To the Editor:
Two times this week, people mentioned the threatened road at the end of the seawall by Farm Pond, and suggested sea level rise is the problem. Nature is not the problem — the failure to remove the jetties of the long-gone harbor at Harthaven is the cause of the loss of the entire Harthaven Beach.
I had aerial photos of that beach back in the early ’70s. The circle that was cut into the beach had a radius equal to the length of the jetties. I have been watching it ever since.
Natural tidal action put Harthaven Beach where it was. This manmade obstruction to natural tidal flow, the harbor entrance and jetties, is the cause of the erosion that eliminated Harthaven Beach and will soon destroy the road. This problem was discussed 40-plus years ago, but nothing was ever done, because multiple government agencies and property owners could not decide on ownership and responsibility issues. Now the seawall and jetties form a funnel that is aiming and concentrating the forces of nature’s tides and waves on the low and narrow part of the road. In effect, we have a manmade bowling alley. It is important to note that today all of the stone in question is below mean low tide. Ownership is no longer an excuse.
This is another case of incredibly incompetent government that fails to measure the impacts of its actions until it becomes a big and, most important, expensive problem. If you wanted to destroy a road, lose a stream, lose a large tract of beach and make the repair as expensive as possible, you could not design a better system than to ignore an obvious and known manmade erosion problem for 45 years and blame it on Mother Nature. Poor lady tries, but she needs some co-operation.
The old jetties were the opening to the main harbor at Harthaven a long time ago. The channel and harbor were deep enough for decent-size sailboats. That large channel, though I have never been out there, is filled and surrounded with good-size stone caught by the structure. My guess is that it is a rock mine full of football- to basketball- and larger-size round rock, and the jetties themselves are large, very valuable, construction-size stone. This stone obstruction needs to be removed in order to stop diverting the natural tidal flow, and utilized to correct the natural tidal flow line from the Farm Pond culvert toward the jetties at the existing little harbor. If we then provided that entire shoreline, from the steamship to the seawall, with as much sand as possible, over time, nature would put Harthaven Beach back where it belongs.
The greatest failures of projects that affect natural balances is that people soon forget that part of the price of the project is to maintain, or compensate for, the impact on the natural system being altered. The old-timers, the greatest generation, knew that when you create a harbor, you create beach erosion. That is why the little fingers were set along the beaches. Today we have dredges that can easily sit a little offshore and pump sand to the beach to maintain the shoreline. In Oak Bluffs it used to be a semi-regular event to dredge the harbor and channel and rebuild the beach. Today there is little sand on the shoreline from East Chop on down, so the harbor no longer fills in as often as it used to. We need to consider and debate the value of feeding natural tidal action with sand versus building steel bulkheads against natural elements. I hope building up the beach at the North Bluffs is part of the long-term plan, but the whole beach from the harbor to the seawall should be the goal.
Donald Muckerheide
Oak Bluffs
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