Coastal Storm Clean-Up Notes

Sara Flynn on the camera, Sara Flynn's dog on the stick.

This last storm was fun to take pictures of, but it was a D+ grade storm historically, maybe a generous C if you value Staying Power. The dog enjoyed it heartily.

No one, except the guy I photographed jumping the Sandwich boardwalk on a parasail, is going to look back on this storm in 20 years with anyone who will remember what he was talking about. It doesn't merit historical consideration, other than the tragedy down in the Bahamas with the MMA kid.

However, even minor storms can mess up the neighborhood pretty nasty, and things will be a bit ugly until Toil and Tide smooths everything over.

We'll try to give you an idea of how the coastal people deal with storms.

This is an old picture, from a 2006 Duxbury nor'easter, To my knowledge, there were no houses torn apart in this last storm.

If the storm is bad enough to take houses, it goes without saying that the cleanup will be lengthier and more complicated.

Some storms can even alter the look of the neighborhood forever. To keep it Duxbury, I can recall the Blizzard of '78 being the end of the road for cottages in front of the dunes. The 1991 Halloween Gale knocked over the last of the 1950s-style cottages, and future gales will put the rest of the neighborhood up on stilts.

Again, this storm wasn't a home-killer. We're just establishing one end of the spectrum for the discussion.

The next level of storm is where the houses are up, but the road is ruined. This is the Ocean Bluff/Brant Rock area, after one of last winter's blizzards. That's not a dirt road, that's heavily-used and trust-me-it's-paved Route 139.

The ocean, when it moves from shoreline to street, isn't just water. It is moving large piles of sand and stone with it, as well as anything that might be in the yard of whoever owns the land the ocean is washing through.

When I was trapped in my house for the Halloween Gale, you couldn't stand in front of a window, even on the second floor, when waves were breaking on the house. Each wave would slam a Shirley Jackson story worth of stones off of the house. That's why you board the windows up, player.

Those stones also wash past the house, and that usually puts them in the street.

Sand also shifts, remember...

This was the most damage I saw working the Sandwich-Barnstable-Yarmouth-Dennis run during the storm last weekend. Some DPW guy can sweep that ish back up onto the dune or whatever happens to it in this town.

Duxbury usually has the other sort of problem, with the ocean slicing through from ocean to bay. That makes parts of Duxbury Beach- as well as Saquish, where people live- into islands. Most of the town's effort after the 1991 storm involved making the beach whole again.

Otherwise, people get cut off, supplies get low, panic ensues, and the people from the Gurnet rise up and slaughter the people of Saquish for food and goodies.

Even tony Sandwich takes her lumps now and then.

Sammich is located on the wrong side of the Cape Cod Canal jetty, and it gets very little replenishment sand from more northern towns.

Prior to the construction of the jetty, this was the sole benefit that Sandwich gained from nor'easters. Once the jetty was up, Sammich was having sand washed down the beach from them without getting any sand washed down to them.

This eventually leads to large chunks of Sandwich being claimed by the sea. The sea then starts touching things that she isn't supposed to be touching, like highways.

It's probably not going to come to that on Route 6A, at least from what I saw this weekend. There were some houses taking shots, and I'd bet that they lost a lot of sand.

If the street an the beach got messed up, you can bet that the wall that was supposed to be protecting the street has been compromised.

Seawall repairs are ugly business, for several reasons. One, if you need them, you most likely just had a damage-doin' storm. Two, seawall repairs are costly, with coastal towns sitting on potential seawall repair bills running into the millions. Three, there will almost always be a fight between homeowners, the town, the state and the US of g*d-damned A over who will be footing the bills for the seawall repair.

I am related to at least one guy who had to run down to Town Hall and wave deeds and contracts in their face before getting off the hook for thousands of dollars worth of seawall repairs that the town was supposed to pay for.

You have to watch the towns, as they try to get off "cheap" on the repairs now and then. Duxbury, which can hardly plead poverty, had a wooden seawall until the mid-1950s.

This is more of the Brant Rock/Ocean Bluff damage from last winter. If the elements and the budget won't let you build a fancy seawall, a bunch of boulders will have to do.

You just want something tall enough to slap down even huge waves, and you want it heavy enough to not be washed away when the Atlantic Ocean leans on it. If a little bit of water gets by it... well, hey, you live at a beach, right?

If you don't build a seawall, the ocean gets to tee off on you for 5-12 waves a minute for 3 hours of nor'easter tide, twice a day, any time the pressure drops. You want to try to avoid having that happen.

Seawalls are like divorces.... they cost so much because they're worth it. The town and state will complain, but it will get fixed in the end. The alternative- again, like the divorce- is too ugly to countenance.

