How Rhode Island is Attempting to Stem the Tide

Photograph via Getty Images/Patrick Lienin.

The Atlantic was a lovely blue-green  on a March morning, and the waves broke at a safe distance from the stub of Walter and Jane Pawelkiewicz’s backyard. This is how the couple thought it would be when they bought a retirement home on the lip of a barrier beach in Misquamicut — the water a backdrop against walks along the shoreline, front-row seats to spectacular sunsets and uninterrupted views of Block Island and Montauk, New York.

It took a decade of permitting and construction to transform the small white fishing cottage into a four-story home, lording over the ocean on one side and Winnapaug Pond on the other. They knew “occasionally there could be a hurricane,” says Jane Pawelkiewicz. “But we never counted on these winter storms.” 

In December 2023 and January 2024 there were several of them, but one January event stands out. A series of ferocious systems delivering heavy snow, flood-producing rains and strong winds swept the country over nine days. In the past, the storms occurred at night, when the Pawelkiewiczes could only hear the mayhem on the other side of their bedroom slider. This one hit Rhode Island around lunchtime.

“In the morning, it was just raining,” she recalls. “Then the wind picked up like crazy. It was just so loud. The wind, the waves roaring — roaring like a jet engine. I have this recurring nightmare that a wave is going to come up over the top deck, and it almost came true. The waves came halfway up the dune and then it would splash up on the decks and the windows. It was frightening. The wind blew so hard that it piled the sand up all across the back of the house on the ocean side, and created a berm. The ocean breached the dune, and there was a river running down both sides of the house.”

The storm ripped away the wooden staircase that led to the beach and sent it west. It plucked a forty-foot wooden telephone pole with an umbrella top right out of the sand. 

“The winds and the waves were pounding for days and they just ate the dune. It’s about twenty-five feet shorter than it was,” Jane says.

Rhode Island’s beaches were created in the Pleistocene Epoch, when the glaciers that covered the state melted. The sand and gravel deposits they left have become community assets as tourist destinations and robust sources of property taxes. But they are fragile treasures, and they are disappearing.

In April 2024, the state House of Representatives created a nine-member study commission headed by the resolution’s sponsor, Representative Samuel A. Azzinaro (D-37, Westerly) to recommend remedies to stop beach erosion in Rhode Island. The group heard presentations on constructing artificial offshore reefs, planting kelp, dredging and other strategies, but had not reached any conclusions about their costs or benefits, or how the state would pay for them. This April, the commission recommended Rhode Island pursue a beach nourishment solution, via federal and state channels. It suggested municipalities could use beach parking revenue to fund such efforts, and that the state should invest in further in-depth studies.

“We’re not going to beat Mother Nature,” says Azzinaro. “But we’ve got to come up with a plan to restore the sand to our beaches.”

Rhode Island’s Atlantic coastline is a narrow string of spits, headlands and barrier beaches fronting salt ponds. In the typical seasonal cycle, winter storms pull the sand off the beach and the gentler summer waves carry it back. But new storm patterns and accelerated sea-level rise caused by climate change have tipped the balance, experts say. In the last two decades, the annualized rate of erosion has been about two feet a year. But the beach actually disappears in large chunks, punctuated by long periods of stability. Hurricane Sandy in 2012 took up to twenty to forty feet of beach and dunes in some areas of the state and the winter storms of 2023–2024 took another twenty to forty feet. 

“One of the main issues is that we don’t have a consistent sediment source that provides new material for these beaches — material flowing in through rivers or through erosion of other large areas, such as bluffs,” says Nathan Vinhateiro, associate research professor and science director at the University of Rhode Island Coastal Institute. “So, in the absence of any sort of human intervention, like beach nourishment, the beaches respond to sea level rise by migrating landward. The entire south shore is retreating.” 

In the mid-twentieth century, there was a strong push to protect coastal assets with hard structures, such as rip-rap barriers and seawalls, says Emily Hall, a coastal geologist with the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council. But in 1971, CRMC prohibited the practice, except for specific purposes — such as holding open a transportation channel or protecting vital public infrastructure such as sewers and roads.

“As soon as you put in a wall or a revetment, everything else migrates around it,” Hall says. “So, you are increasing the erosion immediately in front of the structure and to the neighboring properties, and you’re left with these sore thumbs sticking out from the coastline.” 

Today, officials promote nature-based solutions, says Caitlin Chaffee, chief of the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management’s Narragansett Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. 

“It’s more than stopping the process in its tracks. It’s looking at what is there and what needs protecting and for how long. So, if there’s a way to work with nature to use vegetation, or design projects so that they leave room to accommodate some erosion or flooding, then that’s certainly preferred,” she says. “Our coastal systems are very dynamic, and it’s a losing battle to try to fight those processes. The more that we can design around them, that’s the more sustainable option.”

In March, DEM and CRMC announced that thirteen projects would receive more than $2 million from the first round of the 2024 Ocean State Climate Adaptation and Resilience Fund Program. The General Assembly enacted the OSCAR fund in 2021 to help communities mitigate the effects of sea level rise and climate change. Seven of the projects specifically deal with erosion.

Jamestown received $199,400 to conduct a resiliency study and develop a plan to restore and stabilize the sand dunes at Mackerel Cove, a thumbnail of land with a beach, a parking lot and a road that connects Jamestown proper to Beavertail. The dune on the south side protects the causeway, but over time, storms have destroyed the vegetation that once held it in place. 

“We have repeatedly had to remove the portions of the sand dune from the roadway and put that back on the beach, to recreate it,” says Town Administrator Edward Mello. “What we’re hoping to achieve with the OSCAR grant is to develop a process to make that a more reliable sand dune with appropriate vegetation.”

North Kingstown will spend its $300,000 grant on an engineering study to redesign the seawall that separates the town beach from a recreation complex. On a hazy Sunday afternoon, Narragansett Bay is as still as tea in a cup, but the signs of over-wash are evident in the wall’s loose stones and worn-away grass, exposing the landscape fabric that was meant to keep the stones in place. From the opposite direction, the street-side storm drains empty at the sea wall, exacerbating the erosion and creating gullies in the sand.  

“We’re saved as far as wave protection. But when we get nor’easters, we get slammed pretty good,” says Recreation Director Chelsey Dumas-Gibbs. “I don’t know when that seawall was built, but we’ve been band-aiding it. And it seems like every nor’easter, they’re getting a little stronger and they’re hitting that wall a little harder, and every time it hits, it’s taking that protection away.”

Working with Wenley Ferguson, Save the Bay’s director of restoration, North Kingstown came up with a plan to relocate the sea wall. 

“They accepted that idea because with sea level rise, there’s not going to be enough dry sand for people to sit on the beach at high tide,” Ferguson says. “And it’s not really an area to put a dune in; they’re going to continue to have a structure there. So, they’re going to pull it back to create more beach and do some storm water management to address the erosion from the upland.” 

Municipalities have strong incentives to protect their beaches. North Kingstown’s municipal beach campus hosts summer camps, a concert series, Fourth of July fireworks, swim lessons, art shows and private events. Last year, North Kingstown sold 7,000 beach passes. 

Narragansett Town Beach, visited by as many as 8,000 people on a weekend day, is the lifeblood of surrounding rentals, restaurants and shops, says Parks and Recreation Director Michelle Kershaw. At the suggestion of Save the Bay, the town blocked pedestrian egress south of the south pavilion to protect the dune and allow newly planted dune grass to take hold. Narragansett also regularly nourishes its three-quarter-of-a-mile beach, she says. Each year, depending on how severely the storms have battered the beach, the town expends $8,000 to $60,000 (after Hurricane Sandy) to truck in sand. 

“The ocean’s coming and we keep trying to push it back. We can’t wait for FEMA. We can’t wait for grant money,” Kershaw says. “We’ve got to repair that beach and quickly.”

In Westerly, extending the life of Misquamicut Beach is going to demand a more dramatic and expensive response, says Caswell Cooke, executive director of the Misquamicut Business Association and a former member of the Westerly Town Council. He has been pitching the kind of large-scale sand dredging projects common in mid-Atlantic states with popular beaches. New Jersey has spent nearly $3 billion since 1936 to replenish the beaches in four coastal towns. Maryland’s Ocean City expenditures have topped $115 million since 1998.

Cooke figures it would cost $25 million to create a larger margin between Misquamicut and the ocean. A lot is at stake. Atlantic Avenue alone has 215 houses, forty businesses and large parking lots that allow public access to the beach. 

“If all that’s allowed to become a barrier beach, 1,500 seasonal jobs and millions of dollars in tax revenue is going to be gone. Nothing is a permanent fix, but spending 5 percent of what is generated down there every decade to keep it going — that’s my plan,” he says. “It’s been a bunch of nothingness over the last thirty years — so many studies. Bottom line — there’s no more time. The next big storm is going to take us out, and in some places, the next little storm is going to do it.”

The Pawelkiewiczes have lost five sets of wooden stairs to storms. When Atlantic Avenue floods it can be twenty-four hours before the roads are passable again. But in the relative quiet of late March, with the winter storms behind them and months of card games on the beach ahead before hurricane season begins, Jane Pawelkiewicz says they wouldn’t dream of leaving. 

“The view is worth it.”