Retired elementary schoolteacher Pam Kosar tends sea turtle nests. Every morning during the spring and summer she or another volunteer walks along North Topsail Beach’s shoreline, scanning the sand for turtle tracks. North Topsail Beach is the northern tip of a barrier island in the southeast corner of the state with designated turtle nesting habitat. During the warm months, pregnant loggerhead turtles creep onto the shore to lay more than a hundred eggs in sandy holes on the beach.
But on the north end of the island, these federally-protected turtles crawl out of the sea, heavy with eggs, and bump into a 12-foot high sandbag wall. Each bag is 10-feet long, five-feet wide and weighs four to five hundred pounds. Stacked on top of each other, they form an impassable boundary between the ocean and the buildings behind them. The bags stand in the way of pregnant sea turtles, but they also prevent the ocean from dragging property into the surf.
Kosar said sometimes turtles lay their eggs in front of the bags despite the less-than-ideal environment. When this happens, she moves the eggs to an area without sandbags. “The nests will wash away if we don’t move them,” said Kosar.
Pregnant sea turtles often return to the sea without laying their eggs. This is called a false crawl. Photo credit: Pam Kosar
But without the bags, condos and other residential buildings would wash away. Before she sold her condo, Kosar owned property protected by the wall of bags, a condo in one of the eight Topsail Reef buildings. The Topsail Reef condos are located near the New River Inlet, an eroding section of North Topsail Beach. In 2011 the condos lost two beachfront pools to erosion and by 2012, Kosar said the owners were desperate. So the Topsail Reef property owners paid more than $2 million for a sandbag wall.
“I kind of walk this fine line because I was an advocate of the sandbags because they protected my property,” Kosar said. “But it’s not a good environment for sea turtles.”
Sandbagging structures
Sandbags are the town’s latest tool against the barrier island’s chronic erosion. The bags stretch down the coast of North Topsail Beach for more than half a mile. Besides Topsail Reef’s sandbag wall, an additional wall of bags extends to the northern tip of the island, protecting 20 more duplexes and single-family houses. In 2015, the town and 39 beachfront property owners paid $2.6 million for the second wall of bags.
North Topsail Beach is the northernmost town on Topsail Island. More than 80 percent of the island is eroding. Waves, winds and currents snatch sand from the beaches. For the most part, waves carry the sand further south.
Erosion problems increase closer to the mouth of the New River, which spills out into the ocean on the north end of the island. The New River Inlet expands and contracts to accommodate storm surges and heavy rains. According to the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management, the inlet erodes the nearby beach at rates 10 to 100 times higher than the rest of the island. In 2008, the town was forced to buy out 12 property owners whose homes were standing in the surf.
Kosar sold her condo last year because “we weren’t in a position to risk losing it.” she said. “It just felt like a monopoly game.” After selling, she said she felt like a weight was lifted from her shoulders. “I miss it though. We still have a group of really good friends there,” she said.
Kosar lives 30 minutes away in Hampstead and still walks the beach looking for turtle tracks. She has the keys to some of her friends’ condos, including New Jersey native Jay Greenspan. Greenspan led the Topsail Reef homeowner’s association for a year and “pulled everyone in the community in,” said Kosar.
Greenspan has salt and pepper hair and twinkling eyes behind round glasses. He spearheaded Topsail Reef’s efforts to install the sandbag wall and reinforce the building foundations. Today, after years of battering by waves, some of the bags lie in disheveled heaps like lazy seals in the sun. But they are still stabilizing the buildings. Despite the expense of installing them, Greenspan says it’s absolutely been worth it to protect the condos. “We would have been washed away without those bags,” he said.
As barrier islands erode, more than seven miles of sandbag walls have sprouted along North Carolina’s barrier island coastline, according to Sea Grant North Carolina. Every sandbag permit comes with an expiration date. After the permit ends, property owners are supposed to remove the bags. But the Division of Coastal Management, which oversees sandbag permits, struggles to enforce this rule. A third of the bags were installed illegally, without a permit. According to the DCM, the purpose of sandbags is to protect homes while property owners move their structures back from the beach.
“Sandbags were started as a short-term protection measure to give property owners time to get their structure out of there,” said Andy Coburn, associate director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines. “But the rules were never enforced, and now we have these long walls of sandbags that are basically there permanently.” Coburn said that it’s a lot easier to simply extend the permit than tell property owners to move their threatened structures. Moving the Topsail Reef condos would be difficult, if not impossible. There are eight condominium units, each with 30 individual condos.
Sandbag walls protect structures, but they also increase scouring in front of the bags. The bags deflect the waves, which drag sand away without putting it back on the shore. Without the sandbag wall, the beach would keep migrating inland. “What you end up doing is losing the beach,” said Coburn. “You protect private property, but not the public beach.”
Nourishing the Beaches
Jay Greenspan said he’s hoping for another beach nourishment project to fix the erosion in front of his condo. “Everyone does well when the beach is nourished,” said Greenspan. “Even the turtles. If only we could get them to pitch in some money!”
Beach nourishment projects use dredges, or boats equipped to vacuum or scoop sand from offshore sites and pump the sand onto the beach. Bulldozers spread the piled sand, elevating and widening the beach.
