heart defects
Boom and busted.
In trying to untangle a mysterious herring collapse from the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, scientists in Prince William Sound are revealing just how resilient—and unpredictable—marine ecosystems can be.
On a cold day in June, Scott Pegau leans toward the passenger window of a Cessna floatplane and peers out at the teal waters of Prince William Sound. The glacier-rimmed pocket of seawater on the southern coast of Alaska is protected from the open ocean by a string of rugged islands. It is both moody and alluring. Clouds dally on the snowy peaks and fray against the forested hillsides. The sea is flat and frigid, except for a single row of waves lapping at the rocky shore.
Pegau aims his gaze at the shallow waters behind the breakers. After a few minutes of searching, above a deep bay on one of the outer islands, he finally spots what he’s looking for: a school of juvenile herring. Pegau can distinguish them from other schooling species by the unique way they sparkle—an effect produced by sunlight playing off their silver flanks as the fish bank and roll. Try as I might, I can’t make out any twinkling, just the inky splotch of a few tons of small fish swarming below the surface.
“Small H1,” Pegau says into the headset microphone, tucked snugly under his thick, grey mustache. That’s code for a small school of one-year-old herring. He enters the location on his computer; huddled in the back seat, I make a tick mark on the backup tally. It’s the first of dozens of schools we’ll see on our flight.
Pegau conducts these surveys every year in hopes of understanding what’s in store for the herring population in Prince William Sound. The fish mature and begin to join the spawning stock at the age of three, so the counts give scientists and managers a clue about how many adults may be coming up the pipeline. Researchers and fishers alike always hope the answer will be many. But every year for the past quarter century, they have been disappointed.
The herring population in Prince William Sound crashed in 1993, just 4 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill released 11 million gallons of crude into these waters. The collapse put an end to an $8-million-dollar-a-year fishery, and left a hole in the middle of the marine food web. Scientists have spent years trying to understand if and how the spill played a role in the herring’s demise here, and the results have been hotly contested. All of the legal proceedings finally closed in 2015, with herring listed as an impacted species but with most herring fishers feeling poorly compensated.
Even more concerning is the fact that, unlike most species hit by the spill, the herring haven’t bounced back over the decades since. Populations of forage fish are known to boom and bust, so most scientists thought it was only a matter of time before they rebounded. But 25 years later, there’s still no sign of recovery on the horizon.
“There’s definitely a possibility that the ecosystem went through a tipping point,” says Pegau, who coordinates the herring program at the Prince William Sound Science Center, an independent research institute whose work is funded in part by money from the spill settlement. A host of factors, which scientists are still trying to untangle, could be to blame, from hungry whales to virulent disease. “There’s no one thing that’s keeping them down,” Pegau says. “I think pretty much everyone is convinced of that.”
The herring mystery is a maddeningly concrete example of the often-abstract interconnectedness of nature, which frequently gives ecosystems their resilience, but can sometimes make them rebellious. If jolted a particular way—for instance, by a human-caused disaster or an environmental shift—an ecosystem may not revert to its original state. Instead it may settle into a new normal, leaving both the organisms and economies that rely on it reeling.
But the herring in Prince William Sound may also hold clues to long-standing questions about why ecosystems change, and how they cause fish populations to flourish or founder. After 25 years of research, scientists have collected reams of data on the herring, and half a dozen hypotheses to explain their plight. The data have yet to reveal satisfying answers, but what researchers learn about ecological resilience—and the true value of a species—could have ramifications well beyond Alaska’s shores.
After a few hours of surveying, the floatplane splashes down in Eyak Lake, which fills the Y-shaped valley separating Cordova from the looming peaks of the Chugach Mountains. “We survived another one,” jokes the pilot, as we taxi to a floating dock and unload. Pegau makes plans to fly again the next day, and we climb into the well-worn seats of his white F-250 for the short drive back to town.
Cordova is a no-frills community on the far eastern edge of Prince William Sound that has weathered its share of ups and downs. It was established in 1906 as the seaport from which to ship vast quantities of copper mined in Kennecott, 200 miles inland. When the mine closed in 1938, Cordova fell back on its reputation as the self-proclaimed razor clam capital of the world. But that industry went belly up on March 27, 1964—Good Friday—after a magnitude 9.2 earthquake heaved the clam beds 2 meters (6 feet) above sea level.
That left fishing and canning as the main games in town. Both revolved around salmon and herring. While the much smaller herring rarely exceed 25 centimeters (10 inches) in length, they are prized for their roe, as well as for food and bait.
But in 1989, again on Good Friday, the Exxon Valdez oil spill cast the town’s future into question once again. Many residents considered it the worst blow yet. “There’s a natural disaster, and there’s a manmade disaster,” says Sylvia Lange, a Cordova native and longtime fisher who now runs a local hotel. She has experienced both kinds of catastrophes in her life, and the two, she says, feel completely different.
