{"id":94599,"date":"2025-12-24T07:25:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-24T07:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/94599\/"},"modified":"2025-12-24T07:25:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-24T07:25:10","slug":"lessons-learned-rebuilding-storm-hit-beaches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/94599\/","title":{"rendered":"Lessons learned rebuilding storm-hit beaches"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

FGCU and Island Coast High School worked together to help replant mangroves across Bowditch Point\u2019s shoreline. -DAVID WISHTISCHIN \/ FLORIDA WEEKLY<\/p>\n

Like performing a juggling act with bowling balls and pins, maintaining miles of healthy beaches on and off barrier islands is an imperfect art. Officials have to balance both the imperatives of nature and the economic demands of beach commerce, and they have to do it with flexibility, knowledge, planning, money and two simple acknowledgements. One: Luck is an inevitable partner in what happens. If it\u2019s big enough, the next storm could erase much of their work.\n<\/p>\n

And two: It\u2019s going to cost us, but it\u2019s likely to cost us a lot less over time if it\u2019s done the right way from the start.\n<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Jeannine Richards, an assistant professor in The Water School at FGCU, works with local governments to plant native coastal vegetation across berms and dunes. -PHOTO CREDIT: JAMES GRECO \/ FGCU<\/p>\n

The right way is creating berms and dunes of proper height and placement, anchored by intensive plantings of native flora, say marine ecologists at Florida Gulf Coast University and local government officials. They\u2019re shouldering the not-quite Herculean task of renourishing beaches resilient enough to survive all but the biggest storms without loss of life and overwhelming property damage.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you put a pile of sand on the beach, it doesn\u2019t stay very long if you don\u2019t also plant on it,\u201d explains Jeannine Richards, Ph.D., an assistant professor in The Water School at Florida Gulf Coast University and a plant ecologist working on beach dune restoration.\n<\/p>\n

Now we know. Before we learned, however, that\u2019s what happened following Hurricane Ian.\n<\/p>\n

Countless taxpayers from the nation and the Sunshine State who may have spent little or no time on the southwest coast nevertheless spent millions of dollars helping Floridians pick themselves up, not the least of it restoring beachfront.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThe post-Ian recovery efforts have been largely funded by the state of Florida and FEMA,\u201d says Holly Milbrandt, Sanibel\u2019s director of Natural Resources. The island city alone received $27 million from the state, and money flooded in from federal and state sources to rebuild and renourish beaches up and down the coast.\n<\/p>\n

But significant amounts of that money were blown or washed away.\n<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A single mangrove can release hundreds of propagules, helping entire shorelines regenerate. -DAVID WISHTISCHIN \/ FLORIDA WEEKLY<\/p>\n

At first, communities paid just to pile sand in long berms down the coastlines of Lee and Collier County, hoping it would be enough.\n<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t. What happened next was dramatic, and it suggests that officials and many others required a steep learning curve to catch up.\n<\/p>\n

Our education began with the shell-shocked notion that if the sea knocked us down and took the sand away in round one, we should get up and get into round two quickly. We should find more sand, dredge it from offshore or mine it and haul it from central Florida, and put it back, so people can get on with their tourist-based economy and their comfortable, stable lives.\n<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t and isn\u2019t that easy and won\u2019t be, says Richards.\n<\/p>\n

The complex planting challenge<\/p>\n

She\u2019s been thinking about what beach restoration done right looks like for three years, she said \u2014 and so has everybody else.\n<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Mangrove roots create nurseries for fish, crabs and many more marine species. -DAVID WISHTISCHIN \/ FLORIDA WEEKLY<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen Ian hit, nobody had any plans for a restoration response to a disaster of that scale.\n<\/p>\n

Nobody had thought about whether we even need to replant the beach after a major hurricane event.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

So, they piled sand.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cCommunities just didn\u2019t have the knowledge, and it wasn\u2019t a top priority \u2014 dealing with the human problems first is understandable. But when we had the berm installed, we essentially lost millions and millions of dollars because there were no plants on it. So through wind and wave action it was quickly eroded.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Plants like railroad vine, sea oats, sea grapes, and mangrove forests that put roots and resilience into coastlines naturally \u2014 they were merely second thoughts.\n<\/p>\n

