It's a mix of sand and water that smells like s***:
"‘Sand wars’ come to New England coast; As weather worsens, New England’s sea levels are rising fast — as are the stakes" by Beth Daley | New England Center for Investigative Reporting, December 15, 2013
Related: Sunday Globe Special: The Rising Level of Bulls***
I hope you can see why I no longer want to do this, dear readers.
Sand is becoming New England coastal dwellers’ most coveted and controversial commodity as they try to fortify beaches against rising seas and severe erosion caused by violent storms.
From Rhode Island to Maine, debates over who gets sand, who pays for it, and where it comes from are fast becoming some of the region’s most contentious oceanfront issues. In many cases, taxpayers are being asked to foot some of the bill for beach-rebuilding projects.
“It’s called the sand wars,’’ said S. Jeffress Williams, a coastal geologist and scientist emeritus with the United States Geological Survey in Woods Hole and the University of Hawaii. The disputes, happening across the coastal United States, “are only going to get more intense,” he said.
Once again my war-promoting, agenda-pushing paper has to frame the issue in terms of war.
Among the seaside squabbles, some residents in Salisbury want $300,000 in state taxpayer dollars for sand to help protect private homes from the ocean’s fury.
Kicking $and in our faces?
The public Winthrop Beach is poised to receive an estimated 20,000 truckloads of sand from Saugus as part of a massive beach replenishment and improvement project that is costing state taxpayers $26 million.
Who usually own$ beachfront property anyway?
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The stakes are rising with sea levels.
Good thing sea levels are not really rising no matter what gastric problem the Globe has.
New England seas are rising at an annual rate three to four times faster than the global average.
Please tell me you are not believing that. Folks, water seeks the lowest point and equilibrium. It doesn't say I'll rise way up here and not over there. How sad that the propaganda pre$$ thinks you are stoopid enough to buy this $hit.
Scientists predict that the ocean here could rise 3 feet by the end of the century and that this region could see more powerful storms like those in 2011 and 2012 because of climate change.
She means $cienti$ts as she repeats that tired old lie.
The one-two punch of powerful storm surges atop higher seas is expected to mean more erosion and flooding — reaching farther inland.
Replenishing beaches is big business elsewhere along the Atlantic Coast, where long meandering ribbons of sand from New York to Florida have been fortified for decades, using taxpayer dollars to protect shorefront homes and vacation destinations. New England beaches tend to be smaller and much of the coast is privately owned, so big projects never gained much political traction. There is also, environmentalists say, a leftover suspicion of mining anything from the sea that stretches back to oil exploration attempts in the early 1980s.
But as officials frown upon the construction of new seawalls because it can exacerbate erosion, sand is becoming increasingly valuable as the first line of defense against the ocean.
As if there truly was such a thing.
Recordkeeping is poor on New England sand replenishment, and costs are often shared among multiple government and even private entities.
Why are the private entities such a shock when most of the land is privately-owned?
Massachusetts, however, has begun to develop a database to track the use of sand.
They are going to have a f***ing database for everything.
Using that database and in interviews with coastal communities, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting conservatively estimates more than $40 million in federal, state, and local funds have been spent to place sand on Massachusetts’ public beaches in the past 10 years.
While we endured service cuts and recession.
That amount is minuscule compared with the billions being spent to protect and replenish beaches farther south in the wake of Hurricane Sandy — yet coastal specialists say demand for sand is guaranteed to rise for public and private beaches.
Related: Lost in the Sands of Time
Maybe it should be $ands instead.
Also see: Sandy Anniversary
Massachusetts is now reexamining the possibility of mining sand offshore, and a special commission on coastal erosion has been established by the state Legislature.
Many coastal dwellers and communities argue that the state and federal governments need to take care of beaches much the way they maintain roads. But others, often those farther away, say constantly replenishing beaches, many in front of second homes, with taxpayer dollars is a losing proposition.
The state serves the wealthy so shaddup!
“I don’t think taxpayers have any idea what they are paying for,’’ said Peter Shelley, senior counsel for the Conservation Law Foundation, a legal advocacy group. He said public dollars are needed to protect Boston’s infrastructure to ensure the region’s economic hub is protected, not “people’s beach houses.”
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Also see: Sunday Globe Special: The Schifting Sands of Chappaquiddick
Sunday Globe Special: Eat Dirt
At least the fart mist warms things up.
"Study says US can’t keep up with loss of wetlands" by Darryl Fears | Washington Post, December 15, 2013
WASHINGTON — Over four years, the United States lost more than 360,000 acres of freshwater and saltwater wetlands to fierce storms, sea level rise, and booming development along the coasts, according to a newly released federal study.
The disappearance of so much grass and forest marsh on the edge of waterways is a disturbing sign that government projects to restore wetlands are failing to keep pace, environmentalists said, as storms intensify, the sea level creeps up, and development paves the way for rising coastal populations.
It's that la$t one that is the biggest factor, but that would cost certain intere$ts money and wouldn't allow other intere$ts to tax you.
Saltwater wetlands help buffer sea surges that cause flooding during powerful storms along the coasts, such as Hurricane Sandy last year, and freshwater wetlands soak up storm-water runoff that often causes sewers to overflow.
They also serve as nurseries for numerous species of fish and assorted marine life, while providing habitat for three-quarters of the nation’s waterfowl and migrating birds. Nearly half of endangered species depend on them to live.
So how did that BP oil spill effect them? I mean, we have basically been told that the whole Gulf is back to normal when it can't possibly be after so short a time.
‘‘They are getting it from all directions,’’ said Tom Dahl, lead author of the study funded by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the US Environmental Protection Agency.
No one believes NOAA, the EPA, or any other lying alphabet agency of this government. Sorry.
Study areas include the Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the Great Lakes, and other fresh inland waters.
Nationwide, wetlands have been converted to open water in some places and to mud in others. They include mangrove swamps, salt marshes, freshwater forested swamps, shrub depressions, and wetlands floating on the edges of rivers.
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Storms and wetlands have waged an epic struggle on the coasts for eons.
They are implying war there, aren't they?
What is relatively new, and detrimental to the wetlands, is an explosion of coastal residential and business development, along with coastal farming, that drain water from the wetlands or fill them with dirt for agriculture, parking lots, housing, and stores.
Talk to the real e$tate and zoning guys.
As a result, sizeable chunks of wetlands die. Surviving wetlands are battered by rainwater runoff pouring from newly built surfaces such as driveways and roads, and much of that water is polluted with garbage, toxins, and fine particle sediment. Wetlands can’t handle the added deluge.
‘‘The plumbing of the whole system is altered,’’ said Dahl, a senior scientist for wetlands status and trends for the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Dahl and coauthor Susan-Marie Stedman, a fisheries biologist for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, were clear about the potential effects of such a massive decline.
‘‘You lose places for those organisms to breed, feed, rest,’’ Dahl said. ‘‘You’re losing some capability for other environmental functions like filtering pollutants, providing some protection from storm damage.
‘‘You’re losing recreational opportunities for bird-watching and canoeing. You’re affecting hydrology. The areas are no longer able to retain water. The hydrology is changing and we don’t recognize what the full implications are,’’ he said.
So how is that Fukushima radiation leak doing?
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Related: Slow Saturday Special: Congre$$ Pi$$es on Unemployed
Just watering the garden.
