Molly Murray, The News Journal 4:06 p.m. EDT November 1, 2014
Some residents on Delaware’s ocean coast worry the state is focusing too much on shoreline protection and not enough on safety and recreation.
At issue for Rehoboth Beach resident Ed O’Connor is the limited number of beaches where he can still surf – and even take friends and family swimming – since state and federal renourishment projects started.
“Those beaches have a use, and it’s for recreation,” O’Connor said.
And those bigger, wider beaches, he said, just aren’t as safe for swimming anymore because of the steep dropoffs formed when the beach is elevated and widened.
He and others blame the state-federal beach renourishment projects along the coast for pushing breaking waves closer to shore.
The renourished beach, said Dewey Beach resident Clinton Bunting, has increased surf-related injuries.
Bunting, a former lifeguard, said “injuries have increased dramatically ... I’m asking you, even begging you,” to address the issue.
The concerns were raised Saturday during a public workshop on beach regulation revisions. A committee of state officials and area residents has been meeting to discuss a possible revision to the regulations, which were last updated in 1983.
Frank Piorko, director of the state Division of Watershed Stewardship, said his staff and representatives from the Army Corps of Engineers met with members of the Delaware Chapter of the Surfriders Foundation in recent weeks to discuss the concerns.
Meanwhile, Wendy Carey, the shoreline specialist with Delaware Sea Grant, and Beebe Medical Center emergency room physician Paul Cowan have been tracking weather, surf conditions, numbers of people on the beach and water and surf injuries over the past several summers.
Cowan got curious when he started to notice that some days there would be no surf-related injuries and other times there would be dozens.
“We would see these clusters,” Cowan explained during a talk to area lifeguards in 2012. “As soon as the cluster started, it would stop again.”
Between 2010 and 2012, they tallied 1,121 surf-related injuries, four fatal. The majority – 35 percent – were arm and shoulder injuries, but 5 percent were neck or spinal cord injuries.
The most dangerous time for people in the surf: When they are exiting the ocean and turn their back on the waves, he said. The majority of the injuries were suffered by men between 30 and 60, Cowan said.
Twenty-one percent of the time, during the summer season, there are no injuries at all. But 26 percent of the time, there are five or more. The worst month: July, when the beaches are most crowded.
Anthony P. Pratt, the state shoreline and waterway administrator, said it may be difficult to determine whether the beach renourishment is a factor. Delaware’s ocean beaches have always had a steep slope, which tends to allow waves to break closer to shore.
O’Connor said one issue he sees is that emergency replenishment, after significant storms, occurs more frequently, so the beaches never regain a natural profile.
“We’ve been talking to DNREC,” he said. “It’s a hazardous situation out there. I can’t take family members down to Rehoboth Beach in the summer because of that 4-foot dropoff ... We would love to see a more gentle, sloping beach.”
O’Connor said the end result is “my recreational opportunities have been destroyed. There needs to be a psychology in DNREC that we cannot just pump sand and have a 4-foot cliff and have people getting injured.”
Bunting, too, said he was concerned enough to suggest that state and federal officials revisit the way renourishment projects are done to lessen the steep slopes.
“We’ve got to have it,” he said of beach renourishment. But he wants officials to take a closer look and create a beach where the waves break farther out.
The major state-federal renourishment project in Rehoboth Beach was done in June 2005. The previous summer, Rehoboth lifeguards reported 12 neck and spinal injuries. In 2005, there were 38 – the highest the beach patrol responded to up to 2013.
The summer of 2013, the beach patrol had the fewest spinal injuries – six. That summer season followed Superstorm Sandy and concluded prior to additional sand being pumped onto the beach.
Sandy was such a significant storm in terms of sand movement that, at an offshore artificial reef site, the underwater currents moved, toppled and crushed old New York City subway cars that were placed off the Delaware coast.
Beach renourishment is not a potential topic for the regulation revisions the workshops were considering. But O’Connor and Bunting raised their concerns because the state Beach Preservation Act, upon which the regulations are based, is so closely aligned with shoreline protection.
Both men wanted more public input prior to future sand pumping projects.
“I think it’s a very good question, what opportunity does the public have to comment?” said Ralph “Dirk” Durstein, a deputy attorney general who oversees coastal issues for the state environmental agency. “It seems like the kind of thing that should be raised.”
O’Connor said he believes that recreational opportunities can be incorporated into beach design.
Among other concerns at the Rehoboth Beach workshop were inequities between the commercial building lines along the boardwalks in Rehoboth and Bethany beaches and the adjacent residential ones.
Bunting said it had a huge impact on a boardwalk-front residential development he did in Bethany Beach because he was held to the residential line, which was significantly further landward than the nearby commercial one. He asked state officials to come up with a more equitable way to handle the building lines in the two communities with boardwalks.
And he questioned the state’s decision to kill black pine trees along the coastal highway. He suggested that the loss of the trees impacted the stability of the dunes there. The non-native trees were sprayed with herbicide as part of an initiative to restore native species to the dunes within state parks.
Pratt said the loss of the trees had little impact on the stability of the dunes. The bigger factor, he said, is the beach grass that captures blowing sand and holds the dunes in place.
Dunes were also an issue at the Slaughter Beach workshop. There, a Lewes resident questioned why the dunes off the two Lewes parking lots were flattened by state crews each spring if protecting dunes was a priority in the Act. At that meeting, Pratt said, the practice predates his agency’s management of Delaware’s public beaches.
And, along Delaware Bay beaches, the standard operating procedure for many residents and visitors is to move their boats over dune crossings each spring, place them on the beach and then remove them each fall.
It is a practice residents in Slaughter Beach would like to continue without government interference, said Mayor Bill Krause.
“There are a lot of boats on the state-maintained beach,” Krause said.
The same is true in Lewes, where, in some cases, the boats are pulled up along the edge of the dune or stored in the dunes.
But state officials are considering forbidding the practice if the boats are stored in or on the edge of dunes – a practice they worry could damage dune vegetation and the health of the natural shoreline protection system.
But Krause and fellow Slaughter Beach resident Jimmy Dalton made it clear Friday during the first of two state-sponsored workshops on Delaware beach regulations: Slaughter Beach “is a boating community.”
Officials with the state shoreline and waterway section said they are still in the information gathering stage and hope to get as much input from coastal residents as possible – a process that could take several more months – before they draft new beach regulations.
The state law, however, already gives the agency broad powers to protect dunes. In 2006, they unsuccessfully tried to get boats removed from the dunes in Lewes – also along Delaware Bay – but they were met with political opposition.
Among the other concerns raised during the workshops: whether new regulations would be in line with federal flood insurance regulations; how they might impact residents who want to rebuild to comply with increasing federal hazard requirements in coastal areas; and whether state officials would consider adding allowances for hard structures such as bulkheads, rip rap and living shorelines so property owners in vulnerable areas would have additional tools to protect their homes.
In the past, state regulators have mostly discouraged hard structures and have moved away from that strategy in their own coastal protection program. Instead, they favor beach renourishment projects that include wide beaches and sand dunes.
“The more dunes you have in front of you,” Pratt said, “the more protection you have.”
Contact Molly Murray at 463-3334 or mmurray@delawareonline.comor Follow her on Twitter @MollyMurraytnj.