3 inlet beaches are most eroded in Charleston - Lake Wylie Pilot

Thank you for using rssforward.com! This service has been made possible by all our customers. In order to provide a sustainable, best of the breed RSS to Email experience, we've chosen to keep this as a paid subscription service. If you are satisfied with your free trial, please sign-up today. Subscriptions without a plan would soon be removed. Thank you!

CHARLESTON, S.C. -- 

The inlet beaches on Isle of Palms, Sullivan's Island and Folly Beach are considered the "most critically eroded" Charleston-area beaches, South Carolina environmental officials say.

The state office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management says those beaches raise the most concern, according to The Post and Courier of Charleston (http://bit.ly/nwBpNq). The more central beaches on all three islands still have dunes and are in relatively good shape to withstand a storm, said Dan Burger of OCRM.

Most of the damage this season came from one storm, Hurricane Irene, which passed off the South Carolina coast. But the hurricane season is at its peak now. It was 22 years ago Saturday that Hurricane Hugo became a named storm, eventually making landfall north of Charleston and causing catastrophic damage.

"We don't need to receive a direct hit to do a lot of damage to the beach," Burger said. "By their very nature, the ends of barrier islands, or their inlets, are much more vulnerable."

At Folly Beach, which is getting an emergency renourishment with "trucked-in" sand, the concern is keen. Each new storm could take out more of the remaining dune wall.

"If we get two or three more close calls, our dunes are going to keep disappearing. It's not a good scenario," said Mayor Tim Goodwin. At either end of the island, "there's nothing there to block the water, so the more storms we get, the further back the erosion will go."

The town last renourished its five miles of beach with a $12 million project in 2005.

On Sullivan's, at least one of a few property owners with the tide wash problem has applied for an emergency permit to renourish, town administrator Andy Benke said. That island, except for Breach Inlet, has largely been gaining sand.

At Wild Dunes, "they have sand, but the waves are very close," Burger said. That inlet stretch of Isle of Palms last was renourished with a $10 million project in 2008, after two years of legal arm-wrestling between owners and state regulators, and after tens of thousands of sandbags washed away in storm tides, littering the coast and marshes for miles.

Last year, the city already was shoring up "hot spots" on the stretch.