For some, the Town’s coastal dune management has been a success. In general, snow fencing and plants have worked to create an impressive system of dunes that run north to south along the Cape Charles beach. Sand drift, however, is another problem. Sand from the dunes will do what sand does–it will move. Our dunes are constantly shifting due to the continual movement of sand by the wind On a windy day when the sand is dry, you can see it travel east across Bay Avenue, making its way to homes and lawns.
The stabilization of coastal dunes is meant to stop the movement of sand that is blown by the wind. The main reason for dune stabilization is to protect human property from dune movement. Dune stabilization requires a combination of methods including planting and structural work. To stabilize the moving sand or to stop a shifting dune several actions can be undertaken: planting sand binding species, construction of stopping fences, and covering blow areas with brushwood.
The following photo essay captures some of the sand drifting:
LMAO!
I was always told the smartest people in a beach community are those that don’t live there.
Well what did you think was going to happen, if you live across the street from the beach?
Blowing sand is normal. What isn’t normal, is the town that depends on the tourist dollars to do nothing but move the sand from the south end to the north end. The only thing that does, is to make the contractor that moves the sand rich.
My grandfather always said, ” those people (that live at the beach) have more money than common sense”.
Like Sands in an Hourglass so goes the sand that isn’t in an hourglass. Once Upon a Time the Cape Charles beach was as flat as a blacktop road or sidewalk. As we all see now it isn’t, someone said let’s build up the beach with some dunes it will be so nice, it isn’t now that the new folks are in town, and they don’t like it not one little bit. So that old flat beach doesn’t look so bad now does it. Change is better kept in your pants pockets. It’s not nice to fool with nature the backfire really burns.
Welcome to Sandbridge ,Virginia Beach…!
If one goes to Cape Cod in Massachusetts, one finds the same “issues” with the sand and Cape Cod has far more impressive dunes than does Cape Charles, which is perhaps why so many more people go to Cape Cod and Cape Charles.
I think the difference is now the sand that is blowing can only travel from 2 places, the tops of the dunes and in between. If there were no dunes, the sand drifting problem would be exponentially worse. I understand people complain about the sand and the dunes blocking their views of the sunset, but come on, at some point you have to stop finding things to cry about.
Puddin, dude, you are an absolute optimist with that statement that at some point, people have to stop finding things to cry about.
What would they do with the extra time on their hands then?
And think about the hit to the entertainment value of the Cape Charles Mirror that would cause.
Sand blows where sand will blow!
It has been doing that for millennia now, and will still be doing so long after Cape Charles turns to dust itself.
Speaking of sand blowing, Cape Charles should consider itself lucky:
CLIMATE, HISTORY AND THE MODERN WORLD
Second Edition
By H.H. Lamb
Another accompaniment of some of the severe storms of the northeast Atlantic and North Sea region in the late Middle Ages and after was the overwhelming of a number of coastal places by blown sand.
There was a long epidemic of such disasters on the sandy coasts of northwest Europe from Brittany to the Hebrides and Denmark, starting about the thirteenth century and continuing to about 1800.
As examples, the little medieval port of Harlech on the west coast of Wales was permanently obliterated by a line of great sand dunes around 1400, within at most a few decades of the other cases pictured in fig. 71.
In the seventeenth century a great storm destroyed the fine natural harbour at Saksun on the north-west side of the Faeroe Islands by filling it with sand, and another overwhelmed an area — now known as the Culbin Sands — of perhaps 60 km2 of fine farmland, including nine farms and a mansion house, in northeast Scotland.
In the sandy terrain of the Breckland in East Anglia and in similar country in the Netherlands even places inland were affected by frequent blowing sand in this period.