Gusty Gustav takes a bite out of Destin's beaches (with video)

Destin’s infrastructure came through Hurricane Gustav just fine, city officials say, but the beaches are another story.

“Most of the sand we’ve placed behind Jetty East and Destin Pointe is pretty well gone,” City Manager Greg Kisela told The Log, “but you’d expect that ... The brunt of the damage is to the beaches.”

Otherwise, Kisela said, the city seems to have taken little damage: Even a waterspout over the Marler Bridge didn’t wreak any havoc. The winds did take their toll on the local power grid as about 506 Okaloosa County customers, including Destin homes, were plunged into darkness at about 10 a.m. But it was a far cry from the nearly 1 million that are without power across Louisiana after the Category Two storm roared ashore in central Louisiana. Locally, power was restored quickly and all but 15 homes were restored by 7 p.m.

“So that’s a normal day for us,” said John Hutchinson, Gulf Power spokesman. Hutchinson added that the company is sending 51 workers to the strike zone to help the CLECO power company restore power to Opelousas and Lafayette.

As with Hurricanes Katrina and Dennis in 2005, however, the Gulf waters stirred up by the storm ate away at the city’s waterfront.

“We have waves that were probably 14 to 15 feet high for 24 hours,” said Jerry Stalnaker, the manager of Jetty East Condominiums. “They took out the cap of our seawall, took out the stairs to our beach and did significant damage to our pavilion.”

Earlier this year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had more than 30,000 cubic yards of sand dredged to the end of Holiday Isle. Contractors then worked 16,000 cubic yards into a protective berm for those beaches.

Stalnaker and Terry Trojan of Destin Pointe said that without the berm, the damage could have been far worse.

“It saved us and Destin Pointe from horrendous damage,” Stalnaker said.

“I’ve seen pictures,” Trojan, who’s currently out of town, told The Log. “The water did get up to the pool, there’s some sand and windblown debris ... The temporary berm that was put up did the job of protecting the property this time. Most of it is gone now (and) folks are concerned about the next storm.”

And with three named storms brewing, who knows when that hurricane could be.

“I think that unfortunately these storms over the last three or four years have prepared us for some pretty bad stuff,” said Kisela. “We need to get Holiday Isle some badly-needed storm protection, because God forbid we got a direct hit, we’d lose every ounce of sand.”

Some visitors to Crystal Beach last week told The Log that the restored beaches there have also been eaten away by normal tides and time in the year since the sand was placed.

Okaloosa County Beach Projects Coordinator Jim Trifilio told The Log that if a restored beach is eroded, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has a program that will pay to rebuild it, but only in emergencies.

“If there was an emergency, what FEMA would do is restore the beach to what it was just before the storm,” Trifilio said. If the restored beach had been eroding for 20 years before the storm, none of that would be rebuilt, he said.

Okaloosa County is also trying to enter the federal Storm Protection Program, Trifilio added, which would rebuild the beach to the original design, no matter how much it has eroded since.