Engineering works can transfer erosion damage down the coast to unprotected beaches

Evidence

This is a sand dune, on the Atlantic Coast, which was not bulldozed away to make room for a parking area. Result: in the great tides of September 1962, the ocean did not break in at this point and flood hundreds of summer cottages and hot dog emporia out of existence. … Here you are looking out from the Castillo de San Marcos at St. Augustine, toward the inlet and the man-made channel through which the shrimp boats enter with their cargoes. To protect this channel from shoaling, jetties were built. That was good. But wait. Down the coast about five miles from here there is a place called St. Augustine Beach. … This was a fine gently sloping beach of white sand. There was a boardwalk here, and you went down three or four steps onto this beach. When I last saw it, there was a nine-foot jump, and the beach continues to disappear with every wild storm. The sea is cutting rapidly landward at this point. I need not elaborate. — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 769

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete instance of the erosion/interference feedback driving the Sand County/‘Reading the Landscape’ disturbance-history thread — jetties starve downdrift beaches, an anticipation of modern coastal-sediment-budget science.
• SHARE: A sharp anti-jetties/beach-nourishment example useful to anyone involved in coastal management or shoreline restoration debates.