ENVIRONMENT:
BEACH RESTORATION
A Falmouth company finds an environmentally
friendly way to replenish sandy shoreline.
By TIM WOOD
PHOTOGRAPHY BY DON BOROWSKI
In the past, building up eroded beaches meant carting yards and yards of sand to the shore in wheelbarrows or buckets. It was time consuming and not exactly gentle on fragile coastal environment.
“If you do that 100 times over the same spot, you’re basically tramping everything down,” says Gary Tavares of Shoreline Restoration in Falmouth. With local conservation commissions frowning on the use of heavy equipment to do the job, Tavares figured there had to be a more environmentally friendly, non-intrusive way to replenish beach sand.
Like many useful innovations, the solution was stumbled upon accidentally. About a decade ago, Tavares was doing a project on Nantucket that required filling a number of 12- by 6-foot sandbags. He developed a machine to fill the sandbags efficiently and later discovered that the contraption could be used to pump large quantities of sand onto a beach with little or no impact on the coastal environment. The Sandpump was born.
“All the conservation departments in the towns we’ve dealt with say it’s the most noninvasive way of putting sand onto the beach,” says Tavares, whose company is a subsidiary of landscaping company Francisco Tavares. “The system can be used to restore and protect beaches along the coast and on inland ponds. “The next best thing is [dumping sand from] a helicopter, and that won’t get you the tonnage you need. And it’s much more expensive.”
On Cape Cod, beach erosion is a fact of life, and trying to control it can be literally shoveling sand against the tide. According to a recent analysis of shoreline change, only three Cape towns—Harwich, Provincetown and Sandwich—show long-term beach gains. For shorefront owners everywhere else, beaches are disappearing, some more quickly than others. Preserving both the investment and recreational value of a waterfront parcel is likely to involve some tough decisions sooner or later.
Not all erosion-protection methods are created equal, and while all involve an element of environmental manipulation, some are more environmentally intrusive than others. All are strictly regulated by local conservation commissions and the state Department of Environmental Protection. For homeowners, wading through the flood of state and local environmental laws can be daunting and confusing. The type of shoreline protection for which a property qualifies can hinge on something as arbitrary as when the house was constructed. If the home existed prior to 1978, when the state Wetlands Protection Act was adopted, so-called “hard” erosion structures, such as seawalls and revetments, might be allowed. Properties with homes constructed after that date must depend on “soft” solutions, such as sandbags and beach nourishment, the technical term for adding new sand to an eroded shoreline.
 That’s only the beginning. Options for erosion protection also depend on the environment in which the property is located. If it’s on a coastal bank—think of a high bluff—revetments are more likely to be allowed. But coastal dunes—the low, rolling shoreline seen along much of the Cape’s south side as well as Cape Cod Bay—should be able to move freely in response to coastal conditions, according to environmental regulators.
Location, therefore, is everything. There have been instances, such as along Chatham’s eastern shoreline, where neighboring shorefront properties were determined to lie in different coastal environments—one a dune, the other a coastal bank. In the highly dynamic environment created after the 1987 break in Chatham’s barrier beach, the dune property (with the house on it) was soon gone. The bank, protected by a rock wall, survived.
Officials, however, tend to discourage revetments. The conventional wisdom is that rock walls promote erosion on nearby unprotected properties. Some disagree with that, asserting that properly constructed and maintained seawalls can have a neutral environmental impact. Tavares says that in his experience, while officials will allow repairs to existing seawalls, it’s next to impossible to win approval for a new revetment.
Fortifying beaches by adding sand or “soft” structures like sandbags or filter cloth, designed to trap and hold sand, is the most ecologically friendly shoreline restoration method, appropriate in all but the most active coastal environments. Getting the sand to the beach without damaging the fragile coastal environment can be a problem, however. Driving a multi-ton dump truck across a dune to build up a few feet of beach doesn’t pass the regulatory “pro versus con” test.
