Friday, Nov. 13, 2009

Holden Beach awash in sand

HOLDEN BEACH, N.C. -- Holden Beach officials are perplexed by a problem that some other barrier islands would like to share.

Parts of the town's 9-mile beach are accumulating so much sand naturally that most public and private walkways to the strand now end behind dunes. That means that people headed to and from the beach must walk across the dunes, creating path-sized gullies where they step.

In a storm, those gullies could become allies for ocean water to surge behind and wash away the dunes.

"We're scratching our heads," Mayor Alan Holden said. "We don't know what to do."

On the one hand, officials acknowledge the protection that dunes offer to the homes and public infrastructure behind them. On the other, they know that extending some of the walkways now ending in dunes could cost thousands of dollars, a futile expense if the dunes are washed away in a future storm.

Town Manager David Hewett said he started to calculate what it would cost taxpayers to extend public walkways to the beach side of the dunes, but, "Once I got up to $100,000, I just quit."

Tony Marwitz, a town planning and zoning board member appointed to study the situation, guessed there may now be fewer than 10 walkways along the island that clear the line of dunes separating the beach from the land that's behind it. He said a walkway near his home was extended five years ago and now there's 50 feet of new dunes between it and the beach.

The problem is not uniform along the beach, Holden said. On the east end, just one line of dunes may hold a tenuous existance against the waves. But at the west end, there may now be as many as five or six lines of dunes.

Holden Beach has a $500 fine for walking on dunes, but no citations have been issued in recent years, said Sgt. Adam Milligan of the Holden Beach Police Department. Officers have been called to police people walking on dunes, but either the perpetrators were gone when officers arrived or warnings were given rather than citations.

The state doesn't have the authority to mandate walkway protection for dunes, said Michele Walker, spokeswoman for the Division of Coastal Management. The division encourages people not to walk on dunes, she said, but leaves decisions on walkway length and fines for walking on dunes up to towns such as Holden Beach.

Marwitz thinks a decision on what the town wants to accomplish with walkways must be made before the decision on the walkways themselves.

If the town wants to protect the sand, he said, it would be logical to require elevated walkways that traverse all dunes. If it wants to protect homes and infrastructure landward from the dunes, a single line could work.

Personally, he said he would require homeowners and the town either to build walkways to clear all dune lines, post signs warning people not to walk on dunes or put up some kind of barriers to make it difficult for people to walk on dunes.

In the end, it will be a judgment call.

"There is no easy solution," Marwitz said.