The seawall houses in Duxbury are known for their beautifully maintained lawns and just-like-God-planned-it soft sand yards. Oh, wait... this is a post-blizzard shot of Duxbury Beach.

I swear to God that one of those houses in this picture above (the foreground, with the ice) is owned by a golf course groundskeeper, and his lawn is kept at putting-green-trim levels all summer.

In order for that to happen, you have to shovel (or hire someone to shovel) the beach back on to the beach. My yard on Ocean Road North would pick up what I would conservatively estimate to be 1000000000 rocks every nor'easter.

Rocks are handy to have around if you, say, need to fill large holes in your lawn.

Once the yard is cleared, it must be repaired.

Even after you fill the large holes (snow doesn't count, lazybones!), you still have problems. All of your grass has been washed and soaked on salt water.

The Romans, after razing Carthage, covered the ground with salt and sea salt. They salted it down because, as Sam Kinison said, "Nothing grows in sand, nothing's gonna grow in sand!"

Grass is no exception, which is why beaches tend to be sandy. If you want the grass back after a storm ruins it, you have to skim the top layer of soil and replace it with unspoiled topsoil. Then you plant the grass, and then you see if you removed enough salty soil.

This is why some people say "Screw lawns," and just go with natural sand yards. It turns out that these also require tireless maintenance. I did that with the patio near the seawall, as we would lose the front 10-20 feet of lawn with every storm.

This wonderful beach scene, as we noted in a previous article, would be perfect sand-water-dunes-lifeguard chair Cape Cod if this were not the parking lot of Sandy Neck Beach.

It'll all wash away at some point. It's marshy over there, and the DPW can sweep up and re-deposit that sand where it belongs. A parking lot is less of a touchy maintenance job than that of a million-dollar Hyannis Port beach house. You can't just let the Kennedy Compound drain, and then hire some townie to sweep it up whenever.

This can be touchy with October storms, as no coastal resident with any brains makes yard repairs on the nor'easter damage until late April. June through October is hurricane season, but October through the Ides of April is noreaster season, and we get several storms a year.

The beach suffers during those storms. People like the natural aspect of a soft-sand beach, in theory. In reality, "natural" beaches look a lot more like the picture with the dog at the beginning of the article.

The tide will take care of the lower beach, but the upper beach can get a little bit ugly.

Anyone who lives on a seawall knows this scene, represented perfectly by Duxbury Beach.

Several somebodies let the storm sneak up on them, and didn't take their stairs up (in the local patois, stairs are taken "up" onto the seawall, as opposed to being taken "down" from the seawall) in time. The stairs bang around in the surf until there isn't a seawall to prevent them from being tossed up past the wave-wash.

Eventually, you sneak on the beach with a Jeep (the "Duxbury Cadillac" of legend, in case you heard the term and never knew the reference), tow the stairs back to your house and hopefully store them a little more securely.

Duxbury Beach gets lots of odd stuff washing up. Every now and then, a barge loses a cargo container over the side, whch busts open and disgorges her contents into the sea. They eventually wash up on the beach somewhere. One winter, it was oil filters. Another winter, it was Nikes. If they had EBay in 1980, I would have sold more sneakers than that Air Jordan motherf***er.

Lobstermen get caught slippin', too.

For reasons I don't know but that some salty dude (or dudette, the only lobsterman among my Facebook friends is a girl known to me as Tornado) could tell us, wire pots don't wash ashore as much as wooden pots do.

When I was a kid, we'd go out after every nor'easter and snag lobsters out of the wooden traaps that washed ashore. We'd get several dozen this way, as pots, buoys and so forth were all over the beach.

You never steal the pots, however, and even the buoys were a rough proposition. I don't know if lobstermen can shoot you for touching their gear, but I know that many think they can... and that's all that will matter if the heat comes out on you, friend.

This is the Mystic River, courtesy of Paul Walker... no, not THAT one.

While this isn't ocean damage, what you see here are leaves. Those leaves, still green, should be up in a tree, getting ready to be in my fall foliage shots.

If those are lily pads or something, just try to work with me here.

Massachusetts, and especially Eastern Massachusetts, doesn't really get around to fall-foliaging until late October. Some places on Cape Cod (I noticed this while bell-ringing at the Sagamore Christmas Tree Shoppe) don't even go over until mid-November.

That overlaps with the October-April nor'easter season, and is one of the many reasons why coastal Massachusetts isn't really top-notch foliage country. We rock pretty hard compared to, say, New Mexico, but New Hampshire people laugh at our foliage... they LAUGH at it.

Of course, they don't have ocean storms up there, so they can just shush now.

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.