The ecological impacts of the spill, by now, are legend. Despite the efforts of thousands of response workers, wildlife including sea birds and otters perished in droves. The financial impacts followed swiftly too. The cleanup effort provided some business, but tourism lagged and managers closed fisheries until they knew how the spill had affected fish populations. Meanwhile, for unrelated reasons, the price of pink salmon tanked. “Cordova was in a deep, deep depression,” Lange says, “not only psychologically but economically.”
At first, it seemed like the herring made it out unscathed. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game reopened the fishery in 1990, and in the two years that followed, herring fishers had some of their best seasons on record. But when the spring of 1993 rolled around, the herring all but disappeared. The population dropped from more than 100,000 metric tons (110,000 U.S. tons) to less than 30,000 (33,000 U.S. tons).
The crash devastated a community still coping with disaster. John Renner, a long-time Cordova fisher and chairman of the herring division at Cordova District Fishermen United, says the spring herring roe harvest was a staple of Cordova’s economy. “The whole town depended on it for the first shot of revenue of the season,” Renner says “People paid their taxes, got out of debt, that type of stuff.” For many, it was a big part of their livelihood; Renner once made a quarter of his annual income off of herring roe, and just talking about the collapse still makes him angry. A draft report commissioned by the science center estimates that, in total, losing the herring has cost Cordova almost $200 million and the region nearly $1 billion.
The passage of time has done little to settle questions about what caused the herring crash. Initially, many scientists doubted whether the oil spill could have caused a decline four years later. Some early studies also suggested the impact of the oil was minimal, including those by Walt Pearson, then a fisheries biologist with Battelle Marine Sciences Laboratory whose work was funded by Exxon. Pearson’s research found that adult herring could only have been exposed to low levels of oil for a short window of time, and that there had been little overlap between oiled beaches and herring spawning grounds. “The effects were quite localized,” Pearson says. He concluded that the biggest factor contributing to the crash was that there were too many herring and not enough food, due to a natural shift in ocean conditions.
Many fishers didn’t buy that. “Anyone with half a brain would figure out it was oil,” says Jerry McCune, president of Cordova District Fishermen United, a union-turned-non-profit advocacy organization. The herring spawn occurred just weeks after the spill, and McCune, Renner, and others think that the oil devastated the cohort of herring born in 1989. They say the failure of those fish to show up in 1993 accounted for the collapse.
But survey data collected during the crash suggest that it affected fish of all ages, says Pegau, not just the young ones. And a recent statistical analysis found little evidence for any direct impacts of the spill. Instead, Pegau and others think that if the oil did play a role in the collapse, it probably did so by weakening the herring, or the food sources upon which they depend, making it easier for something else to do them in.
The prime suspect, in Pegau’s estimation, is a disease called viral hemorrhagic septicemia (VHS). While there was no official monitoring program then, fishers and scientists saw signs of VHS in 1993. “It can take a population down in a real big hurry,” Pegau says. As the name implies, fish with VHS hemorrhage and can die from organ failure. The disease spreads quickly through herring’s dense schools or when fishers corral them into an enclosure to harvest their spawn, as local fishers were doing around the time of the spill. Some researchers think that this practice, called pounding, combined with the high herring numbers before the crash, contributed to a deadly outbreak of VHS.
But the risk of an outbreak could have been exacerbated by the spill, too. Fish embryos that don’t die when exposed to oil may carry genetic scars, particularly in something called the aryl hydrocarbon receptor gene. “It turns out that that gene gets completely knocked out among survivors,” says Paul Hershberger, a disease ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. And compromising that gene may weaken the immune system in fish, potentially making them more susceptible to disease. Hershberger’s colleagues have demonstrated this effect in Atlantic killifish, and now, his team is testing it in herring.
Exposing herring embryos to oil may also cause them to develop heart defects that put them at a general disadvantage. They can’t swim as fast or as long, which makes them more likely to get eaten, says John Incardona, a toxicologist at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center and lead author of a study on this subject published in 2015. In lab experiments, Incardona has found that developmental effects occur even when herring embryos encounter levels of pollution far below what is generally considered harmful. “We think all of us are way underestimating what the initial injury was to herring,” he says.
Richard Thorne, a fisheries scientist who recently retired from the Prince William Sound Science Center, takes issue with the idea of a delayed collapse altogether. Evidence that the herring population remained high until the 1993 crash came from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s population estimates, which are based on the stock assessment models the state uses to manage its fisheries responsibly and set sustainable harvests. But in 1993, Thorne started conducting acoustic surveys of the herring population, and realized his numbers lined up best with a different set of data collected by Fish and Game: observations of how many miles of shoreline were covered in herring spawn. Looking back at this pre-crash spawning record, Thorne came up with an alternative population history, which suggested that herring numbers started falling immediately after the spill. He thinks the fish died from ingesting oil and that the collapse, if there was one, resulted from allowing fishers to harvest a herring stock in the early '90s that managers didn’t yet realize was already declining.
