THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, January 25, 1997 TAG: 9701250001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A11 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: OPINION
SOURCE: KERRY DOUGHERTY
LENGTH: 99 lines
``This is just like the Titanic,'' muttered the woman sitting next to me at the North Virginia Beach Civic League meeting last Tuesday night. ``Exactly like the Titanic.''
Several others seated nearby nodded in agreement and resignation. We were all hearing the sound of icebergs grinding in the night.
Some people join their local civic league because they are naturally good citizens. Others join when they are worried about crime. Still others are prodded into membership when they need sewers, sidewalks or some other city service.
What did it take to get me to my maiden meeting, after almost six years at the North End? The Erosion Control and Hurricane Protection Project. In other words, the beach.
I knew it was coming, it's been in the news and in the air. But it wasn't until the league newsletter arrived in the mail earlier this month that I finally circled the date on my calendar and made a note not to miss the meeting. Looming over spring like a giant diesel cloud were closed beaches, screeching pieces of heavy equipment and parking headaches like we've never seen.
I suddenly envisioned myself slathered in suntan lotion, wearing steel-toed flip-flops and a hard hat as I try to bushwhack my way to the beach next summer. Not a pretty sight.
You see, I live between 43rd and 58th streets - Phase 2 of the little understood Erosion Control and Hurricane Protection Project, coming to you courtesy of Uncle Sam and Aunt Meyera.
Because of a use-it-or-lose-it provision affecting the federal dollars - 8 million of them - work will begin a few weeks before the tourists arrive and continue straight through the summer and fall.
I was one of the last to arrive at the meeting. More than 100 people were already seated, and it was instantly obvious I wasn't the only newcomer. I saw several neighbors who admitted - with some embarrassment - that this was their first meeting; they too were worried about the beach.
``The Titanic, I'm telling you,'' my seatmate said again, folding her arms across her chest and shaking her head.
It was then I realized I had taken a seat in the Greek chorus, where folksy people were ruminating in stage whispers about all the high-faluting techno-babble that was dribbling from the front of the room.
This lady was right, of course. There is a certain audacity - a tempting of the gods if you will - in proclaiming a seawall almost infallible. And that's what the speakers were implying as they talked confidently about constructing a ``140-year-storm-protection'' wall. And when they calmly invoked the Hurricane of '33 and the Ash Wednesday storm and told how catastophes of this magnitude would be turned away, or rendered less dangerous, by our new wall, you couldn't help but think they were asking for trouble.
I want to believe them. These engineers are kindly men. Smart, too. They were armed with charts and maps and little microphones. But to those of us in the back of the room, it seemed surreal.
Especially when they explained how, by building a seawall 16 feet out from the current bulkheads, they would increase the sandy beach by 100 feet.
``Seems to me, if they want to increase the beach 100 feet they ought to move the seawall back 100 feet,'' guffawed the older gentleman on my left.
``How're they going to make the waves move out to sea 100 feet?'' wondered another.
There was a certain down-home wisdom to their concerns. And I found myself groping the underside of my chair a couple of times to see if there was a life vest hiding there.
In fact, I live near a very narrow beach. I reckon that after they build the seawall and before they ``nourish'' the beach with sand next year, we'll be left with about 11 inches of seashore.
City Council will need to pass an ordinance restricting sunbathers to nothing bigger than a hand towel to sit on.
And sand nourishment will be a fact of life at the beach - every three years for the next 50 years.
``Can anything be done about the way the sand seems to just wash away?'' asked one woman midway up the room, innocently.
``For crying out loud, it's God's will,'' called the woman next to me who had been ruminating about the Titanic.
But the experts tried to pick these little nits. And after listening to their reassuring voices, I was heartened by the notion of good storm water drainage and a wall thick enough to hold back the mighty ocean. The officials seemed genuinely sympathetic to the concerns of the community, and promised to figure out how to get the scores of construction workers to the job site every day without having them clog side streets with their cars.
They also said they were trying to figure out how to get the heavy equipment onto the beach - a drop of at least 10 feet in places.
``We're working on it,'' they assured us.
But there were several things that niggled after the meeting had ended and we in the Greek chorus had gone home. In an off-hand way, one of the speakers mentioned that the seawall is going to jut out about 16 feet in most sections of the 15-block area, but in some it will be 40 feet. The engineers, it seems, want to straighten out our unruly coastline.
I may be a minority of one, but mark me down for liking the meandering coastline. I think it looks pretty, natural - kind of coastal.
It's just another audacious aspect of the project. We don't just want to protect ourselves from the sudden violence of nature. We want to harness it, to outsmart it, make it fit neatly on a piece of graph paper.
Come to think of it, that kind of thinking is reminiscent of the cocky Belfast shipbuilders who declared the Titanic unsinkable. MEMO: Ms. Dougherty is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot.