Beach Management In Plymouth

Time and Tide wait for no man, and the feeling is mutual.

Beaches are not permanent things. Waves, wind and rain erode beaches, and shifting sands go where they may. It's how the world works, and how it worked for a long, long time before man arrived and started building along the coasts.

This natural order of things is all good, as long as you don't mind the fact that Monument Beach may become Monument Harbor some day. Oceans have a way of asserting themselves, and care little for these maps that men draw.

Of course, this natural order of things sometimes gets in the way of important things like Waterfront Development and Beach Access, which is where we'll be going in today's column.

You're looking at Cedarville, which is a better-sounding name than the more fitting "Wicked Big Dune." Cedarville is where you end up if you walk North out of Sagamore Beach. Their coastline is defined by giant, fragile sand cliffs.

Sand cliffs are very vulnerable to erosion, especially if they have no vegetation. You can pretty much see how it works just looking at the picture above. Rain and gravity move the sand from top to bottom, and the ocean washes the sand down the beach.

Much of the Massachusetts coastline is built that way. Scituate also has sand cliffs, and the erosion of these cliffs nourishes beaches south of Scituate in Marshfield and Duxbury. Saquish and her sand cliffs replenish beach sand in northern Plymouth, while sand cliffs in Manomet handle southern Plymouth.

Cedarville's job is to hook up Sagamore Beach, Scusset Beach, and Town Neck Beach. Cedarville's sand cliffs meet up with Sagamore Beach's sand cliffs, as you can see in the picture below. The flow of sand tends to be, as directed by the ocean's forces, north to south. The coastline south of this picture depends on these cliffs for their sand, lest the (present) coastline gradually erode away.

Sagamore Highlands has their own seawall battle going, and we'll write about that in a few days. I felt that you needed to know about the Dune Tram (see the video at the end of the article) more immediately.

Shifting sands are all well and good, unless you own a little cottage on top of those sand dunes.

Very few people say "Hmmmm.... I think I'll build my house directly on the lip of this 150 foot free fall." However, they didn't understand how Erosion works, or they underestimated how quickly it happens in the great scheme of things. That's how you get a house with Potential Energy that very much resembles a cottage version of Lindsey Vonn about to bust out of the gate and ski downhill.

Maybe the builders knew about erosion, but counted on it not being a problem in their lifetimes. I always think of Henry Beston when pondering this. His famous "Outermost House" was eventually pulled into the sea in the Blizzard of '78, but I assume that Henry Beston was long dead when that happened. Whatever design and location flaws the Outermost House may have had, it lasted long enough for him.

To avoid a Bestoning of your beach house, you need to put in some work. This generally involves building a seawall. A thick concrete wall running miles along the coast is more of a job for the US Army Corps of Engineers than one for a scrappy homeowner, but other options are available.... and necessary, as the US and Massachusetts governments seem to have given up on Cedarville.

In fact, looking at those cliffs, the government would have to build one of those 20 story World War Z-style Jerusalem walls, which would be a pretty expensive and exclusive job considering that it would benefit about 10-30 homes. Cedarville residents are on their own.

The home in the pictures above and below went for the Lobster Pot approach. The homeowner wraps scores of stones in metal netting, and uses it to build a base at the bottom of his cliff. The netting keeps the stones from being washed away one at a time in large storms. The stones, in theory, keep the cliff from washing away.

It works better if your next-door neighbor builds one as well, but you can't win 'em all, folks.

Here's a close-up.

There's a Rock Lobster joke lurking in the picture above, but even I won't hack away at that level.

You can also use this sort of pantyhose-style sand condom thing that the guy in the picture below favors. He looks like he may need to make it a bit higher, but what do I know?

I do wonder if there are laws against using beach sand for that purpose. I don't want to hassle the homeowner, as he has enough problems. I suppose that he may even be helping the beach, or at least the cliff.

I just think it's funny that a guy who lives on a giant sand dune which overlooks a sandy beach might have to import sand. 

Keeping the sand from washing downhill is just part of the problem. You also have to keep it from washing downstream, or whatever you call "downstream" with oceans.

This is where the Groin comes in. Yes, it's a silly name, one which the actual English English-speakers get around by using the more Olde English-looking groyne.