Pegau, for one, doesn’t think scientists will ever know what actually transpired. “We’ll never be able to say one way or the other because no one was collecting data when it happened,” Pegau says. And frankly, he doesn’t really care what caused the initial collapse. The more pressing question, Pegau says, is why the herring haven’t come back.
I meet John Platt on a floating dock in the old harbor, and the first thing he says as he shakes my hand is, “Why are we still talking about herring 25 years later?” Platt is a third-generation Cordova fisher with a leathery face and the gnarled physique of a former wrestler. And he’s being coy; we both know the answer to his question.
Platt used to fish for herring, collecting them using a type of net called a purse seine to harvest roe. He gamely drives me out to see the net, which he stores 10 minutes outside of town and which is—as far as I can tell—the only piece of herring gear left in all of Cordova. “I always thought they would come back,” he says. We pull up to a rusted white pickup truck overgrown by weeds and Platt gestures toward the sorry sight before us. “This basically sums up the herring fishery.” He gets out and starts to unwrap a battered blue tarp covering a lumpy mass on the truck’s flatbed, He finally tugs free a loop of black mesh for me to see. The net—which cost about $20,000 new—still looks good decades later. After all, it’s hardly been used.
Like many, Platt was nearly destroyed by the herring collapse. Commercial fishing permits in Alaska are traded like stocks; the state issues a limited number, and fishers buy and sell them at prices that generally reflect the value of the fishery. And the seine fishery was a high-stakes gamble. Herring roe was a hot commodity and fishers like Platt jockeyed for position near schools of herring so they could scoop them up when the fishery opened, sometimes only for an adrenaline-filled 15-minute window. Before the crash, when Platt bought his seine permit, the going price was nearly a quarter of a million dollars. Today, the same permit is worth just $31,000.
Some note that’s remarkably high, given that the roe market has deflated and there have only been two modest herring harvests in Prince William Sound since the crash, in 1997 and 1998, when managers thought the fish might be making a comeback. But the permit’s unsinkable value is of little use to people like Platt, who purchased his permit with a loan from the state, and struggled to make the payments—and pay taxes—without any fish to catch. In total, those who held permits for herring in Prince William Sound took a $50 to $60 million-dollar hit in lost permit values, according to a recent economic analysis.
Platt got paid by Exxon for working on the cleanup effort immediately after the spill, but that money went straight into paying off boats and gear. To settle his permit debt, Platt ultimately had to sell off his salmon boat and turn over the payout from a class-action lawsuit against the company, which, after going before the Supreme Court in 2008, came in at a fraction of the original award. For many, though, it was too little, too late; the loss of the herring had already taken its toll. “It caused divorces, ruin, a few people killed themselves,” Platt says.
Like many, Platt thought the failure of the herring to recover might be grounds for reopening the 1991 settlement between the government and Exxon, (now ExxonMobil), which closed before the herring crashed. The settlement included $900 million in payments, in addition to criminal fines, and a clause that would make an additional $100 million dollars available for long-term impacts that weren’t considered in the original agreement. “This is textbook what it was for,” Platt says.
In 2006, government lawyers did launch an effort to file a claim under the reopener, but it was later aborted. Moreover, the claim made no mention of herring. “It’s maddening,” Platt says. But Pegau thinks there was a simple reason: Linking the fish’s poor recovery to the spill would have been a hard case to make.
Traces of oil still remain in Prince William Sound, buried a few feet in the sediment among beach pebbles and sand, but most scientists say it has little ecological impact on herring today. Indeed, if the spill had any role in the fish’s demise, it was by helping to knock the population off a cliff in the first place. Other forces have now taken over and seem to be holding the herring down. And they don’t seem to be letting up. In 2015, after what seemed like a few promising years, the herring population dropped again to around 8,000 metric tons (8,800 U.S. tons)—less than half of what it was after the crash in 1993.
“I think the system reset itself,” says Ron Heintz, a nutritional ecologist in Juneau with NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center. “We ended up in a new state that apparently doesn’t include herring.”
One factor at play is predation. Forage fish, by definition, get eaten, and herring are no exception. “It’s a critical food resource,” says Mary Anne Bishop, an ecologist at the Prince William Sound Science Center. She describes the spring spawn as a frenzied feast when the herring turn coastal waters white with eggs—each female releases about 20,000 of them each year. “It’s the whales, it’s the sea lions, the harbor seals, all the birds coming in,” she says. Predation doesn’t stop as herring age, either; dozens of species consume them throughout their life cycle.
While there may have been enough herring to fill bellies and nets when the fish were plentiful, they may now be trapped in what scientists call a “predator pit.” After everyone has had their fill, there simply aren’t enough fish left for the herring population to climb out of the hole. More young adults join the spawning stock each year, but not enough to outweigh the number being eaten.
