When you pulled up to the sandy parking lot at Tom’s Cove, all you saw was the dune and the open sky. The gentle whoosh of the waves spilling onto the beach was unmistakable, but you couldn’t see the water yet. First, you had to cross the gravel, pass a small lifeguard hut, and climb the glistening white sand dune, the Atlantic Ocean finally coming into view at the top.
This is what the southern tip of Assateague Island National Seashore, a national park on a long barrier island off the coast of Maryland and Virginia, looked like in September 2017. Now, only two years later, the lifeguard hut—raised on wooden piles over the beach—is gone, and the dune is so flattened that you can see the water from the lot without having to get out of the car. The seas are rising around Assateague, the barrier island is shifting toward the mainland, and each new storm risks breaching the recreational beach and washing away the parking lot.
The parking lot at Tom’s Cove, previously protected by a natural sand dune and now exposed to the open ocean, is at the heart of an ongoing conflict between the small beach town of Chincoteague and federal agencies that manage Assateague Island. The government must choose between using federal funds to fortify this at-risk community against the rising seas and diverting resources to long-term adaptability initiatives that will leave the town behind. As climate change drives sea level rise and produces more violent storms in the coming years, the existential dilemma facing Chincoteague is bound play out across the United States and the world.
A new management strategy in the face of sea level rise
“When the ocean is rising around you, like it’s happening to us, there are really only three alternatives: you can try to stay in place and fortify, you can try to move as the island moves, or you can just get out of the way,” Deborah Darden, National Park Service (NPS) superintendent of Assateague Island National Seashore, explained. Darden oversaw the drafting of the latest NPS management plan for Assateague, which is designed to guide the park service “for the next 15 to 20 years in protecting the seashore’s natural and cultural features.” The plan considered alternatives to managing climate change, solicited public input, and ultimately decided to allow the island to evolve naturally without trying to fortify it against rising seas. In Darden’s words: NPS will move as the island moves.
The beach at Tom’s Cove and the adjacent parking lot for visitors both fall under federal jurisdiction. When a nor’easter hits the shore, the parking lot inevitably gets flooded. A nor’easter, a storm common on the East Coast of North America, is typically accompanied by heavy rains and can easily overwhelm the unfortified beach. Sometimes even a particularly high tide can reach and flood the lot, which lies only about 500 ft from the water. Over the years, the parking area’s location has necessitated frequent repairs, causing the NPS to repeatedly sink federal funds into a doomed project.
To tackle the problem, the NPS along with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS)—another federal agency that co-manages Assateague—decided to relocate the beach along with the parking lot 1.5 miles north. Once moved, it’s projected to be safe from flooding for the next few decades. According to the Virginia Eastern Shore Coastal Resilience mapping tool, a medium-intensity storm today would raise the water level anywhere between 3 and 12 ft on the beach strip at Tom’s Cove. By 2065, the area could see as much as 20 ft of water, with the beach appearing completely submerged on the map. Farther north, the shore looks safer, showing only about 1-3 ft of water during a medium-strength storm through 2040, although that number goes up to 12 ft by 2065.
To planners at NPS and FWS, moving the beach and the parking lot seemed like the best option. It would preserve the recreational beach, which is a major tourist attraction, account for environmental changes, and, crucially, save the federal government some money.
“In the past, when the parking lot gets flooded, we’ve applied for emergency funding, usually through the park service,” Tom Bonetti, senior planner at the FWS, said. “[After] one of the more recent storms, the people in the NPS headquarters office in Washington said, ‘We’re not going to keep doing this. You can’t keep asking for emergency money time and time again.’ It’s like building a house next to a river, it constantly floods.”
Locals demand protection against storm surges
The residents of the town of Chincoteague, located on a small island between the Virginia mainland and federally-owned Assateague Island National Seashore, are not happy with the agencies’ decision. They worry that abandoning the existing beach and parking lot and letting nature take its course will expose the town to more intense storm surges and flooding. Instead, they want the government to fortify the island and prioritize Chincoteague’s safety.