Beach towns up and down the coast use beach nourishment to buffer property from storms and shore up tourism dollars. According to the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, North Carolina has completed more than 300 nourishment projects at a cost of $750 million. Federal, state and local funds pay for the projects.
North Topsail Beach’s neighbor to the south, Surf City, is poised to receive its first nourishment project. Generally, Surf City’s shoreline erodes less than North Topsail Beach’s, but portions of Surf City’s beach have been receding close to a foot every year, according to the Division of Coastal Management.
Surf City town manager Larry Bergman said beach nourishment is the best long term strategy to fight erosion. “The Town’s primary struggle is not finding the solution to erosion, but funding the solution,” he said. “If we can be shovel ready then we might get this project off the ground.”
Federal money for beach nourishment isn’t dependable. Federal funds can contribute up to 65 percent of a project, but Bergman said nourishment projects are low on the priority list. And unlike states like New Jersey, Florida and Delaware, North Carolina doesn’t have a dedicated beach nourishment fund. Towns often cobble together funds from their own budgets, or compete for available federal and state funds.
In 2012, North Topsail Beach hired accountant Peter Ravella to advise the town on funding shoreline protection measures like beach nourishment. Ravella consults coastal towns from North Carolina to Florida on financing beach nourishment. He said in most towns, the story is the same: nobody wants to pay for anything. “Everyone wants money to rain down upon them from some mysterious place,” said Ravella.
Ravella said North Topsail Beach’s funding issues are more difficult because Onslow County, where North Topsail Beach is located, refuses to fund beach projects. Ravella said there’s a bias against beach nourishment in the state and Onslow County. “I call it the Hawaiian shirt syndrome,” said Ravella. “It’s a pushback against subsidizing beach people, who are seen as rich frivolous babies.”
In 2013, beach recreation on North Topsail Beach generated $1.9 million in local taxes. North Topsail Beach rentals brought in more tax money than anywhere else in Onslow County combined. “You can hate on coastal towns all you want, but there ain’t nothing else in that county that draws thousands of people every year,” said Ravella.
Surf City town manager Bergman said beach nourishment doesn’t just protect property. It also fuels the coastal economy. “Maybe a town or city inland has a factory that provides jobs and spurs the economy,” he said. “The beaches are Surf City’s factory.”
According to a 2016 report from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, tourism from Topsail Island’s three towns brings in more than $110 million. Beach recreation creates almost 1,400 jobs on the 26-mile-long island. In 2012, more people visited North Carolina’s beaches than all the national, state and historic parks combined.
Despite this, many towns have to get creative to keep their beaches wide and welcoming to tourists. Surf City raised enough money through special taxes to fund part of the project, but the town is waiting on Congress and the Army Corps of Engineers to designate funds for the rest.
Unlike Surf City, North Topsail Beach can’t access federal funds because 70 percent of the town is in a “CBRA zone,” a special zone designated by the Coastal Barrier Resource Act (CBRA) of 1982. The act was designed to discourage development in flood-prone, storm-prone areas. These zones can’t receive emergency funding from the federal government for beach nourishment or flood repair. North Topsail Beach has lobbied for years to remove their town from the CBRA zone.
As a result of CBRA, North Topsail Beach is more pinched for beach nourishment money than other coastal towns. The town’s budget includes a dedicated beach fund, but the fund barely reaches $1 million annually. Beach nourishment projects cost around $2 million a mile.
Despite budget constraints, North Topsail Beach’s shoreline has been nourished 18 times since the late 1990, according to the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines. Until 2013, the sand came from the New River Inlet, which is periodically cleared by the Army Corps of Engineers for boat travel. The town benefitted from this annual unclogging of the inlet, as the Army Corps would deposit sand spoil on the north end of the island. But in the last five years the Corps hasn’t been dredging consistently.
In 2015, North Topsail Beach borrowed close to $17 million from the United States Department of Agriculture to nourish part of their beach located outside the CBRA zone. The town plans to repay the loan over a period of 11 years through property and occupancy taxes.
The stretch of sand buffered the houses and condos for a few months, until storms gouged the sand away. By 2017, the sand from this nourishment— roughly enough to fill 90,000 dump trucks—was gone.
“We used to complain about the long walk to the beach after they nourished it,” said Greenspan. “We thought it would last forever. But it didn’t.” Most federally-funded beach nourishment projects last for 50 years, with periodic nourishment “episodes.”
“Beach nourishment doesn’t cure beach erosion,” said geologist and engineer Spencer Rogers. “We too often think of it as something you do once and live happily ever after.” Rogers is an erosion specialist. He’s advised North Carolina coastal towns for more than three decades on how to manage eroding shorelines. He said nourishment projects keep beaches wide for an average of three to five years before waves and winds chip away the new sand. A storm can destroy a nourished beach in a few hours. “Beach nourishment works best in places with moderate erosion”, he said. “And like anything else man-made, it requires maintenance.”
Like a roof that needs repairing every 15 years, beaches need constant maintenance. But North Topsail Beach is pursuing another major engineering project they hope will permanently solve some of their erosion problems: a terminal groin. After 30 years of banning hardened structure like groins on the coast, in 2011 the North Carolina legislature allowed for four to be built near inlets. In 2013 the legislature allowed for two more groins. One has already been built on Bald Head Island and North Topsail Beach hopes to be next.