Eroding beach. Replacing sand.

[coffeeman]

Hi all

Just read a story about many $$ spent to replace sand on some beaches. They talked about the waste of $$ because some plans didn't work. I wonder, why is it important to attempt to keep all things the same? Why preserve beaches? Why preserve wetlands? Why is change bad?

Just a think about it thought. Cheers

 

[tallyho8]

Many years ago Lebanon was like the Garden of Eden and now it is just desert. At the present rate, the Amazon jungle will be similar to the Sahara desert in 150 years. Less rainforests = less worldwide rain = famine and pestilence. Natural environmental changes are not so bad because they are generally slow and species can evolve and adapt. Man-made environmental changes are relatively fast and can quickly make the Earth unlivable for our grandchildren. Saving the wetlands is much more than just protecting our alligator habitat.

 

[ToadHill]

On the flip side, New York State in 1900 was only 10% forested. By the year 2000 as family farms went out out vogue and land returned to it's natural state the forest cover now includes almost 75% of the land in the state.

 

[dmccarty]

Raleigh, NC is in Wake county. In the early 1900s it was almost all farm, city or town. But the 80s it was forest and city. Now the cities are growing into the forests. I see lots of farm land going into forest and subdivisions in the surrounding counties. The Dairy farms are all but gone in my county. Timber is big business.

When I was in FLA years ago most of the coastline was loosing sand. The exception was in the Panhandle. The cause was inlets, jetties, sea walls, etc. that stopped the movement of sand. Since there is a lot of protected beach up in the Panhandle they actually had beachs that where growing in size. Here in NC the barrier islands are shrinking for whatever reason. We just where at the beach and the building had the one and only dune line just to its front. There was not more than 30 feet from the pilings to the high tide line. Scary. The wife's distant family has a house at the same beach and right next to where we stayed. The house was the first one built that far south on the island 50-60 years ago. It does not look like it will last another 10 as close as the ocean seems to be. I would like to know how much the beach has moved from when the house was built.

I don't mind that the beaches are rebuilt as long as it does not use my tax dollars. It should be payed for the people who live at the beach. Course our Federal taxes pay for this and we also subsidize the insurance cost as well which I don't like. We figured if our house lot was at the beach instead of one house there would be 20-30. YUCK!

Later,
Dan

 

[Bandybear]

Coffeeman,

It is the arrogance of some to believe we actually have a serious impact on the environment. As several posters have said, when left alone, the land returns to its prior state. (Otherwise, why do I have to constantly weed my garden when I removed all of the weeds once.) The very people that advocate that science indicates we are destroying the environment by this or that forget to cite the evidence of prior environmental change, change that occurred well before the arrival of the dreaded SUV.

 

[tallyho8]

Coffeeman, It is the arrogance of some to believe we actually have a serious impact on the environment. As several posters have said, when left alone, the land returns to its prior state. (Otherwise, why do I have to constantly weed my garden when I removed all of the weeds once.) The very people that advocate that science indicates we are destroying the environment by this or that forget to cite the evidence of prior environmental change, change that occurred well before the arrival of the dreaded SUV.

You can argue about whether or not man is causing global warming but there is NO doubt and NO argument about the fact that man has caused the demise of wetlands in southern Louisiana and has caused millions of acres of land to become open water. Building levees on the Mississippi River all the way to the gulf has stopped the natural flow of silt onto the land and has caused the land to sink below sea level. The thousands of miles of canals dug through our wetlands by the oil companies to service their operations has caused salt water to kill all plant life that is needed to keep the marshes healthy and intact and has left hundreds of thousands of acres of barren land to be overtaken by the gulf. New Orleans used to be as far from the gulf as Baton Rouge is now but the gulf is now so close as too allow catastrophic events such as Katrina.

Millions of years ago the gulf was further north than Baton Rouge but the natural flow of the Mississippi River with its land building silt created hundreds of square miles of high and dry land going way out into the gulf. Man and man alone, has reversed this natural land building mechanism.

Now, the Corps of Engineers thinks it can stop this erosion by spending billions of dollars on more levees, knowing full well that the levees are what caused this problem in the first place. When will they learn that some levees south of New Orleans must be removed, instead of being built higher, to let the natural land building processes commence once again?

 

[ToadHill]

Don't get me started on levees. Spend millions of taxpayer $$ to allow people to live where they "want" to live. If you want to live in a flood plane, build your house on stilts. In my area we have people who have to have flood insurance at up to $800 per year in order to get a mortgage. In several of these areas they have not had a flood in over 200 years, but their insurance helps support levees.

 

[tallyho8]

Don't get me started on levees. Spend millions of taxpayer $$ to allow people to live where they "want" to live. If you want to live in a flood plane, build your house on stilts. In my area we have people who have to have flood insurance at up to $800 per year in order to get a mortgage. In several of these areas they have not had a flood in over 200 years, but their insurance helps support levees.

