Admission Of Fault In Sandwich Beach Erosion Dispute

The good people of Sandwich got some welcome news recently, as a recently released US Army Corps of Engineers report determined that the Corps was at fault in a Sandwich coastal erosion matter.

The issue at hand is beach sand erosion at Town Neck Beach. The cause is said to be the jetty at the east end of the Canal, on Scusset Beach.

Erosion along Cape Cod Bay is generally a give and take thing. Every wave carries off a bit of your beach, but those waves also steal sand from further up the current from you and dump it on your beach. Nobody wins, but nobody loses that badly... well, for the most part, generally.

Responding to one problem (shipwrecks happening as shipping rounded the treacherous waters off of Cape Cod), the Man created another one. The US Army Corps of Engineers now manage the Canal that was cut through Bourne and Sandwich to circumvent that nastier voyage. That management responsibility includes accessories like lighthouses and jetties.

These accessories, like the jetty off of Scusset Beach, have several functions. Some, like slowing down waves before they mess up Canal shipping, were intentional. Others, like the traffic jams on the bridges spanning the Canal, were matters more of the OOOPS! variety.

"OOOPS!" isn't so bad when you stub your toe or pour too much tequila into a drink, but it becomes Very Bad Indeed when it starts washing your yard away.

The jetty off Scusset stops the flow of sand down from the South Shore beaches as Mother Nature intended it. This fills in Scusset Beach with a nice, fresh layer of sand every X amount of years. By doing so, it deprives anything east of the jetty of the sand that they normally would gain via the motion of the ocean.

For 'bout a third of a mile immediately east of the Canal, it's a fair bargain. You lose out on new sand, but you get the protection of a big, federally-funded-and-maintained rockpile against the storm surf. Every beach gets hammered if the wind hits it, but the jetty blocks the worst of the surf from the dreaded north wind that always beats up Sandwich as a storm pulls away.

Storms aside, the real killer is the Western Maine Coastal Current, which flows southeast along the South Shore before hooking east around where the Canal is. The jetty protects that first area against the current, but the beach beyond it has no such protection.

Look at it from a satellite, zoom in close (Go ahead... look), and you'll see right where that protection runs out.

Beaches like Brewster and Dennis also lack the protection of a jetty of that magnitude, but they at least get the sand that is flowing away from Sandwich and Barnstable. Sandwich, and Town Neck Beach in particular, get hit by the current, they hit by the storm waves.... but they miss out on the replenishing beach sand washing down from Scituate and Manomet. It's lose/lose.

Even things that seem logical and symbiotic, like filling in Town Neck Beach with sand dredged out of the Canal, instead become illogical and parasitic when our friend D. Next Storm comes to town and that new sand washes down to Barnstable and Beyond. "Gone, gone, like the snows of yesteryear."

Sandwich has been losing 2.5 feet of beach a year since the flow of sand was cut off, and that jumped up to over 6 feet a year during the recent rash of coastal storms.

Generally, that's between Sandwich and God. God can't be sued. However, if someone plays God with the coastline, you can take your best James Sokolove at them

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The admission of fault in the USACOE report (an honorable result, as giving the defendant the right of determining fault often ends up like when the wolf, the coyote and the chicken vote on what to have for dinner) opens up some doors as far as How To Fix This Problem goes.

Section 111 of 1968's River And Harbor Act authorizes up to ten million smackeroos in compensation for damage resulting directly from federal navigation projects.

According to the USACOE's own report, they are directly at fault. That saves Sandwich a lot of money, never a bad thing these days.

If the repairs cost less than ten million dollars, they are Uncle Sam's treat. Anything after that, the town and the feds split it 50/50.

That could also cost Sandwich millions, but they get millions in property taxes from houses along a tourist-drawing beach that pays for itself all over the friggin' town. Even if it's a fortune, it's money well-spent.

The decision should perk up ears in any town along the coast that may, say, have a USACOE seawall or something like that. One must be vigilant. Duxbury Beach residents barely dodged a similar bullet on seawall repairs, with the town about to lay all the costs on the residents before the people spoke up.

Sandwich hasn't won the war yet, but they did just take the Dub in a major battle.