Tybee Island secures funding to replenish beach sand

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between WABE and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.

Tybee Island has secured federal funding to replenish its beaches with sand after being denied the money earlier this year. Local officials say the beach renourishment project is critical for a rapidly-eroding beach.

Barrier islands like Tybee should naturally accumulate sand from islands farther north; it’s called the sand-sharing system. But human activity — development on the island, building sea walls and jetties, creating shipping channels — has disrupted that process. As a result, Georgia’s barrier islands are constantly losing sand, and the beaches are constantly being washed away by the relentless tide.

To address the problem, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has, since the 1970s, been dredging up sand and depositing it onto beaches up and down the East Coast. 

On Tybee, which sits just south of the mouth of the Savannah River, the natural sand-sharing is further interrupted by the shipping channel that cuts between Tybee and its island neighbors to the north. The Corps typically replenishes sand there every seven years. But that cycle was nearly interrupted this year –  creating concerns for Tybee businesses, beachgoers and wildlife.

In the winter of 2019 and 2020, the Corps placed 1.3 million cubic yards of sand on the Tybee Island beach. More than half of that sand is gone now. On one stretch near the DeSoto Beach Hotel, the dune looks like it’s been chopped in half with a giant knife, ending in a five-foot cliff instead of a gradual slope.

“It’s extremely stark and startling to see up close and personal,” said city manager Bret Bell. “You can see the vegetation. It’s bisected in half. You can see the roots coming out of the dune system.”

It’s not just the dune grasses. In some places, the tide and storms have cut into sea turtle nests buried in the dune. 

Businesses are feeling the pinch too. The dramatic erosion has forced chair and umbrella rental operations off the beach in some places, Bell said, and the DeSoto has lost bookings due to the poor state of the beach in front of its doors. 

All told, the erosion puts the island itself — and the mainland — at risk. The sea level is rising about half an inch a year due to climate change.

“It is really our only protection against the encroaching oceans,” Bell said. “Storm surge would inundate our island if it weren’t for the mitigating effects of the beach and our dune system.”

Tybee Island is due for renourishment again this winter. Planning began when the last renourishment ended, Bell said, and the city of Tybee, Chatham County, and the state of Georgia have worked since then to set aside enough funds to cover 40% of the $20 million price tag — the required local match for the federal beach renourishment program. But Congress underfunded that program, according to Bell, and Tybee was left off the project list.

“All of a sudden, all of these beach communities started really competing for the limited amount of funding that there was,” he said.

City officials continued to lobby, residents launched a letter-writing campaign, and members of Georgia’s congressional delegation visited the island to see the stark beach erosion. 

Then, in September, came a development Bell called a “miracle”: Several beach nourishment projects in New Jersey came in under budget, so the Corps agreed to divert leftover funds to Tybee. Work is slated to begin this winter.

When it does, the Corps plans to try something new. When the agency dredges the Savannah River shipping channel, it will deposit that sand in the shallows off Tybee’s beach instead of pumping it farther offshore. The goal is to minimize the wave action that eats away at the beach and allow the sand to travel more like it naturally would without the interruption of the shipping channel.

“That really is expected to extend the life of our nourishment,” Bell said. “So instead of the next nourishment happening in seven years, it might be 10 years.”