That’s where the Sandpump comes in. Essentially a large yellow funnel and motorized pump on wheels, the machine is designed to combine sand and water into a slurry that can be quickly and easily pumped onto the shore. As the water runs off, the sand settles, building up the beach. “It’s an alternative when beach access is a problem,” says Don Borowski, head of marketing and operations at Shoreline Restoration.
LOCAL EXAMPLES
Beach nourishment has long been recognized as an environmentally neutral way to combat erosion, by replacing sand lost by long-term coastal processes or storms. Huge beach nourishment projects have been undertaken in places like Florida and North Carolina; closer to home, beaches in Nantucket and Chatham have been restored by simply placing large quantities of sand along the shore. For many of those projects, sand is either trucked in from an on-shore source and spread over a beach by heavy machinery, or dredged from offshore, dried and then placed along the beach by a loader.
The advantage of the Sandpump system is that it doesn’t require heavy machinery, which can damage fragile coastal environments. The only other equipment required is a truck to provide clean, local sand (which matches the location’s existing beach sand) and a loader to dump the sand into the top of the Sandpump. The water necessary to create the slurry is pumped into the Sandpump from just offshore, says Borowski. The mixture flows through a plastic pipe that snakes from the Sandpump on the upland down to the beach. No heavy machinery; no damage to the environment.
“Nothing goes over the slope” except the carefully placed pipelines, Borowski says. For one recent job, access issues meant the homeowner’s only other alternative would have been to carry the sand to the beach in five-gallon buckets. “It doesn’t take long to realize you’d be doing that for the whole summer,” Borowski says.
That project, located in Barnstable’s Oyster Harbor, involved building up a 500- to 600-foot stretch of beach at the base of a coastal bank. It took several days.
 A smaller job at John’s Pond in Mashpee resulted in the creation of 10 to 15 feet of new beach in just one day, according to Borowski. “He had no beach when he first moved there,” he says of the property owner. When the job was completed, the only evidence of the work, besides a nice new beach, was a small sandy patch in the driveway. Tavares says the Sandpump can pump sand to a beach 1,000 feet away with no problem.
Beach restoration can sometimes involve combining sand with other minimally intrusive structures. A project in Buzzard’s Bay involved pumping sand on top of material known as fiber rolls—organic tubes that lie somewhere between a hard and soft erosion-control method. The rolls anchor the base of a dune or bank and are then covered by sand. Beach grass is planted in the sand, which further serves to hold the sand and underlying structure in place.
Beach nourishment is sometimes criticized as too costly for the benefit it provides. Indeed, it isn’t unusual for a single storm to wipe out all of the sand meticulously, and expensively, placed on a beach. But for owners of waterfront properties—especially those with no other choice due to environmental regulations—the cost can be beside the point.
Shoreline Restoration has used the Sandpump for dozens of projects from the Canadian border to Chesapeake Bay, according to its website. Costs vary widely depending on the location. The John’s Pond work cost about $4,000. Larger projects reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But most waterfront property owners don’t blink at the price tag, Borowski says. It’s significantly less than building a full-scale rock revetment, which runs an average $1,000 or more per linear foot. Sand may have to be replenished every few years, or even annually, depending on storms and other factors, but Borowski says most waterfront homeowners don’t mind.
Sand is a major element in coastal processes, and erosion is the natural process that provides the material that keeps other beaches from eroding away. In many cases now, the state requires that existing revetments be covered with sand that can be “sacrificed” in place of the sand trapped behind the seawall. Sand can also serve as a pre-emptive buffer to protect against future erosion, especially in low-impact areas where shoreline loss is slow and gradual.
“My approach is to save the shore” before erosion becomes a crisis, Tavares says. That can save homeowners more in the long run by preventing the need for major restoration. “Like everything else, it’s a temporary measure,” Tavares acknowledges. “I have one client where we go back every single year for maintenance, which can be $10,000 to $15,000. But he’s got an expensive property. This is just keeping it up.”
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