The Shore in Limbo

I heard and felt the devil in the shrieking roar of the wind the night of the storm.  I felt the presence of evil and wickedness as I trudged in the dark through piles of stinging sand to watch the ocean meet the bay and fire rage in the sky.  And the evil is still around, I walk past it every day.  Entire tracts of homes missing, many others gutted, oh look they demolished that one, now just an empty lot, oh the bulldozed dunes are blowing away in the west wind, the ocean is still high, why is the beach still so small?  Things are still not correct.  The police are paranoid, the towns are paranoid, and if I let myself I could easily feel the headaches of all the homeowners who may have lost the shore or the businessess that lose from the lack of people and construction site beaches that don't want anyone on them.

The line of spooky oceanfront homes stretches for miles.  How many lots will be back to sand once the money gets worked out.

While it's winter and the shore is always quiet and forgotten about in the winter, the real measure of where things stand is when the days are longer and the sun is higher and brighter.  The measure of progress or the lack of it will be revealed as spring turns into summer.  What I want is things to go back to the way they were, because when you think back it was pretty good.  Of course the crowds are horrible at times and the waves usually suck and the fish always seem like they are out too far, but there were always those times, always a chance, where it was possible to score big.  Dozens and dozens of fish with no one or friends.  A-frame waves and a nice west wind, warm water, with only the souls you want with you.

Looks like some other planet, because it is.

A lonely small S swell wave breaking on a new outer bar.  Fortunately, January has been pretty calm and flat, a wierd thing to be glad for.

The mean sea level trend is +3.99mm/year which is equivalent to a change of 1.31ft in 100 years. NOAA

The rate of sea level rise at the Atlantic City station is about 1.31ft in 100 years.  Almost every barrier island in the world is shrinking, even the ones that aren't intensively developed.  With a higher water level, the storm surge has been higher from even minor to moderate storms.  It doesn't take as powerful a storm anymore to cover the beach and eat the dunes, and then keep the sand.  Last year I was in one of the hardest hit areas about to surf an average 3-5ft swell and the ocean was up to the dune fences for no reason.  Then you get the real storm, and the storm surge is off the charts, and it's able to do that much more damage because the water level is higher.  That's on top of how blocking high pressures make storms go where they aren't supposed to go.  The sea level rise, on this chart, really began to move upwards starting in the 1930s.

I always wonder how many more percentage points the ozone layer can deplete, two more percent, five more percent, ten percent, before the person who isn't into such things will go, "Oh shit! We better do something about that.  Right now!"