ST. AUGUSTINE BEACH, Fla. — Tens of millions of your tax dollars are spent every year to protect our area’s beaches, but it takes just a few storms to wash that work away.
St. Augustine Beach just had a $33 million federally funded beach renourishment project finished. It was the fifth one in just more than two decades.
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Margie Underwood’s cafe, Little Margie’s, is just on the other side of the beach.
“They come here because of our beach. We have a nice beach,” she said.
In fact, the beach is the reason Visit Florida said 39% of tourists came to Florida in 2022. It’s also the reason Underwood said it’s important to protect the beach.
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Renourishment on St. Augustine Beach put down sand past the pier by more than 100 feet this summer. After three months and two hurricanes, the ocean had already come roaring back.
“Half of that project is gone and it’s going to have to be rebuilt and goes again in 5 to 7 years,” Randall Parkinson, a coastal geologist at Florida International University, said.
Parkinson said the project in St. Augustine Beach worked, just as renourishments have over the past three decades. But he added that the multi-million dollar investment can’t stand up to the storms over time.
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“Conditions are not what they were 20, 30 years ago. So, it’s not a solution forever,” he explained.
Action News Jax Investigates dug through data from each of Northeast Florida’s coastal counties over the past two dozen years.
In Nassau, seven beach renourishment projects cost $76.3 million. In Duval, five different projects cost $79.88 million. In St. Johns County, the most vulnerable local coastal county, 23 projects cost $219.4 million. Thirteen of the 23 projects in St. Johns were in just the past four years.
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That’s more than $375 million spent in Northeast Florida since 2000, and much of that work has washed away.
Jason Harah, the senior project manager overseeing beach renourishment for the US Army Corps of Engineers’ Jacksonville District, admitted larger, more intense storms mean the Corps is in a cycle of renourishing beaches more frequently. But he argued it’s the first line of defense from the ocean dune.
“We build the beaches so that they can sacrifice themselves,” Harah said. “We build them to absorb that wave energy and we know they will wash out to shore. That’s exactly what we designed them to do.”
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While Northeast Florida’s coast sees direct impacts, it’s what’s on the other side that has critics like Parkinson concerned. Sea level rise along the Intracoastal can cause another host of issues. Parkinson said Florida’s coast has seen six inches of sea level rise since 2000.
“It essentially buys time. Over the next decade, significant progress needs to be made in how that time is used to change an impending crisis,” he said.
The Army Corps argued it’s studying that as well with projects to raise levies and even money.
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Action News Jax Robert Grant asked if it’s worth the money.
“The beaches provide a huge economic engine not only for the people coming from international or domestic but also for the hospitality and the restaurant industry,” Harah said.
Army Corps studies show tourists generated five times the revenue as the money spent over the last century on renourishment across the state.
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