A small coastal community in Southwest Washington might be a model for other places facing coastal erosion as the climate changes and sea levels rise. A group of people in North Cove, Washington, dumped a berm of rocks on the shoreline in an attempt to stop their beach from eroding — and it may be working. Sarah Trent wrote about the effort for High Country News, and she joins us to talk about her story.
Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.
Geoff Norcross: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Geoff Norcross. U.S. climate models show sea levels are expected to rise by a foot by the year 2050. For communities along the Pacific Coast that’s expected to cause billions in damage. Residents of North Cove, Washington saw they were losing 50 to 100 feet a year from what came to be known as ‘Washaway Beach.’ Seeing they didn’t have much left to lose, they tried something. They started by dumping a $400 pile of rocks onto the beach. Encouraged by what they saw, they kept adding more. Now there’s a two kilometer long berm of rocks and stumps that is collecting sand and rebuilding the beach. Sarah Trent wrote about all this for High Country News, and she joins me now. Sarah, welcome to Think Out Loud.
Sarah Trent: Thank you.
Norcross: Could you put me in the space first? This place that’s come to be known as Washaway Beach – when I’m there, what does it look like? What does it sound like?
Trent: It’s a beach. It’s funny being out there and knowing that they have been doing so much work out there. I was kind of surprised that you get there and that’s not apparent. In so many places that they’re trying to do erosion control, there’s some big structure that’s built. You get out there and it’s just a beach. There’s sandpipers in the distance. The waves were a couple of hundred feet out, whereas years ago they would have been right up against the bank there. We’re standing on the edge of this road-end and literally step over what a couple of years ago was a 14 foot cliff, just into the soft sand. There’s dune grasses… It looks like a healthy beach.
Norcross: We’ll talk about how they did that. But could you give me a sense of, before this restoration project started, what the town of North Cove lost already in terms of mass and structures?
Trent: Yeah. They had lost, I think it’s four square miles off the end of… It’s like the north tip of the entrance to Willapa Bay and 160 structures, most of which were homes and trailer pads that had been on this sort of peninsula I guess you could call it. I was with David standing in what was near the center of this old neighborhood, and most of it’s gone.
Norcross: Yeah, David is David Cottrell. He’s kind of the hero of your story, and we’ll talk about him a little bit more. But can you clue me in on the science. What is it about North Cove that has it so exposed to erosion?
Trent: It’s complicated, and scientists are really just starting to understand what’s happening out there. This is a place that is near the mouth of the Columbia River, has always been really exposed to tides and currents and sand flowing in and out. In the winter most of the sand disappears, and then in the summer it comes back again. Until it didn’t, which scientists believe is because of jetties and the dams on the Columbia River that really shifted how sediments flow in this area and how they collected and what once was a natural process and now isn’t.
Norcross: And in fact those dams and jetties were built over 100 years ago, so we could be seeing a century of erosion out there?
Trent: Yep. Give and take in this very ephemeral place.
Norcross: And what would the encroaching sea mean for the area economically if it kept eroding?
Trent: Oof… This, it’s an area that’s known as the Cranberry Coast. I think two thirds, or at least more than a half, of the state’s cranberries are grown in this area. There’s all these historic cranberry bogs. It’s this very rural, isolated community, right on the coast – farms, people, homes. It’s a place that a lot of people feel, I think, a really strong connection to. I’ve heard from friends who were like, ‘Oh, yeah, I grew up visiting Washaway Beach.’ It’s a famous place in Southwest Washington.
Norcross: And there’s a highway there that they would’ve had to move. Right?
Trent: Yes, the highway is not officially the dike but basically serves as the dike. If the tides were to overtake this road, everything behind it would be lost just because of the topography of the place.
Norcross: One of the main people in your story is a local named David Cottrell, and we talked about him a little bit. He was the one who came up with this idea of dumping the rocks on the beach. This was back in 2016. What was he thinking?
Trent: He was looking for any solution to save his community and his farm. He had observed what happened at other places on the Washington Coast – cobble beaches, places where there are basalt cliffs and rocks that fall naturally – and just the fact that those places tend to be quite stable, where his wasn’t. So he was looking to sort of imitate what’s happening in those places. It turns out that this is also quite similar to ways that Indigenous communities in the region have forever managed their coastlines and farmed shellfish, and it just looks a lot like that.
Norcross: Okay. So he was trying to mimic sea breaks that occur naturally in other parts of the coast.
Trent: Yeah, exactly.
Norcross: Coastal communities who are dealing with erosion have some other tools that they use, but that’s usually like a seawall or a big pile of boulder-sized rocks called riprap to stop the encroaching sea. How is this different?
Trent: This is not a fixed structure. In fact, David quibbles with the word ‘structure.’ It’s a natural process that is being set up. Seawalls often actually cause more erosion because water hits them and then has nowhere to go, so it’s forced back out again. Whereas this, the water sort of sloshes through the berm, it slows, it changes direction. When it slows, it actually drops all the sand that it’s carrying. So they’re imitating this very natural process that happens everywhere and always has.
Norcross: You mentioned that we started with a small pile of rocks on the beach. At what point, I’m wondering, did David Cottrell and everybody else who was watching realize, ‘This is working; we need to go bigger with it?’
