North Carolina’s fitful and uneasy enforcement of its sandbag policy is set to pick up where it left off a year ago, as policymakers are facing a difficult balancing act between the inevitability of sea-level rise, preservation of beaches and private property rights.

With the lifting of the moratorium on sandbag removal on Sept. 1, the state Division of Coastal Management can technically resume its efforts to force real-estate owners to remove non-compliant sandbag structures from their oceanfront properties. Except the agency won’t do so, at least not right away. Legal challenges and outright defiance have made the state’s coastal sandbag rules, by all practical measures, unenforceable. The North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission, a 15-member governor-appointed regulatory panel, is expected to take action on the issue at its Sept. 15 meeting, but it’s not clear what that action will be. A stakeholders meeting has been scheduled earlier in the month to discuss the rules and gather input for the commission.

“I think it’s clear that the sandbag rules have not performed, and there has been a consistent record of extending deadlines, ” said Mack Paul, an attorney with Raleigh firm K & L Gates. Paul, who is representing about a dozen property owners from Nags Head and Figure Eight Island, said that the state’s ban on hardened structures has limited the tools that property owners have available to protect their homes from beach erosion.

Paul said that owners in Nags Head are seeking more time to protect their properties until a beach nourishment project develops, pending the success of funding.

Oceanfront homeowners and coastal developers have strongly defended the use of sandbags as an interim measure while beach widening projects are planned.

Orrin Pilkey, professor emeritus of earth science at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and an outspoken critic of shoreline hardening measures like sandbags, said that even costly, widely-used sand replenishment projects will have limited success in the future on the North Carolina coast. State coastal policy must look long term, he said, since no homeowner can be expected to voluntarily give up sandbags or any other means to temporarily secure their property. That means building on the oceanfront has to stop, he added, and what’s there has to move back.

“We’ll be severely impacted by the mid-part of this century and beach nourishment will be economically impossible,” Pilkey said in an interview. “The only solution is to get out of the way. Otherwise, I see a future of abandonment of barrier islands.”

But Spencer Rogers, coastal construction and erosion specialist for North Carolina Sea Grant, said that relocation is impractical on a barrier island. Rogers, who has studied the coast for 32 years, said he believes limiting the size of sandbag structures to about 6-feet tall and 20-feet wide, rather than limiting the time they’re permitted, is a reasonable compromise for erosion control.

Over the years, some sandbag structures along the coast have become huge hills piled haphazardly on the beach in front of structures. Newer geotextile bags are more compact and durable than the older bags, according to Rogers. A member of the CRC’s advisory council, Rogers favors terminal groins, which he said are porous and allow sand to pass over and around them. Pilkey, on the other hand, said those groins would increase erosion elsewhere.

In addition to sandbags, the CRC is expected to revisit the groin issue at its September meeting.

“There’s some level of emergency protection that is worth considering,” Rogers said. “But we certainly don’t want to move toward shoreline hardening.” At some point, he said, the reality is that some structures have to go, ideally before the ocean has its way with them. “The houses need to come out. The bags are less of a problem.”

Since 1985, North Carolina coastal policy has forbidden permanent erosion control measures like seawalls and jetties under most conditions because they are believed to increase erosion downstream. Sandbags have been permitted on a temporary basis to protect structures, but the time limitations — if not outright ignored — were complicated by overlapping permits at certain locations and frequent hurricanes. Permits, typically granted for 2 to 5 years and pegged to recovery from a storm or a pending beach widening project, were extended several times over the years. As a result, some sandbag systems had been in place for as long as two decades.

When the CRC allowed extended permits to expire in May 2008, a state survey counted 379 structures on the coast. Of those, about 149 were exposed, the standard the CRC decided would require their removal. Dare County had 117 of the uncovered sandbags, the vast majority in South Nags Head. Others were located in communities on the southern coast.

After the state sent notices to property owners, the CRC was hit with about 30 variance requests. A number of owners did not respond at all. By the time a moratorium started last year, not one targeted system had been removed.

The state’s removal effort had been suspended as part of legislation authorizing a study of terminal groins, which are erosion control barriers placed near inlets. The study proved to be inconclusive. Legislation authorizing the CRC to consider variance requests for the groins was passed last session by the Senate, but failed to come up for a vote in the House.

State Sen. Marc Basnight, a Dare County Democrat and the Senate President pro tempore, supports use of terminal groins at inlets as a measure that “protect our beaches but do not harm neighboring islands,” according to a Sept. 2009 letter he wrote to CRC chairman Bob Emory. He also told Emory in an Oct. 2008 letter that while he supported the panel’s effort to remove non-compliant sandbags from the coast, he believed that homeowners should be allowed to restore once-covered structures that were exposed during a storm.

Most of the state’s 326 miles of coastline is eroding at rates ranging from several feet to more than 20 feet a year, depending on location and storm activity. With scientists expecting sea level to rise on the coast as much as 4.9 feet by 2100, erosion of North Carolina’s beaches is anticipated to increase steadily. But sandbags, groins, seawalls and other hardened structures not only increase downstream erosion, scientists say, they will ultimately not work.

According to a 2007 National Commission on Energy Policy report, “Measuring the Impacts of Climate Change on North Carolina Coastal Resources,” (PDF) the value in today’s dollars of lost residential property in 2080 in the state’s four coastal counties would be about $3.2 billion; non-residential property loss in 2080 would be about $3.7 billion. In addition to property concerns, officials must consider the health of the state’s beaches, a major attraction for North Carolina’s $16 billion tourism industry.

(Photo: Flickr Creative Commons/SoilScience.info)