There’s debate about which animals are doing the most damage, but humpback whales are a possible culprit. Their numbers have quintupled in Prince William Sound in recent decades as the gentle giants have recovered from whaling. Scientists say the whales here have learned to specialize in herring, sometimes banding together to trap the fish in “bubble nets” before taking turns gulping them down en masse. Studies suggest humpbacks may consume 20 to 75 percent of the spawning herring population each year—the equivalent of the fishers’ historic share and then some.
Other scientists, including Pearson, have suggested that salmon hatcheries may bear much of the blame. Starting in the late 1970s, managers began releasing hatchery-raised pink salmon into the sound, and in the 1980s, they began to ramp up the numbers. Researchers have hypothesized that young salmon may eat or compete with juvenile herring for food, while older salmon returning from the sea may eat herring of all ages.
It also appears that the herring in Prince William Sound continue to see diseases like VHS more than their neighbors. Hershberger developed a test to detect whether fish have recently encountered disease, and found consistently higher levels of exposure in Prince William Sound than in Sitka, 450 miles to the southeast. Some wonder whether, as Platt puts it, the herring here are “wimpy” because of some lingering epigenetic effect of the spill that has been passed down from generation to generation. Hershberger says no one has tested that yet. “At this point, all we can do is speculate.”
Factors like predation, competition, and disease can limit populations from the top down. But that’s only half of the story: There has also been a low supply of young herring. Researchers call this poor recruitment, and they suspect it’s the result of environmental factors limiting the population from the bottom up.
For the herring to recover, they need a few big years in close succession to overwhelm the demands of predation and escape the threat of disease. But that hasn’t happened in a long time, Pegau says. “It’s been 25 years of bad luck.” He points to sweeping natural changes in the North Pacific in 1989—the same year as the spill—as a potential turning point. The exact nature of the shift was complicated, with some parts of the ocean warming and others cooling, but the impact on marine organisms was pronounced. Across the Gulf of Alaska, animals toward the bottom of the food web, like shrimp, crab, and herring have fared poorly since, while larger fish like halibut and cod have multiplied. This apparent contradiction continues to stump Pegau. “I have yet to figure out what in the world supports them,” he says of the thriving predators.
Much of the science center’s research looks at how oceanographic conditions affect herring in hopes of understanding why the tide has turned against them in recent decades. Among other things, that involves tracking where currents carry larvae, determining which environments young fish inhabit, and studying what controls the quantity and quality of food available to them as they store up energy to survive the harsh winter.
New research also suggests that herring recruitment may be linked to the amount of freshwater that pours into the Gulf of Alaska. High discharge years correlate with recruitment failures, says Eric Ward, a statistician at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center who led the study, published earlier this year. The mechanism, though still unclear, may have to do with how freshwater from rainfall and melting ice affects the strength and timing of the spring plankton bloom—the flurry of photosynthesis that kickstarts the entire ecosystem every year. In recent decades, there have been fewer years with extremely low runoff, which correlate with upticks in herring recruitment—what Ward calls “herring baby booms.” And as climate change melts glaciers and messes with rainfall patterns, the trend may continue.
These oceanographic factors may help explain why herring recruitment has also been weak in other parts of Alaska since the early 1990s. The reason places like Sitka still have a healthy herring fishery despite these changes, Pegau says, may simply be that the population there never crashed in the first place.
Scientists hope that figuring out what’s going on with herring will shed light on bigger questions about what fish need for successful recruitment—a problem that has stumped researchers for decades. Trevor Branch, a fisheries scientist at the University of Washington who studies the herring, says it’s possible that a whole host of things have to line up for successful recruitment: the right water temperatures, the right salinity, and abundant food, among them.
If scientists are to have any shot at figuring out how these fit together, they need lots of data collected over many years. And the research sparked by the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the subsequent herring crash have furnished just that. “If ever we were able to pinpoint something, it would be with Prince William Sound herring,” Branch says.
The day of my second flight with Pegau, the weather is sublime. We head across Prince William Sound to survey its far southwestern corner. A cruise ship glides beneath us, then a cluster of salmon seiners. The small skiffs that accompany them trace lazy circles on the surface, like ripples from giant raindrops, as they loop their nets around unsuspecting fish.
We officially begin the survey in a milky, ice-flecked fjord with a reclusive glacier tucked away at its head, and follow the coastline in and out of emerald bays. In the narrow passages between Evans, Elrington, and Latouche Islands, we spot school after school of herring, clustered along the rugged shoreline. In the afternoon light, I finally see them sparkle.
Nearly a hundred years ago, these were prime fishing grounds for an earlier incarnation of the herring fishery. Fishers caught huge quantities of herring, which were reduced for oil. For five consecutive years, they brought in in an average of 40,000 tons a year, Pegau says, marveling at the scale. Catch records show that those big hauls likely drove the herring to collapse, but remarkably, they appear to have recovered in the span of just 3 or 4 years. Pegau takes this as evidence that the herring in Prince William Sound have rallied back from the brink before, like others around the world.