Trent: My understanding is that it happened pretty quickly. As soon as it was out there, the waves shifted. In a place where people had – my understanding is they had basically given up – they saw, ‘Oh, this might work; this is worth trying harder.’ And they kept adding more. They got state grants. Charlene Nelson, the chairwoman of the Shoalwater Bay Tribe, really stepped in and brought in more money and more support. They just kept adding and trying new things and ended up, in addition to all of the cobble up on the bank, [putting] a speed bump out in front of it: This three-foot pile of cobble. It was the same very rough, small cobble. Together those things really have worked and have gotten a lot of support from agencies and a lot of attention from engineers.
Norcross: But how does it work? How is it able to replenish the beach in a way that a seawall can’t?
Trent: It collects sand. Every season sand is flowing through this area. It’s caught in the waves. The waves slosh up through the speed bump into the berm and drop sand and then they recede. And the high tide comes in with all of that energy. This really harnesses the energy of the waves and the sand that they bring to collect sand and build up the beach. I mean, it’s been built hundreds of feet over the last few years.
Norcross: Wow. If I’m hearing you correctly, the point is this berm has a little more flexibility, a little more give, than a structure would, and that’s a critical part of the process here?
Trent: Yeah, it’s critical. It’s funny, David, he doesn’t like to talk about them having built this because they didn’t. All they did was drop rocks. He doesn’t like calling it a structure because it isn’t. It’s not anything that a traditional engineer would recognize as, ‘We designed the exact specifications and it looks like this and it acts like this.’ It’s like this is a natural process that they put the rocks out, and nature does the rest.
Norcross: This process has been going on for over 100 years now. Why hasn’t anybody thought of this before?
Trent: I think people are caught in the old way of doing things. I think engineers, who have been trying to solve this problem forever using seawalls and other structures, have been sort of established and have design guidelines. This is a process; this is a structure, for lack of a better word, that doesn’t have those guidelines. So even if somebody has seen that it worked, or knows that it works, without data, without research, it’s hard for agencies or even communities to put these kinds of things in their place, which I think is what this experiment in North Cove is really helping to change.
Norcross: How do they keep from running afoul of any kind of state or federal environmental rules?
Trent: I think they have been working very carefully with all of these agencies. Everyone sees that it’s starting to work and are getting on board and are coming together. There’s, I think, regular meetings of all of the agencies. DOT is involved, Department of Ecology is involved, Fish and Wildlife, local conservation district. Everyone is involved and staying abreast of what’s happening the best that they can throughout this whole process. I think David has really been a champion, but there’s so many people involved out here.
Norcross: Sarah, you touched on this earlier, but this story seems to be part of many stories that we’re hearing lately about how traditional interventions to changes in our landscapes – ones that Indigenous populations have been using for millennia – are being brought back. Is that what’s happening here?
Trent: Yeah, exactly. Yes.
Norcross: Tell me more about that.
Trent: I think there’s been a big push over the last couple of decades even, to try new things. I mean, there’s so many new threats coming with climate change, and there’s real interest in finding new solutions. As little experiments like this work, as new people come to the table with ideas and evidence develops that these work, there’s just been a big push in landscape architecture, in communities, engineering… All these fields are really seeing that these more natural, sort of softer approaches work, and trying to find evidence to keep growing this movement, I guess.
Norcross: Are the folks in North Cove seeing any downside whatsoever to their work out there at Washaway Beach?
Trent: I don’t think so. I mean, not that I know of. The beach is growing. Anecdotally, some shorebirds are coming back. Dune grasses are definitely coming back. This place that has been so special, that was threatening to wash into the sea is, at least for now, not anymore.
Norcross: Is there more work to be done on it? Does it need to be shored up or maintained in any way?
Trent: Yes. Parts of this beach have become stable for now, but there’s always some level of maintenance. On any structure to protect communities, there’s always going to be some maintenance. But once this natural process is established, I think there is the hope that it will be largely hands off.
Norcross: Are folks in North Cove still calling it Washaway Beach even though it’s not washing away as much?
[Laughter]
Trent: Yes, although I will say David wears a jacket – very proudly I think – that says, ‘Washaway No More.’ That is part of a community fundraising effort, and ‘Washaway No More’ I think has become his and many people’s slogan out there.
Norcross: Is the broader scientific community taking a notice of this? Is their interest in this method?
Trent: Yes, I think there’s huge interest. George Kaminsky, who is an engineer with the Department of Ecology, has been doing a bunch of research monitoring literally the very specific movement of rocks that are tagged so he can understand how exactly this works, how it could be improved or imitated in other places. His research has helped to inform other projects around Willapa Bay, in California, as far as Guam and Europe. People are interested in this and interested in adapting it to their own place. George talks about this project in Guam that was interested in this approach but didn’t have the kind of cobble that exists here and so used, I think shells, instead – just this other naturally occurring thing there that I believe has worked there as well.
Norcross: Yeah, use what you’ve got. Final question: I can just see coastal communities hearing this story and just going out there and dumping rocks on their beaches. Can you apply this solution to any coastal community that is seeing this erosion?
Trent: I think the Department of Fish and Wildlife would really like for you to ask them first. But I think that, yes, similar approaches seem very likely to work in many places. And I think David and George and many other people would be really encouraging, and be really encouraged by seeing this happening in other places.
Norcross: Sarah Trent, thank you.
Trent: Thank you so much.
Norcross: Sarah Trent is a reporter with High Country News.
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