But everybody began to learn, costly as that education proved to be.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd now,\u201d said Richards, \u201cCollier County established a new berm and planted it starting about a year ago, in the beginning of December. Their entire coastline is replanted. The plantings look good.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

The region was fortunate this time around \u2014 no hurricanes hit in 2025. As a result of that luck, \u201cthe plants are steadily growing, surviving, and they should get solidly established by next July or August when we get into peak hurricane season.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, on Sanibel and in Lee County, plantings are also taking place on berms and dunes, with some efforts scheduled to start in January, Milbrandt says.\n<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been three years and three months since Hurricane Ian\u2019s disastrous 5.5-foot storm surge covered Sanibel, along with Fort Myers Beach and Captiva, and the island has gone from nearly knocked out to significantly improved.\n<\/p>\n

Remarkably, on a calm day about a week before Christmas, workers completed the last of a number of Ian-spawned renourishment efforts on the island.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re finishing up with the last big push on the north island, just south of Blind Pass between there and Bowman\u2019s Beach. We were able to coordinate that with the Captiva Erosion Prevention District (the CEPD) and the contractor that had been doing the regeneration project for Captiva,\u201d Milbrandt said.\n<\/p>\n

Sharing the work \u2014 and the displeasure of critics<\/p>\n

That coordination was a neighborly choreography of contract bending between the city and the county in the form of Captiva\u2019s Brighton Heard.\n<\/p>\n

Heard, the CEPD\u2019s general manager, directs the Captiva renourishment project that\u2019s raising sand dunes on the island two feet above their traditional heights, at a cost of $30 million. He helped Sanibel by developing a new memorandum of understanding with the city. That allowed them to \u201cpiggyback on our contracts and permits, and get emergency sand at the same rate we pay.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

The sand is coming from so-called borrow sites about six miles offshore, about 5,000 cubic yards at a time. \u201cCaptiva got a million cubic yards of sand, and Sanibel about 300,000 cubic yards,\u201d Heard said.\n<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

With each plant, the shoreline becomes more resilient to rising tides and future storms. -DAVID WISHTISCHIN \/ FLORIDA WEEKLY<\/p>\n

\u201cIt protects our shoreline, and being entirely candid, provides beaches for everyone to enjoy. We could have a seawall \u2014 but who wants to hang out on an island blocked by a seawall from the beach?\u201d\n<\/p>\n

To make the beaches even more attractive, Lee County government threw in $6.5 million for the coming year, of which Sanibel received $2 million. But that money, an annual dispensation funded by bed taxes, isn\u2019t for beach renourishment, it\u2019s for upkeep of public spaces \u2014 such essential tourist attractors as paved parking lots and restrooms, officials said.\n<\/p>\n

Heard, meanwhile, spoke bluntly about his experience so far.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI have struggled for seven months\u201d to establish beaches that can withstand bigger storms, he said, \u201calso doing renourishment projects and managing those efforts. It\u2019s been a real trial-by-fire.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Originally from Louisiana, Heard has seen and experienced a lot, but he may not have been prepared for the contentious nature some of the work engenders.\n<\/p>\n

In mid-December, a frustrated county commissioner stormed in and berated him \u201cfor never doing anything,\u201d he said, not naming the commissioner. He praised the board as a whole for their renourishment decisions.\n<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

FGCU Student Nina Lipka planting a mangrove at Bowditch Point. -DAVID WISHTISCHIN \/ FLORIDA WEEKLY<\/p>\n

And that may be the least of it.\n<\/p>\n

In the course of doing resilience the right way on Captiva, the CEPD \u2014 with board approval \u2014 is raising dunes from 10 to 12 feet along much of the island, and from 8 to 10 feet on the north end.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cWe let everyone know that the dunes would be bigger than ever, and I am happy the board did choose to provide a more substantial level of protection than has ever been provided in the past,\u201d he said.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThat provides a much more robust level of storm protection and overwash protection, which is when waves crash over the top of dunes and push the sand inland.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Higher dunes are a result of unhappy higher education of a sort. The reason why the CEPD was created, explained Heard, \u201cwas because the shoreline was taken all the way back to the road, and that could be the fate of the island again, in another big storm.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