John Trochta, one of Trevor Branch’s graduate students at the University of Washington, has analyzed more than 50 historical herring populations across the globe, most of which have collapsed at some point. He found that the majority rebounded within a decade, but there were a few exceptions where herring numbers remained low for at least twenty years after a crash. One is in Prince William Sound; another is off the coast of Japan and southeastern Russia. There, fishers once harvested nearly a million metric tons of fish per year from the legendary Hokkaido-Sakhalin stock. But by the 1930s, perhaps due to intense fishing pressure and oceanographic changes, the stock began to decline sharply, until, by 1955, there were hardly any fish left. It’s the only herring stock yet to come back after more than 60 years. No one knows whether the same fate awaits the herring in Prince William Sound.
On my final day in Cordova, I stop by Pegau’s office at the science center—a converted icehouse perched on stilts just inside the entrance to Cordova’s harbor. From Pegau’s second-story window, he has a clear view of the bustling docks and the mountains that stand guard over town. With this year’s survey nearly complete, I ask him how it looks. “This is probably the best year we’ve seen,” he admits. He saw a lot of schools, and the schools held a lot of fish. Still, he’s reluctant to wager whether that bodes well for herring. “I’ve felt optimistic in the past; now I’m a lot more reserved.”
There’s nothing Pegau can do to help the herring. There’s no fishery to manage or acute environmental stress to relieve. That’s not the way he sees his job anyway. His goal is to understand the vulnerability and value of the fish so that other scientists and managers around the world can be better equipped to do the same. Increasingly, he and others think that the answer lies in studying an ecosystem as a whole, and how an individual species like the herring fits in. And in that regard, he is more hopeful than ever. “It’s a great puzzle,” Pegau says, his dark eyes twinkling with excitement. “One of the real joys is to see how all those pieces fit together.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julia Rosen is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon. She writes about science and the environment for publications including Science, Nature, Orion, and High Country News, as well as many others. Follow her on Twitter @sciencejulia, and find more of her writing at www.julia-rosen.com.
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WildEarth Guardians
17 million in US live near active oil or gas wells.
More than 17 million people in the United States live within a mile of an active oil or natural gas well, according to a new study.
More than 17 million people in the United States live within a mile of an active oil or natural gas well, according to a new study.
The study is the first peer-reviewed, nationwide estimate of how many Americans live close to active wells and raises health concerns, as such proximity has been linked to heart, lung and brain problems, some cancers, and certain birth defects such as lower birth weights, pre-term births and heart defects.
"The closer you are to a well, the more likely you are to have health impacts, said Eliza Czolowski, lead author of the new study and an associate in the energy and environment program at PSE Health Energy, a nonprofit research institute in Oakland, California.
Using state-level information on oil and gas drilling and the U.S. Census, Czolowski and colleagues had data for 30 states and estimated that 17.6 million Americans, or about 6 percent of the population of the contiguous 48 states, lives within a mile of an active oil or gas well.
Perhaps most concerning for public health, about 1.4 million children under the age of 5 live within a mile of active wells.
"This study hammers home why we need federal and state safeguards against oil and gas air pollution like methane," said Bruce Baizel, energy program director at Earthworks, which was not involved in the study.
"Americans across the country are forced to live with oil and gas operations in their communities, literally right next door to their homes, their schools, their playgrounds," he added.
In West Virginia, about half of the state's roughly 1.8 million people live within a mile of an active well.
Oil and gas wells release pollutants—including particulate matter, benzene, nitrogen oxides, ozone, volatile organic carbons, carbon monoxide—to nearby air and water and have been linked to a host of health problems in people living nearby.
The study, published today in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, compared states and found Texas, Ohio, California, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania all have more than 1 million of their residents living within a mile of wells.
West Virginia and Oklahoma had, by far, the highest percentages of their populations near wells.In West Virginia, about half of the state’s roughly 1.8 million people live within a mile of an active well. Oklahoma was second with about 47 percent.The next highest state was Ohio with 24 percent.
Texas had the highest number of people living within a mile of an active well at 4.5 million people.
There are no federal regulations for buffer distances between active wells and people's homes, Czolowski said.
Many states have their own setback requirements, she said. A 2013 study found that among 31 states with current shale gas production, 20 required the wells be sited certain distances from nearby homes. The setbacks range from 100 feet to 1,000 feet.
Scientists have for the most part concluded that the closer people are to active wells, the more likely they are to experience health impacts, Czolowski said.
"There is definitely the chance for impacts living within a mile," she said.
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Eric Gross/flickr
Disappearing beaches.
The forces chewing away at the nation’s beaches are only getting worse as climate change fuels rising seas.
Tom and Jennifer Erichsen bought their family an oceanfront home on Nantucket, Massachusetts, 34 years ago.
They were charmed by the sense of community on the small island — and because they loved raising their kids amid so much nature. A decade later, the whole family permanently moved into the gray-shingled 1 1/2 story house that they had named Sea Shell.