According to Director of Emergency Services Bryan Rush, nor’easters have increased in frequency, with at least one major storm hitting Chincoteague every year. The town of Chincoteague is small, only 1.5 miles wide and 7 miles long, and very susceptible to flooding. Rush has worked for the town since 1990, and he said that inundation has become a much bigger problem in recent years. When the causeway connecting the town to the mainland gets flooded, Chincoteague is completely cut off from the rest of the world. Residents used to go several years without worrying about that, but now, the road floods at least three times a year. Having a beach that is maintained and refilled after every weather event provides a buffer against storm surges coming in from the Atlantic. When the federal government abandons the existing beach, Chincoteague will have to face intense storm surges alone.
“We’re losing our protection,” Rush said of the NPS’ decision to abandon Tom’s Cove beach in favor of developing a safer alternative 1.5 miles north. “Our inlet now is probably 1.5 miles wide and back in the day, 10, 15 years ago…it may only have been 600 yards (0.34 mi) wide.” Nearby shore areas with similar flooding concerns, such as Ocean City in Maryland and Wallops Island south of Assateague, have turned to sand-pumping and replenishment techniques to protect their coastlines. By building up an artificial sand barrier along the shore, they hope to mitigate the impact of storm surges and reduce inundation. “From a local government standpoint, we certainly feel that by not replenishing [the beach], it is putting our south end of the island, it’s putting us in a direct path,” Rush said. “A bigger storm is going to be devastating for our island.”
When the FWS drafted its 20-year conservation plan (a sister version of NPS’ management plan), a large percentage of public comments echoed Rush’s sentiment, focusing on the need to protect Chincoteague from storms. Of the 330 comments the FWS received during the public commenting period in 2015, the majority pertained to the proposed beach relocation. One hundred and fifty-four comments opposed the idea of relocating the beach, and 62 requested that the FWS maintain artificial dunes along the Assateague shoreline to provide storm protection to both the beach and the town.
“A restoration project to build beach elevations…has not been considered as an alternative to the 28-acre impact of relocating all visitor facilities,” one comment reads. “The Town [of Chincoteague] requests assurance that responsible federal management actions are maintained at Tom’s Cove.”
“Seventy-three commenters think that it would be more cost effective to periodically replace dunes and repair and enlarge the existing beach,” according to the FWS Summary of Public Comments document. “Commenters requested that the [FWS] Refuge leave the beach where it currently is and rebuild the dunes…noting that this practice was utilized in the past and protected the beach from storm damage.”
Balancing sustainability with residents’ concerns
Creating an artificial dune system to protect the beach is not a sustainable strategy, however. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Assateague managers attempted to maintain an artificial dune on the southern end of the shore. But it was being washed away by each big storm, failing to provide the necessary protection. According to Tom Bonetti, the visitor’s center behind the dune had to be moved at least four times during this period because the dune was so unstable. Recreating the dunes would cause more problems than it would solve, especially since storm surges have become more frequent and sea level rise more significant since the 1970s. “A lot of old timers from the town remember what it used to look like. With each storm that’s come in, there’s much more erosion, and [the beach strip] gets narrower and narrower. There’s not even enough room to have an artificial dune there,” Bonetti said. “That’s part of the reason to move that infrastructure north, so it’s not constantly being wiped out.”
Esther Chapman, a volunteer at the Chincoteague Chamber of Commerce, worries about potential flooding but remains optimistic. The town hasn’t experienced a severe flood since 1962, when a violent nor’easter caused 90 percent of Chincoteague to flood and decimated the town’s chicken industry, killing over 350,000 birds. Chapman says the town has been fortunate, but she’s noticed some residents preparing for the worst in recent years. Newcomers are elevating their homes, but many elderly residents who have lived at Chincoteague for decades can’t afford to rebuild. “The beach protects us. That’s why we keep hoping they’ll continue to keep it up,” Chapman said of the beach relocation plan. “If we had a severe storm without that beach, we’d be in bad shape here.”
After undergoing a lengthy review process and taking Chincoteague residents’ concerns into account, federal agencies ultimately decided to proceed with the beach relocation. Although they are sympathetic to the plight of the locals, there is little the NPS and the FWS can do to protect the town from the effects of climate change in the long run. Trying to fortify the beach in order to spare Chincoteague some of the worst effects of inevitable storm surges is as futile as trying to protect a sand castle against massive waves. “If you’re building a sand castle on the beach, and the tide’s coming in, you can put your hand right in front of your castle,” Bonetti said. “But everything’s just going to go around it as the water comes in.”