Surfside Beach (United States) – On Surfside Beach in Southeast Texas, Toni Capretta still seems stunned. There is nothing to suggest that here in June rose sandy hills almost as high as this slender Texan.
Every winter, his association “Save our Beach” calls on hundreds of volunteers to erect a dune barrier using Christmas trees. It took only five months for the ocean to swallow up several years of effort.
In all seasons, residents of Lake Jackson and Houston fish or swim along Brazoria County’s 37-kilometer stretch of beaches, including Surfside Beach. The coastal dunes are a refuge for hundreds of species of birds, turtles that come to lay there and sometimes even alligators.
This Saturday, on the occasion of “Dune Day”, Toni Capretta gives his instructions to the volunteers who came to begin their reconquest of the land on the sea.
Curved, they fix 3,000 recycled Christmas trees to the ground, using untreated wooden stakes and natural fiber strings.
– Active hurricane season –
After a few months, by holding back the grains of sand carried by the winds, the thorns and branches of the conifers end up being completely covered.
“It’s a perfect combination,” said Bryan Frazier, director of the Brazoria County Parks Department who has overseen this operation since 1978. “These Christmas trees will rot and be used as fertilizer by the vegetation that grows on them.”
The technique works so well that the county regularly receives requests for advice. This was the case in 2012, after Hurricane Sandy hit the coasts of New Jersey and New York State, several thousand kilometers from here.
It must be said that the erosion of the coast is suffered here in a very concrete way. The sea currents and the mouths of two nearby rivers make this coast “one of those experiencing the most rapid decline in Texas,” laments Bryan Frazier.
The barrier built by the volunteers played its role in protecting homes and roads against the elements particularly raging last year.
“The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season has been very active. Thirty storms have been named. Never have so many been recorded in a single season,” said Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane expert at Colorado State University.
– Storm damage –
Never since 2008 (and the passage of Hurricane Ike) has the coast been so damaged. But the fact that it has been far from any eye of a storm prevents the activation of federal aid. “The storms didn’t hit us directly. When they do, you get state funding,” says Toni Capretta.
What ravaged the coast were the waves and high tides caused by four storms that followed each other a few weeks apart, dozens if not hundreds of kilometers from here. It all started very early, at the beginning of June, when Cristobal crossed the Gulf of Mexico before going up the Mississippi.
It is “the earliest recorded tropical storm to hit Louisiana” since 1959, according to researcher Phil Klotzbach.
At the end of August, it is a hurricane, Laura, which hits Florida and Louisiana after killing dozens of people in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
By mid-September, the names planned for the season’s storms are exhausted and meteorologists begin to decline the Greek alphabet.
At the end of the month, Tropical Storm Beta swept through the waters of the Gulf of Mexico before smashing 90 kilometers from Surfside.
This long black series for the city of Texas ends in early October with a second hurricane, Delta, which also ends its course in Louisiana.
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