But some people don\u2019t care, apparently. There\u2019s a petition with about 20 names of Captiva residents protesting the new, higher dunes, and earlier this month the Mucky Duck restaurant filed a $10.5 million lawsuit to stop the process near them.\n<\/p>\n

The challenge: stabilize the ephemeral<\/p>\n

Joe Cavanaugh, the Calusa Waterkeeper whose non-profit organization seeks to protect the water from the people and sometimes the people from water they\u2019ve polluted in the 60-mile river basin stretching from Lake Okeechobee to Charlotte Harbor near Sanibel, points out that barrier islands and other coastal environments \u201care ephemeral by nature.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re not meant to be stable environments.\u00a0 But Florida is sometimes all about, \u2018Let\u2019s fill in the sandbox and create a permanent structure.\u2019\u201d\n<\/p>\n

A beach renourishment expert who worked with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) on beach renourishment before becoming Calusa Waterkeeper, Cavanaugh says there is a way, one good way, to protect the interests of people on the beaches.\n<\/p>\n

That\u2019s thinking 50 years ahead.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI worked with NOAA for almost five years in their Coastal Storm Risk Management program, on the beach renourishment issue, and there was all this federal money tagged for Gulf coast Florida. The money was in the billions. Just for the Collier County beach nourishments for the future, alone, they had planned $4.5 billion (with a b) for the next 50 years.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

But in 2024, he said, \u201cthose projects all went on indefinite hold, as the Army Corps called it.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Federal officials then moved the money away.\n<\/p>\n

Renourishing the beach with nature-based solutions, Cavanaugh says, echoing the observations of others too, is more complicated than just sand. But it will take money, from somewhere.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere are we going to plant seagrasses and mangroves, what are the slopes on each beach, what time of year do we work so we don\u2019t impact sea turtles and shore-bird nesting?\u201d\n<\/p>\n

As for the Mucky Duck lawsuit against the CEPD, Cavanaugh said, \u201cif you\u2019re going to have a good living shoreline, the beach has to have a certain slope for nesting and shorebirds, but you need dunes on the backside to protect from erosion, dunes with railroad vines and sea grapes and the like, and the slope changes. Different species of sea turtles\u2019 nest in different areas, you have to take than into account.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

That, he concludes, \u201cis the price of living in paradise.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Matt DePaolis, environmental policy director at the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation. -COURTESY PHOTO<\/p>\n

For Matt DePaolis, environmental policy director at the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation (the SCCF), the price is also navigating complications, the complications of a complex and dynamic environment in flux, and a human environment that insists on stability.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cNo individual beach renourishment program is cut and dried. You can\u2019t say \u2018this is all good, or this is all bad,\u2019\u201d he said.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are different disparate needs, and the history of it, Captiva versus Sanibel, for example, shows very different tacks in how they renourish their beaches, and with different levels of success.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are some clear issues, though: If you\u2019re trying to renourish during turtle nesting season, now you have to move turtle nests, which is expensive. And that\u2019s something Captiva has to contend with.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cBut if your beach is the lifeblood of your economy, you might have to do something else. Here\u2019s what we (think): You can refurbish your beach effectively. But the question is, how expensive will that be? If every year you\u2019re putting sand back in the same spot\u2026\u201d then it will be a lot more expensive, he said.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m an advocate for planted dune systems. We\u2019re also talking about using mangrove fringes, oyster reefs for storm surge \u2014 all built solutions based on nature. Nature has solutions for all the problems we\u2019re facing; we just have to use and apply them. Nature knows how to build barrier islands, how to clean water, and how to stand up to a hurricane.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

He offers a comparison between two kinds of solutions.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you build a seawall, it\u2019s a problem for someone into the future, a building problem that will surface in a future state. But if you plant mangroves, they can bring other mangroves into the system, and it will perpetuate over time.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Not a problem for a future state.\n\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FGCU and Island Coast High School worked together to help replant mangroves across Bowditch Point\u2019s shoreline. -DAVID WISHTISCHIN…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":94600,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210],"class_list":{"0":"post-94599","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cape-coral","8":"tag-cape-coral","9":"tag-cape-coral-headlines","10":"tag-cape-coral-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94599\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}