The whole family would gather at the home, at 34 Rhode Island Avenue, after work and school to head out on adventures along the beach. They’d take their boat out to check on lobster traps and spend all afternoon outdoors.
In the evenings, the family would watch the sunset. The house was right on the western edge of the island, and the vibrant blend of orange and pink light would envelope their home.
“It was very nice to raise them in such a natural place,” Tom Erichsen said.
But nature is what ultimately forced them from their idyllic home.
In 2008, after a series of storms battered the land that held up the home, the family was forced to move out.
When the Erichsens bought the house in 1982, it was situated behind a dune and about 500 feet from the water’s edge. There was always erosion, but Erichsen said, that increased ferociously over the past 10 years.
By the time the family fled the home, it was perched precariously above the crashing waves. The water that had been nearly two football fields away was now tearing through the first floor of their home.
Erichsen, 65, said he knew the situation had become dire "when you see waves that are 20 or 30 feet tall breaking on the beach and you’re standing on your deck about to evacuate, hoping your house will be there the next day."
"I left at 10 at night, and we thought when I returned in the morning, our home may not even be there," he said of that storm that forced him to pack it in.
The forces chewing away at the nation’s beaches are only getting worse as climate change fuels rising seas — not just in Nantucket but also in the Rockaways of New York and other oceanfront communities all along the East Coast of the United States that are being held together through a patchwork of federally funded programs that are inherently temporary.
It’s why places like Nantucket and the Rockaways — two very different communities facing different socioeconomic realities — have become battlegrounds for opposing views on how to stem the erosion: fighting nature head-on or trying to buy some time. And it’s why many of the beaches Americans will be flocking to this summer are disappearing under their feet.
Rob Young, a coastal geologist from the program for the study of developed shorelines at Western Carolina University, said "Coastal communities have to understand that any of the solutions that they’re thinking of to hold the beach in place for a little while are all temporary solutions."
NANTUCKET
When the Erichsens bought their Nantucket house, in the Smith Point neighborhood of Madaket in 1982, they consulted a resident scientist, who thought erosion would cause 5 to 10 feet of loss of their beachfront property every year.
The roughly 13,000 residents who live on the island full time are a tight-knit group. Those who live year round in Madaket — a roughly 350-home community where the vast majority are unoccupied until the summer months — are even closer.
"We really enjoyed the small community of Smith Point because we knew everyone. It was like when I grew up. Everyone knew everyone," Tom Erichsen said.
Storms and erosion are inevitable to some degree when you’re talking about life on an island off the Northeast Coast, facing the brunt of the Atlantic’s wrath.
At first, the damage wasn’t bad, and Erichsen said they lost a few feet in the fall storms, but the degree of loss got progressively worse and started reaching 50 to 70 feet per year.
"It really was a bad thing really quickly. From 1982 to 2000, we hardly lost anything, but from 2000 to 2005, there was this change," he said.
The day after the storm that forced them to evacuate their home, Erichsen said, he returned in the morning to find that 40 percent of the solid ground beneath his house was gone, or, as it’s known technically, undermined.
"We made a phone call to about two or three of our friends, and we ended up with about 18 to 20 people with pickup trucks out there, and that afternoon everyone was carrying everything out of the house — furniture, boxes, chandeliers. Then about six or eight football players [arrived] who carried out our refrigerator, our washer-dryer," he said.
Erichsen said that in the winters, his family was the only one living in Smith Point, so he and his wife would check on all the houses for any damage from winter winds and nor’easters.
"We would tell people if they didn’t hear from us, then everything was OK," he said.
Everything was not OK for them after that last big storm.
The house had to be moved to a plot of land the Erichsens bought in the middle of the island, and they now live in the same structure, but their view is of a dusty road and trees all around.
THE ROCKAWAYS
Winter storms are always a threat for Nantucket, but more deadly storms like Superstorm Sandy present bigger problems for other coastal communities like the working-class New York City neighborhood of the Rockaways, which is also grappling with the same double-pronged problem of sea level rise and erosion.
The long peninsula was a popular resort destination back in the late 1800s, and although it is having a resurgence with a strong surfing community, it is also home to a range of lower- to middle-class homes, with brick high-rise public housing units mixed in with bungalows and stand-alone multifamily homes.
In the Rockaways, it’s hard to say exactly how quickly the beaches are being eroded, because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been replenishing the sand there for about 80 years. The most recent figures, from the Army Corps for 1966 to 1988, estimated erosion rates along the western Rockaway Peninsula of about 2 feet per year and about 5 feet per year along the eastern peninsula.
Kathy Richardson is a 32-year-old single mother whose family home was lost in Hurricane Katrina a few years before she made the decision to move to New York. When Superstorm Sandy arrived, she was there waiting for it in the Rockaway home she inherited from her mother.
"I started hearing people say, 'Here comes the water, here comes the water.' It started rolling up the street," Richardson told ABC News.
When she started smelling the fires triggered by Sandy, she recalled thinking, "Here we go again. Fires and destruction. Water and destruction."