As near as I can tell (and I'm working from Word with no Internet connection, so we're doing very little research), the difference between a groyne and a jetty is that a jetty is at least partially in the water all the time, ideally to protect a channel or harbor entrance. A groyne is there to keep your sand from becoming Sagamore Beach's sand, and is mostly on land at low tide.

While they are more angry at the Scusset Beach jetty that is the north end of the Cape Cod Canal, this groyne is one of the things that the Trustees Of Sandwich Beaches people are all upset about. Every grain of sand that the groyne prevents from moving south is a little bit of Sandwich eroding into the sea, kinda/sorta. If you are ever driving on Route 6A in the future and a wave washes under your car, you're going to have to learn some Olde English if you want to place the blame properly.

This groyne is on the beach in front of (and preserving) the 18th Hole on the golf course at the White Cliffs Country Club. The hole is on top of a dune, as they haven't invented Beach Golf yet. The groyne was built in 2008, after some legal wrangling. WCCC would be a 17 hole golf course in a few years if they didn't have several groynes.

WCCC is one of my chill spots, as they have a lovely little private beach that, because of the 175 foot dunes, very few people use. They are taking steps to fix that, as many of their tenants and members are elderly.

Below, peep the photos and video of the brand spankin' new Dune Tram.

We were talking to a guy who bought one of the first units made available at White Cliffs, back in 1986. One of the reasons he bought the place was that the WCCC was promising a Tram to the beach. 28 years later (sounds like a Zombie film sequel, no?), WCCC finally came correct.

They utilized a firm called Marine Systems Incorporated (from friggin' Minnesota, of all places) to design the Tram, which was built by a Massachusetts-licensed elevator company called Above & Beyond. The tram operator had no cost figures when I asked her (and I have no intention of wasting a late summer morning attending the WCCC Tram Media Day tomorrow), but the cost I kept hearing for the Tram was six figures.

The Tram is the only one of her kind in New England, at least to my knowledge.

Like you even have to ask if we tested it out.....

It's the size of an industrial elevator, which I suppose is a good thing, because it is an industrial elevator. It is sort of set up like a ski lift, but you stand in an elevator car. It goes about one mile an hour or so. You'd beat it to the beach if you were walking downhill, and it would beat you to the crest if you were walking uphill.

The Tram runs 175 feet, and it is just what you want to see coming for you when Option B is walking up 15 stories worth of stairs after a long, arduous day of Beach. I'm told that the poles were hammered 25 feet deep into the dune. The ride is very smooth.

Added bonus? It's elevated, so vegetation can still grow in her footprint. The Tram is only a month old, and there's already some Beach Fuzz growing under it.

There is an attendant who runs the Tram, and a position of "Tram Operator" was being advertised for on the WCCC website. I may take that job myself next summer. No, they don't play elevator music.

However, "Dune Tram To The Groin" would make a good Dancehall song title... but they'd have to go to a coastal country club in Plymouth to film the video, and that would cost them a breathtaking amount of street credibility.

Check out the...

Dune Tram video.

You know you want one of these Dune Trams, so stop acting like you don't. You aren't fooling anyone.

Plymouth Hurricane Primer: Inundation and Evacuation In America's Hometown

Plymouth doesn't have the coastal flooding problems that towns like Duxbury have, which is amazing, because Plymouth has as much coastline as Scituate, Marshfield and Cohasset combined.

Plymouth floods, no doubt. If you've ever been in Bert's, and wondered why the big boulder was displayed inside.... the Blizzard of '78 put it there. A trip to Cedarville will show you several houses which are one storm away from a straw/camel's back scenario involving the seaside cliffs they rest on. Plymouth was also Ground Zero for the worst hurricane seen in New England by the palefaces, but we'll get to that in a moment.

Plymouth gets mad hurricane Disrespeck for several reasons. One, it is blocked by several barrier beaches, which range from as small as Long Beach to as large as Cape Cod. E/NE winds that push storm unimpeded waves across the mid-Atlantic towards towns like Scituate and Duxbury find a Cape Cod-sized roadblock when aiming at Plymouth.

The Cape, an dat ol' sketchy South Coast, also protect Plymouth from direct hit hurricane shots. Any storm that hits Plymouth has hit New Bedford or Wareham first, and those towns absorb a lot of the initial shock. I watched Hurricane Bob- which tore Cape Cod to shreds- from nearby Duxbury Beach, and the waves didn't even hit the seawall.

