Moving Sand Around

We do a lot of moving sand around on the Outer Banks. And when we're not moving it we seem to be thinking about moving it, or where we should move it.

We debate beach nourishment, rebuild dunes with dump truck-delivered sand and then re-plant it with sea oat sprigs and sand fence after storms (as done by the Town of Kitty Hawk), and push beach sand back into dunes by oceanfront homeowners (This is when oceanfront property owners replace dune sand lost to storms in front of their homes with sand on the beach pushed into a kind of dune by a bulldozer. Yes, this is a somewhat desperate act.) The various towns will even dump sand in the parking accesses' ramps to the beach to block the ocean overwash usually pushed into these parking areas and the beach road beyond by big storms, especially at high tide.

The sure result of all this is often new sand being fed into our beaches' sandbar system. The net effect is just as often improvement in how the sand bottom around these sandbars influences breaking waves. This is one of the things I entertain myself with during the winter as I scout various sandbars up and down our local coast.

Three years ago, the Comfort Inn in Nags Head sported sand added to the beach by property owners following the carnage of Hurricane Isabel. Sand was lost during the storm, so more sand was added back by people. During the time afterwards, the new sand was slowly chewed away and pulled down into the first slough between the beach and the first sandbar. You could look at the escarpment along the beach and clearly see where the sand had come from. This created a situation unlike any I've seen few times before along a beach dominated by sandbars. It created a beachbreak that stayed around for over two years. You could take off on a wave over the first sandbar there and ride it right to the dry sand along the beach, as there was no deep slough where the wave would stop breaking.

Also looks like the current and swell along the beaches created by Hurricane Noel at the beginning of November all but eliminated the prime sandbar that had stayed with us so long at First Street in Kill Devil Hills.

We'll see what the rest of this winter brings. The only constant, I suppose, is all the changes on the coast.