In the years since, Richardson and later her daughter, who was born in 2014, had all their belongings crammed into the second floor of the house as the whole first floor was ruined from the storm water.
It took three years and the help of charitable organizations to make the first floor habitable again.
The biggest reason she says she won’t be leaving the Rockaways anytime soon is her daughter Charleigh Jolene, who is nearly 2 years old and was born with a heart defect. Richardson wants to remain close to Charleigh Jolene’s doctors at New York University. Also, she says, this is home.
"Katrina prepared me for Sandy. Katrina made me a stronger person. Slowly, in time, I’ve started [realizing] that I don’t have control — to just go with the flow," she said.
Her family lived in a FEMA trailer after Hurricane Katrina, and her grandmother died from complications due to a stroke that she had when they were evacuating during that storm. Richardson is well aware of the risks.
"You have to be afraid of it," she said of the ocean, "because if you’re not afraid of it, you don’t have respect for it."
SOFT VERSUS HARD SOLUTIONS
When it comes to staving off coastal erosion and the impact of sea level rise, the generally accepted proposals fall in two categories: soft and hard solutions.
Soft solutions are considered more environmentally friendly, though they tend to offer less protection than their harder counterparts. Some examples are planting beach grass to hold down sand dunes and lining the shore with biodegradable jute bags, which capture wave energy but still allow sand to drift naturally along the coast. Beach nourishment programs, in which copious amounts of sand are dumped onto eroding shorelines, also qualify as soft solutions, despite the ecological damage caused by dredging and dumping sand in such vast quantities.
Hard solutions, like seawalls and plastic geotubes, offer more protection but can be catastrophic for local ecologies. Such structures disrupt the natural flow of sediment, on which sea life depends for habitat and nourishment. Plastic geotubes can be even deadlier when they are exposed to sunlight and become brittle, potentially leaking toxic plastics into the tide.
In the Rockaways, officials have turned to a combination of hard and soft solutions, inserting groins — wall-like structures that are built into the water and run perpendicularly from the beach — and frequently nourishing the beaches to hold the shoreline and protect nearby homes. In Nantucket, the community has come up with a hybrid model that uses geotubes and beach nourishment. But neither solution, say scientists, is a permanent or perfect one.
Almost 40 percent of Americans live in coastal communities with high population densities, all of which are either already trying to solve the impending problem or ignoring it for cost or other reasons, according to a 2010 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report.
Young, from Western Carolina University, said 95 percent of communities that are addressing the problem are turning to soft solutions like beach nourishment.
"Everybody’s building beaches, from Maine all the way around to Texas," he said.
But building beaches is expensive.
According to a database kept by Western Carolina University associated with the United States Geological Survey, there have been 36 instances of beach nourishment in the Rockaways since the 1930s, which have cost $253 million, adjusted to 2014 dollars.
They’re not the only ones racking up nine-figure beach nourishment bills. Ocean City, New Jersey, has accrued a nearly $183 million bill, and neighboring Atlantic City’s total is just over $121 million.
Florida has the highest beach nourishment bill of all states, with $2.17 billion covering the cost of 495 instances. New Jersey is No. 2, with $1.5 billion for 325 instances.
These figures are largely focused on federally or state-funded projects, in which most of the bill is footed by taxpayers who don’t live anywhere near the beach, according to Young.
Steve Ellis, the vice president of nonpartisan budget watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, said that roughly 65 percent of the initial cost of beach nourishment programs is paid by the federal government and then 50 to 65 percent of the maintenance and upkeep is federally covered.
"Long term, it’s not sustainable, either moneywise or sea-level-rise-wise or the-actual-finding-the-sand-wise for the beach replenishment," Ellis said.
Parts of Florida have run out of beach nourishment sources and have floated the possibility of buying sand from the Bahamas to use on Florida beaches.
FIGHTING FOR SURVIVAL
On Nantucket, residents are self-funding their solution.
Along the eastern side of the island, homeowners have banded together to come up with something of a hybrid fix for their disappearing beaches.
The Sconset Beach Preservation Fund pushed to install a stretch of geotubes along the toe of a 75-foot-high bluff, much to the chagrin of local environmentalists. But it also agreed to an extensive beach nourishment program, in which it piles 1,000 dump truck loads of sand on top of the geotubes every year.
The idea is that the waves and storms will take the sand from on top of the geotubes before taking the sand from the areas beneath them and from the bluff, staving off further erosion.
The bluff happens to host a stretch of homes with some of the best views on the island, situated along the only road that goes up to the historic Sankaty lighthouse.
Right now, there are 950 feet of geotubes that directly protect two homes. After striking a deal with the town, the group has secured permission to expand to 4,000 feet of geotubes in 2018, which would protect 27 homes.
Josh Posner, the current president of the SBPF, started visiting Nantucket with his family when he was 10 years old. He lives in Boston most of the year, but his family has been returning to the same home looking out over the Atlantic for more than 50 years. His home would be among those protected after the project expands.