Please remember that the vast majority of New Orleans had not flooded in over 250 years!(until Katrina)

Now, all homes there must be built 3 feet higher than before. 3 feet higher when the average home was under 6 feet of water. Go figure!!!

 

[Bandybear]

Please remember that the vast majority of New Orleans had not flooded in over 250 years!(until Katrina)

Now, all homes there must be built 3 feet higher than before. 3 feet higher when the average home was under 6 feet of water. Go figure!!!

tallyho,

You are making this tooooooo easy. May 8th 1995 Louisiana Flood
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The May 8th 1995 New Orleans Flood struck the New Orleans metropolitan area, shutting down the city for two days. It was a two-event phenomenon. Areas south of the lake began receiving tremendous amounts of rain at approximately 5:30 p.m. on May 7th, continuing into the early morning hours of May 8th. The flooding began on the Southshore, Jefferson Parish and Orleans Parish, including the cities of New Orleans, Metairie, Kenner, River Ridge, and Harahan, on May 8. During a short period of twelve hours, some areas received twenty inches of rainfall. The next day, the Northshore of Lake Pontchartrain, including Slidell, Covington, etc. received similar amounts of rain and flooding.

Some have compared this to the great November 1979 Louisiana Flood, or the more recent November 7 - 8 1989 Louisiana Flood, though the May 8th Flood was more extensive and costlier than both combined. It was the worst flooding the city had experienced between hurricanes Betsy in 1965 and Katrina in 2005. Perhaps the only comparable flood caused by rain alone was the Good Friday 1927 flood. (Rain also caused significant street flooding in New Orleans on May 3, 1978.)

Six people died as a result of the flooding. The city of New Orleans suffered $360 million in damages, and the damage of the surrounding areas put that total above $1 billion. Some 56,000 homes were damaged in 12 Parishes. Thousands of cars were flooded. 14,600 homes and apartments were flooded in Jefferson Parish.

The cause of the massive rain fall totals was a stalled out frontal system from the northwest. It produced a train effect, in which rain and/or thunderstorms continued to form over the same area. Pumping stations were overwhelmed and could not pump out the water into Lake Pontchartrain. The pumping stations are only rated to pump one inch per hour maximum.


I toaddally agree with Toadhill, why are we throwing our money into a blackhole because some people want to live in a place that is below sea level and still sinking?

And you made my first point quite eloquently, if we did not continue to believe we can control the environment, the environment will revert to its prior state. The upriver erosion will continue to be carried as silt to the delta, where it will be deposited.

 

[Kendall69]

It always amazes me how people point the finger at “man” as being the culprit to all the Earths changes, when Mother Nature is FAR ,FAR, more destructive than Man.

When Mt. Helenen’s erupted Nearly 230 square miles of forest was blown down or buried beneath volcanic deposits. At the same time a mushroom-shaped column of ash rose thousands of feet skyward and drifted downwind, turning day into night as dark, gray ash fell over eastern Washington and beyond. The eruption lasted 9 hours, but Mount St. Helen‘s and the surrounding landscape were dramatically changed within moments.

And that’s just one volcano - times that by all the volcano’s on earth and the number is staggering.

And we have forest fires caused by Mother Nature For two terrifying days and night's - August 20 and 21, 1910 - the fire raged across three million acres of virgin timberland in northern Idaho and western Montana.
Many thought the world would end, and for 86, it did.Since then we have had equally large fire, one as I type this in Reno Nevada. And that’s only two fires , times that by the thousands that are started by lighting every year.

Yellowstone was decimated in the early 90’s, I was there the year after, and the park was healing just fine, and last year it actually was in better shape than the damage “man” caused by trying to “protect” the park.

Funny how the tree huggers complain about cutting down trees, but don’t utter a word when those exact same trees get burned up, because they could not be cut. I’ll never understand that one. When all that lumber could have built thousands of homes for free to the needy.

Man has never caused as much eco damage as Mother nature herself, and the earth continues to repair itself just as it has done since being under miles of ice. That’s what the Earth does.

Global warming is a farce. What scientists do agree on is little and says nothing about man-made global warming, to wit: (1) that global average temperature is probably about 0.6 degree Celsius -- or 1 degree Fahrenheit -- higher than a century ago; I guess we should park all those bad SUV’s.

Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have risen by about 30% over the past 200 years; and that CO2 is one greenhouse gas, some level of an increase of which presumably would warm the Earth’s atmosphere were all else equal, which it demonstrably is not.

Until scientists are willing to save the U.S. taxpayer more than $5 billion per year thrown at researching climate, it is fair to presume the science is not settled. To settle this argument would mean the naysayers would be out of a 5 BILLION a year job.

So it looks like money is driving this argument not science, or an overwhelming desire to “save” the planet.