Ocean Shores erosion threatens homes, infrastructure

I want to bring back in some of this footage that our crew was able to get earlier today. I mean, the long story here is that for a long time, you weren't actually able to put these types of boulders down. Thank There was some reasons behind it, why you weren't able to do that, but they've changed that. There's an emergency. that has been declared storm driven waves lots of water eroding the shoreline now you've got homes that are at risk but you also have public infrastructure further up we're talking one you. million gallon water reservoir there's a pump station there sewer line so this could get pretty ugly if they can't fight off mother nature here in the short term so the city's urged people Including visitors, so if you want to get a looky-loo here, best do it on TV to stay away from the area that's been affected because there are a number of places where the embankment close to that water is getting unstable, so they're worried that somebody could hurt themselves trying to see all this up close. You'll notice we actually didn't go too close ourselves. Instead, we used a drone so we could kind of see some of the work that's going on here. The place that's getting the most damage And again, this is a thing that's been unfolding for a long time, but it's really starting to impact them now. It's going to be Marine View Drive, Neptune Way, Mariner Court, and Peninsula Court. Again, this is decades-long issues. You've got a jetty offshore, high sea waves, tidal surges, all sorts of things that make stabilization concerning. A little bit difficult to pull off here. We got a chance to catch up with Scott Anderson from the City of Ocean Shores earlier today. Let's check in to see what he is seeing on the ground. Well, the problem, of course, is the Pacific Ocean, and it's a little more complicated. There's a remnant jetty structure out there that was built by the Army Corps of Engineers. And that's, just over time, dilapidated, and it's dilapidated to such an extent now that this area of the Pacific Ocean is punching us straight on. It's just coming straight at us. We have some really valuable city infrastructure just on the other side of this road. We have a million-gallon water tank. We have our sewer plant equipment, a whole host of things that are out there. And it's a state of emergency. It's been eroding for some time, but in the last two years, it's gotten really bad. But with a series of king tides coming in. In November and another series of king tides coming in in December, we know this is going to take a direct hit from the Pacific Ocean. It's got its own agenda, and we're just doing everything we can to save our shoreline. I can say this, the good news for the city of Ocean Shores right now is the regulatory agencies have finally gotten to a point where they will allow us to use the hard armor. That's that big rock that you're seeing out there. We were denied for using that for several years. I mean, they wanted nature-based solutions, and while that makes sense, there's a lot of places that nature-based solutions will work. Unfortunately, this is just not one of them. It comes at us straight on when we have these southeast winds, and only hard armor is going to protect that. That's a lot of the time. Yeah, yeah. It is a lot of the time, but, you know, in the winter when the king tides get here and the seawater rises, and, of course, you see what's going on on the Oregon coast, the California coast, it's no different than what's impacting us here. We're fighting the same battle against Mother Nature right now. This has been going on a long time, but you guys finally got permission to report on it. Yeah, exactly. Well, we've been working on it for two years, and we've been using cobble. They really wanted us to try to use a sort of small rock-based solution. And like I said, there's a lot of places on the coastline or on Puget Sound where that might work. This is not one of those places. There used to be a place just literally like 300, 400 yards down the road from here that was called Damon Point. It's now Damon Island. It's completely gone. It was one of the most popular beaches we had in the city. It's been simply pushed out into the bay and it will reformulate at some point because the sands tend to do that here. But we are on a sandbar in the Pacific Ocean and we need all the help we can get right now. We're bringing in some more coastal engineers. We're going to bring in one today. Ideally, we would expand it. We'd have to expand it to the west end of the city because there is a vortex station down there that belongs to the FAA. And there are other homes that are adjacent to the Ojai Wildlife Preserve, which is Fish and Wildlife's jurisdiction. But they will also be at risk. All those structures will be at risk if we don't expand it with hard armoring. And I'm just really grateful that we can finally do that now. I saw the press release. It sounded like it was really an emergency. It's definitely serious if you live down here, and the one thing we cannot have is our saltwater from the Pacific Ocean breaching our fresh waterways. These are just across the road. That'll change our whole ecosystem here if we get saltwater pouring into our fresh waterways. So it is serious. It's clearly not all of ocean shores, but the problem is this is our sort of, we have one more line of defense against this, and we really just don't want to lose this one. We had the opportunity to sort of... Build right here, we would have lost all these homes so obviously that's not good and then you can't retreat from there. So we need something where at least we can put up enough hard armor that we won't have to pull that retreat and move back. What's the future for this project? I'm hoping that we, if we hard armor it, this should last. We should be able to save this area. I'm a real big believer in that. It's just we've been, until we've been able to take this solution and get this in place, we've been sort of stuck. I don't think you've got enough proof. There was a problem with the picture. Well, you know, in fact, I don't know if you know this, but Fox has actually covered this a couple of times. And they've they've said that themselves. We've we've brought them down here before and they're like, we're going to need to get something more than just cobble. We've known that our engineers have known that. And now we're finally able to do that. It's kind of a win. It's a win if it holds. Let's put it that way. Absolutely.