Investigation · August 2, 2025
The Vanishing Coastline
Erosion is a fact of geology. The speed of this one is a fact of policy.
14 min read
The first house went over the bluff in a night storm. The second was taken apart and moved inland on a flatbed. The third is still for sale.
TRACE compared sixty years of shoreline surveys against recent permitting for hard armor — seawalls, riprap, and groynes that protect one parcel by starving the next. The pattern is familiar to every coastal geologist we interviewed and invisible in most of the public notices.
What looks like a natural disaster from the beach is, in the records, a sequence of exemptions. We published the maps, the exemptions, and the names of the boards that signed them.
The sea will not read this story. The people who still live on the bluff might. That is enough reason to file it.