Plymouth has a wide variety of coastline designs, or whatever God calls it when He makes Ellisville different from Cedarville. You can park 100 feet from the shore at Bert's and have a wave break over your car. You're a few feet higher off the beach over by Issac's, and you're 8 stories above the waves at the same 33 yard distance if you are working the 18th hole at White Cliffs Country Club.

Plymouth also elevates rather quickly from the shoreline, so the ocean is unable to push that far inland, even with Katrina-style winds blowing behind it. That means very little to you if you live on Water Street, but it is why you don't see flooding miles inland like you do with Duxbury and Marshfield. This is also influenced by the heavily-wooded nature of Plymouth, as opposed to the just-add-ocean marshes in the Floodier towns to the north.

We have two maps for you to look over. The one at the top of the page is a Hurricane Inundation Map. That shows you what parts of Plymouth would flood in what intensity of hurricane. The people who make these maps (a group effort by FEMA, MEMA, NOAA and the NHC) are assuming a worst case, direct-hit scenario with full hurricane conditions striking at mean high tide.

The map DOES NOT account for freshwater, inland flooding. You're on your own there, homie... although you'd want to know how far you are from any river, and the relative elevation of your house. Shoot, 7 inches of rain will sweep some roads away, so be prepared.

The colors of the Inundation map work like this.... light green = Category 1, darker green = Category 2, yellow = Category 3 and red = Category 4. Plymouth has not had direct Category 4 hurricane conditions since the Pilgrims showed up. FEMA even takes a 100 Year Flood estimate for extreme scenarios, which is represented by the color Crayola used to call "flesh" until they realized that minority kids also like to color. I think it's called "Off Whitey" now.

Due to Plymouth's large size, it can be hard to distinguish some of the colors with the picture I have for you. You can solve that by going here. You can zoom in all you want from there.

The hardcore areas in town seem to be a Kingston border-to-Long Beach run. It's not so bad after that, as the hills of the coastline begin to assert themselves. You get some flat coastline- and a river mouth- right where the nuclear power station is. Pilgrim is in the Inundation zone, even for a moderate hurricane. It's odd using terms like "moderate" to describe something as ghastly as a hurricane, but this is how we do at the NWS.

If your street is any color but the white of the map background, you might want to start making plans on escaping. You might have to wait 50 years before you need to get Ghost, but it is better to have a plan and not need it than it is to need a plan and not have it.

Your plan would be influenced by the second map we have for you today, the Evacuation. Sounds biblical, no?

The proffered Evacution map is easier to follow. Red means "those people have to evacuate," and yellow means "so do you."

Plymouth takes her storm threats very seriously, and the police will be following this map as a guide for which streets and even which houses would be asked to leave when Mr. Hurricane comes knocking.

The immediate shoreline will be evacuated all through the town, even the cliffs areas. This is in effect even for a minimal huuricne. You don't have to leave if you don't want to, but you also don't want to be relying on the cop you told to f*ck off earlier to pull you out of the maelstrom. Irony and Karma both bite for the ass.

The bonus areas in Plymouth that might require inland evacuation are the Eel River area and Ellisville. You have to earn them with a higher-intensity storm, but the threat is real. Larger storms look to be a good bet to evacuate people out to 3A in White Horse Beach and all around the Eel River.

That's the cell phone version of the map, you can view the Evacuation map in more detail by clicking here.

Plymouth folk may have the tendency to disregard hurricane preparations, as they have large land masses taking the heavy shots for them. However, history paints such people as fools, because Harry Cane can f*ck you up smooth in Pilgrim Town. He has before.

Remember, we're only about 380 years removed from the Great Colonial Hurricane.That powerful 1635 storm dropped in unannounced on the Pilgrims, and blew down everything in sight. Experts say that it may have been the worst East Coast hurricane since European colonization, and hit Plymouth (after coming ashore along the CT/RI border) as a Category 3 monster. It may have been Category 5 further south of us.

A storm like that would be bad, bad news for Plymouth, and that would be BEFORE we factored in the inundated nuclear power plant.

Keep your head up, people. This magazine relies heavily on your site visits, and my lifestyle can not afford to have Plymouth residents dying en masse. We've got nothing but love for you.

Saquish, pictured in the background below, would be an island in a hurricane. Rotten last paragraph, I know, but I like to end articles with nature shots.