Notes from an Environmentalist; Our coastal system is broken.

               “Our System is Broken”

                    MRBA Meeting

                February 2, 2024             

                      Part One

In early February I drove north to see how Plum Island and Salisbury Beach had fared during our January storms.

Erosion from the center of Plum Island both north and south had increased over the past two years, so areas like Center Groin, Emerson Rocks and Sandy Point had so much sand that most of the groins and rocks had been buried. Sandy Point had grown several hundred more feet, plus the loose eroded sand had buried many of the clam flats creating dead spots in both Plum Island Sound and Ipswich waters.

Waves had swept through Plum Island’s North Point parking lot flooding the state’s shellfish depuration lab and exposing its wellhead standpipes. Twenty foot dunes had been flattened but the storms had created new 10 foot high nascent dunes along “Engineer’s Beach” where residents and Federal, local and state officials were involved in a complex process to prove that the Corp of Engineer’s jetty repair had put 20 homes at risk and that the Corps should be responsible for cutting a weir into the jetty to allow for the natural flow of sand to fix their $24 million dollar mistake.

Salisbury Beach had much bigger problems. Waves had washed out the extensive dunes in front of scores of houses along more than a mile of beach and now the houses were in imminent danger of tumbling off the unstable dunes into the surging Atlantic Ocean.

Residents and the town of Salisbury were frantically trying to raise eight hundred thousand dollars from residents to dump sand in front of the houses and working to get the state to release three hundred thousand dollars from a state trust funded by parking fees from the Salisbury State park specifically targeted to pay for sand for such emergency situations.