropped by more than 8 feet. What did we expect the result to be?
There is an old proverb that says “When in a hole, put away the shovel and stop digging.” Our Beach Management Plan does not believe in this proverb as a substantial amount of work done over the last three months is to dig more holes in the beach, move the sand up to the dune and watch it disappear again after one tide cycle – like rolling a stone uphill and letting go. The city engineer, CSE, who is a defendant in a lawsuit in Pawleys island for erosion-related issues, is the sole voice to City Council, even though its results are abysmal.
The state of South Carolina and DHEC/Ocean & Coastal Resource Management love this strategy. Do nothing to renourish the beach, do nothing to the dunes as required by law and let the storm erode personal property. Then use your police powers to claim jurisdiction over personal property by designating it “active beach.” Is this not what our forefathers warned us against – government using regulatory police powers to take your land? The so-called proponents of property rights, Blair Hahn, Rusty Streetman and ex-Mayor Jimmy Carroll, are all for this as they play out their petty class wars.
What should we do? First understand the science better. As sea levels rise, water depth increases, waves become deeper and waves reaching the coast cause more severe erosion. Soft structures like sand alone can no longer save our beaches. We need a multipronged approach and a broader thought process.
I am not qualified to articulate a detailed strategy, but it has to start with the dissipation of wave energy before it hits the coastline. Having waves slam into our coast the way they do now and trying to protect the beach with sand is infeasible and unsustainable. There are many technologies that act as “speed breakers” for the waves out in the ocean. When the wave energy is broken or dissipated out in the ocean, the materials carried by the current are deposited behind the speed breaker. I believe the use of soft structures such as beach renourishment and sand dunes as the next level of protection is a good idea as long as there is a plan to comply with routine renourishment – not crisis renourishment – to maintain a dry sand beach at high tide and a stable dune. The third line of protection is the dune itself. Stabilizing the toe of the dune is critical. States such as Michigan use natural materials like coir rolls to stabilize the toe. Coir rolls absorb wave energy, and natural vegetation can be planted in and around them to stabilize the dune.
Coir rolls disintegrate naturally over a five-year period. When all these levels of protection fail, homeowners should be allowed to protect their property with a retaining wall or equivalent as a last line of recourse and to disconnect property destruction from erosion damage. Isle of Palms stands alone among coastal communities that prohibits homeowners from protecting their property in any fashion on their own land. There is a lot of chest thumping about how bad a retaining wall is. In general, hard structures as a first line of protection are less preferred because the theory is that hard structures reflect wave energy, and, over a period of time, that can cause that energy to dig holes or reflect into a neighboring property. Even those issues have been mitigated with state-of-the-art structures that absorb wave energy rather than reflect it. However, in this case, a retaining wall would never come into play and never have an opportunity to cause any damage as it only comes into play briefly when the structures in front of it fail and are, hopefully, immediately restored or replaced.
It makes no sense to say that all the structures maintained by the state and municipalities fail, and the homeowner must suffer catastrophic damage and loss of property rights as a result. Property protection must be disconnected from poor beach management. Manage the beaches like the regulations require, and you will never ever see a property protection system come into play.
In summary, I urge our politicians and bureaucrats to wake up and give themselves a report card. The grade we would give you is an F. If you can accept that, then we can get rid of preconceived ideas and discuss better ways to truly protect our island’s greatest asset.
Reddy or Not represents the opinion of Lucky Dog Publishing owner Rom Reddy but not necessarily the opinion of the newspaper. In keeping with our philosophy of publishing all opinions, we welcome responses, which must be limited to 400 words and will be published on a space-available basis.