North Cove -Washaway Beach
Erosion fighting at North Cove may spare road but not homes - January 15
By David Scheer - Daily World writer, The Aberdeen Daily World
North Cove - The jetty the state Department of Transportation built to save Highway 105 has been a good news-bad news story for residents of North Cove, who may still lose their property.
More than 80 people, most of whom live near Washaway Beach, packed a university-caliber lecture in the North Willapa Grange Hall Thursday night. They heard an update on the 1,000-foot rock jetty built to protect a vital link of the highway connecting Westport and Raymond.
The good news: A preliminary survey shows the sand-sucking currents that were eroding the beach and undermining the road are moving south, away from Highway 105, according to Vladimir Shepsis of Pacific International Engineering, the company paid to monitor the area.
Thanks to the state project, Pacific County most likely won't be "split" by the loss of the road, County Commissioner Pat Hamilton said.
Engineers hoped the jetty would also protect homes in the area.
Which brings us to the bad news: The jetty may not be successful in protecting the homes of many Washaway Beach property owners.
Early surveys show that since November, underwater erosion has been halted as far as 3,000 feet north of the jetty's outward-jutting groin of rock and underwater dike.
But for now, the protection tapers off about that far north, said Shepsis. Most of the Washaway Beach neighborhood, a couple thousand feet farther up the shore, remains outside the jetty's "shadow," the engineer said.
The engineers hope that will change in the next year or two, and as the new underwater system stabilizes and the channel reshapes, erosion at Washaway may slow or even stop, Shepsis said.
But it will still take a chunk of the neighborhood to fill in the gape offshore left by years of gutting currents, the engineer noted.
His English heavily accented by his Russian roots, Shepsis used hand gestures, an overhead projector and aerial photos to explain the complex nature of offshore currents and erosion.
On a relief map he used to indicate depths, a close-to-shore channel that eats the land showed up as a purple swath, purple being the color representing the deepest part of the chart. Intersecting it was the jetty, dwarfed by the trench.
"It looks like a Band-Aid put on a split artery," said Ed Andersson, a Washaway Beach resident who will likely lose his home to the erosion.
Andersson and Vicki Humbyrd sat in the front row. Only two seats separated them in the Grange Hall, but they were a world apart in how they took the news.
Several times, Andersson reminded speakers that the sea ate nearly two blocks of land near his house during a two-day storm after the jetty was completed.
He and his wife both deal with severe medical problems. Their home will be among the next to fall into the sea.
"Would you like to come to my house?" Andersson asked Shepsis. "I could push you a little, and you'd fall in."
Andersson also offered to give the engineer a really good deal on "oceanfront property."
But Humbyrd, the jetty's northern neighbor, will likely keep what's left of her property.
"See that first pasture there?" she asked, pointing to an aerial photo of North Cove. "That one is ours. It used to be bigger."
She and her husband Lonnie have roughly 15 acres of land left after losing five. Humbyrd grinned several times during the meeting as speakers detailed their results.
"I am optimistic," she said at her home this morning.
"We've lived here long enough that we know better than to get excited about what's happened in just one winter," she added. But because of the jetty, the Humbyrds will stick around a little longer to see if they can live at North Cove permanently.
"I think it's time to count our blessings," said Commissioner Hamilton.
"I'm not going to stand here before you and say that was the project I wanted," Hamilton said. But "we saved that highway. We are not going to separate the county."
Hamilton helped spearhead an intense countywide effort to protect the highway and Washaway neighborhood.
Originally, the North Cove jetty project was to be built in tandem with offshore dredging that would create a deep center channel. But the channel proposal was nixed by state resource agencies.
And a proposal to build two jetties - one at the highway and one closer to Washaway Beach - was impossible for funding reasons: The DOT could only dedicate money to save the road, for which the second jetty wasn't necessary.
The single-jetty project originally called for a 2,200-foot spit of rock.
But the fast-track project had to go through "every state and federal agency known to man," said Commissioner Hamilton. Getting clearance caused delays, including a six-month holdup sparked when the Army Corps of Engineers raised navigation issues.
Meantime, $32 million in state funding began to trickle away. The final project was to be 1,100 feet long, at a cost of $23.5 million. The dike was trimmed again by 90 feet, when engineers realized erosion had eaten more of the jetty's base before the construction could begin.
"It was very disappointing," Hamilton said.
In the end, speakers at the meeting still praised the DOT for "thinking outside the box" by undertaking the jetty construction, the department's first-ever offshore project.
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