"The idea that we’re just going to throw up our hands and say 'It’s Mother Nature’s will for us to be washed away under all circumstances' doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to us," Posner said in the backyard of his Nantucket home in 2015.
"For us, it’s very personal, because I’ve been in this house — it’s been in my family pretty much from the beginning, and we love it there," he said.
Another unusual aspect of the SBPF’s plan is that it is not taking any federal or state funding. The residents self-fund.
"We raise money, like a school," Posner said.
"Eventually, once we have expanded the project to the size that it needs to be … then we will put in place a regular legally binding system of cost-sharing, where all of the people that have been getting protection from erosion would be contributing to the construction and maintenance," he said.
Sarah Oktay has a Ph.D. in oceanography and worked on the island’s Conservation Commission for nine years. She was one of the most vocal opponents to the geotube project, arguing that by installing structures that act like a wall, you’re effectively giving up on the beach itself.
"This is an established scientific fact that if a seawall is built, the walkable beach in front of that will go away. When waves come in, they are going to take all the sand away and cause the beach to drop," she said.
"When you put a permanent hard structure, you are stopping erosion from occurring, but you’re also starving a down-drift beach of sand that would normally come from your beach. So it’s basically saying, ‘I’ve got mine. I’m going to keep this line in the sand. But if people want my sand, [they] won’t be getting that sand.’ So it’s a last resort," she said.
Oktay was not reappointed to the Conservation Commission in the summer of 2015, and she moved to Colorado to work at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in February. She remains unsold on the geotube projects and feels that coir or jute bags — which are similar to geotubes but are made of natural materials and break apart during storms — would be better alternatives.
"The jury’s still out on whether it’s going to slow erosion," Oktay said last month of the geotube project.
Posner believes that since the geotubes are stopping some sand that would naturally float back into the ocean, the SBPF’s commitment to dump 150 percent of that sand amount will substitute for the natural process.
Young, who has done environmental consulting in Nantucket, isn’t thrilled.
"Nantucket is a little bit different than some of the other places," he told ABC News, noting that "there’s a lot of room" there and residents "have the means to pretty much do whatever they want."
"We’ve always hoped and suggested that places like Nantucket are the best candidates for developing a model of how you might take a step back from the eroding bluff, from the eroding beach, rather than try and hold that eroding beach forever," Young said.
THE FUTURE
The test for Sconset will be if the erosion stops along the bluff and fewer houses have to be moved in coming years. But even Posner accepts that this is not a permanent solution.
"Forever is an awfully long time, but I think that this is probably a system that could very well work for the next 50 to 100 years. It’s not just buying a few years. It could really last a long time, but it’s really going to depend how much [the] sea level rises," he said.
The question of whether all this is sustainable is a question with which scientists, including James Hansen, a man considered either a climate change guru or alarmist, have been grappling.
Hansen, who was among the first to alert the world about global warming, set the scientific community abuzz when he released his latest report early last summer with more extreme sea level rise predictions — in terms of both speed and degree — than had been commonly accepted. The report was peer-reviewed and published in March.
Among Hansen and his co-authors’ fairly alarming predictions is that because of climbing global temperatures, due in part to increased carbon emissions and fossil fuel usage, ice sheets are melting at a quicker rate than previously.
The report says that sea levels will rise several meters in the next 50 to 150 years.
The independent scientific organization Climate Central has created interactive maps that help users visualize what that all means. Its map of the Rockaways makes it clear that with 2 meters (about 7 feet) of sea level rise, the peninsula will be all but gone and with 3 meters, it will be completely underwater.
All three New York City–area airports — JFK, LaGuardia and Newark — will be all but gone as well. Miami, New Orleans and Charleston will be underwater at that point, along with sizable portions of Boston and Philadelphia.
Klaus Jacob, a geophysicist at Columbia University’s Lemont Earth Observatory, fully expects there to be 6 feet of sea level rise by 2100.
"That is a considerable sea level rise that is comparable with the flood surge from [Superstorm] Sandy," he said. “So you can get a feeling for what that means, that a permanent solution day to day looks like what we saw more or less during Sandy."
All the scientists consulted for this article agreed that the outlook for sea level rise and threats to coastal communities is not going to improve.
"Every coastal erosion issue that we have today is only going to get worse in the future, not better," said Young.
"The hard reality is that even if we were to wrap the Rockaways in a seawall, it’s still fairly low elevation, and with sea level rising on both sides … it’s not going to be the kind of place that people are likely going to be living in in 100 years from now in the same fashion that they are right now. That’s a hard reality to envision," he added.
"It’s not about abandoning the coast. It’s about living within the reality of these dynamic shorelines in a way that makes sense," he said. "And it’s about realizing that we cannot hold every single shoreline in place forever."
Additional Credits
Executive Producer DAN SILVER
Managing Editor XANA O'NEILL
Supervising Producer RONNIE POLIDORO
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