Beach restoration makes Destin beaches worse, homeowner says

Walking Destin’s beaches, homeowner Linda Cherry says, “used to be like walking on sugar. It’s now like walking on Sweet ‘n Low.”

At Monday’s City Council meeting, Cherry and homeowner Denny Jones told the council members that the 2007 restoration of two miles of eroded Crystal Beach waterfront had replaced soft white sand with a harder beach streaked with black and filled with crushed shells.

“Beach restoration took place almost a year ago,” Cherry said. “We’ve seen tremendous changes.”

Jones and Cherry are both members of Save Our Beaches, which filed suit in 2006 to stop the restoration project because the 80 - 100 feet of added sand behind their homes would become a public beach. They said Monday that the sand quality was a separate issue, one City Council needed to know about.

“Somebody needs to think about it before you approve any more beach restoration,” Jones said, presenting the council with a box of sand so they could feel and see the difference.

Jones said he’d found a boat gaff buried in the dunes created by the restoration project. He predicted that since the fine white sand would erode and blow away faster than the shell fragments, Destin would end up with a beach that felt more like shell than sand.

“We were assured the sand quality was going to be good, and we were absolutely (called) naysayers,” Jones said of Save Our Beaches. “Either you guys got snookered or you snookered us.”

Cherry said that according to experts, restored beaches eroded much faster than regular ones, which benefited no one but the dredging industry: “I would venture to guess that in three to five years we’re going to be very sorry.”

This isn’t the first time this issue has come up. In 2000, the council stopped a berm-building project when it found the sand didn’t match the beach. The following year, the council found that a number of small rocks had made it through the contractor’s sifting screens and into the berms.

Council Jim Bagby said Monday that watching for contamination was important but beach renourishment was vital to protect waterfront property and to keep Destin’s tourist-centered economy going. He also said that the beach isn’t as pure white as most people think: “If you dig down beyond two to four feet, you’ll find red sand.”

Bagby, who works as town manager in Rosemary Beach, said the beaches there had become a dark, half-peat mix after 2005’s violent storm season, but they had since regained their normal color and texture.

He said, however, that he would ask Okaloosa County’s Tourist Development Council, which paid for the beach restoration project, about the dark streaks in the restored beach.