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How $400 worth of rocks saved a beach community from being washed away
Harriet Alexander, Washaway Beach, July 1 2024, The Times
A cranberry farmer turned the tide on creeping erosion after refusing to accept the authorities’ decision to leave North Cove, Washington, to its fate
It was the “hell no” meeting that sparked it all. Officials from Pacific county, the wild and windswept corner of southwestern Washington state, had called a community gathering. Their rural region was eroding at a terrifying pace, and the authorities had come to the conclusion that there was nothing they could do beyond raising taxes to pay for the eventual cleaning up of their eventually ruined homes. David Cottrell had other ideas.
“David stood up and thundered: ‘Like hell you will,’” said his wife, Connie Allen.
“He told them: ‘There is something to be done. And we will damn well do it.’”
Indeed, they did.
Led by Cottrell, a local cranberry farmer, the community around what was nicknamed “Washaway Beach” began experimenting. One of Cottrell’s experiments was with “cobble”, which is large gravel, as big as a basketball or as small as a pebble.
He spent an initial $400 on a lorry load of the stones: when, remarkably, they seemed to be dramatically slowing the erosion, he bought more. To fund the scheme, Allen organised bake sales in the working-class neighbourhood, and sold T-shirts and hoodies reading “Washaway No More.”
“Every time we had $100, we’d buy another load of cobble,” Allen said.
It worked. What was once the fastest-eroding beach in the western United States began to rebuild itself. The shoreline was receding by well over 100 foot per year; now the beach is growing. In an area where the school, post office and dozens of homes were sucked into the sea — the lighthouse had to be moved twice — there are now flourishing sand dunes.
It’s an almost unprecedented turnaround, which has attracted scientists from around the world.
Students from the University of Bath have come to explore their methods; project leaders have travelled as far afield as Guam to see if the techniques from North Cove can be replicated there.
In May, the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association declared North Cove one of two winners of their best restored beach award. Local residents and scientists are now eagerly awaiting an answer from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to their grant request, which is expected in July: if successful, the subsequent $13 million for further research at North Cove will be life-changing.
Cottrell, who died last year at 65 after a bike accident, was a giant in North Cove. A second-generation cranberry farmer, he was by nature a problem solver and leader, who studied for a PhD in mathematics.
At the age of three his father took him to see the coastguard station at the end of their road as it was tumbling into the sea — a memory that haunted him for ever. The road itself now ends in the ocean: the department of transport has had to build a new one, inland. As an adult, he was horrified by the constant collapse of homes into the ocean and the hollowing out of his homeland, as residents sold up.
Houses were bought for $500 by people just hoping for one summer. They’d think the storm would skip them, then be forced to run from their beds in the night as the buildings began to slip. Some simply abandoned their homes and fled.
George Kaminsky, a coastal engineer with the Washington state department of ecology, became involved.
“We’re working with the environment, not against it,” he said. “This is probably the only place where nature is actually rebuilding the beach.”
North Cove was settled in 1884, and the peril became apparent several decades later. Kaminsky says the causes are “complicated”. He explains that it’s thought to be due to human activity along the coast changing the flows of the rivers from the sea, and disrupting the natural currents. Climate change is not a factor here. By 1971, 3,000 acres of the town had been lost; in the 1990s a national wildlife refuge disappeared into the sea.
For years the solution was thought to be sea walls, or installing hulking slabs of riprap — concrete chunks or large boulders. But the cost ran into the tens of millions, and the beach was inevitably lost.
Kaminsky and his university colleagues now carry out detailed quarterly assessments of the coastline, taking GPS measurements from a backpack they wear as they walk the length of the beach. The measurements calculate the erosion.
They have also enlisted the wider community, commissioning two artists to create cast-iron sculptures upon which locals can rest their phones and take a photograph. A QR code is displayed beside the sculpture, enabling the photos to be updated to a database.
“I think we have the potential to do something really special here,” Kaminsky continued.
Beside the iron sculpture, they recently installed two stone benches looking out across the coastline that Cottrell loved so dearly. The benches are inscribed with his favourite saying.
“You can do something or you can do nothing,” it reads. “If you do nothing, you get nothing.”
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