By Eric Lipton and Justin Gillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 20, 1995; Page A1

SANDBRIDGE, VA., AUG. 19—As Hurricane Felix continued to send large whitecaps crashing against the shore, Louis Parham planted his feet against the wind and shoveled sand to keep his beachfront property intact, sweat pouring off his back.

"Hard to say exactly who owns this house," said Parham, 63, looking at the 4-foot-deep, 20-foot-wide trench that Felix had carved in front of his stilt-supported home. "It's kind of a joint venture between us and the ocean."

The hurricane may have drifted away from the Atlantic coast, sparing most structures from serious damage, but beaches from New Jersey to North Carolina took a fierce beating.

The desultory storm lingered off the coast for days, driving six- to eight-foot waves and higher-than-usual tides onto the beaches, dragging away sand and pounding seawalls. When Felix went away, people had merely gotten a fright. The beaches took the worst of it.

Now, in developed beachfront communities up and down the coast, Felix has renewed the debate over whether man should replace the sand lost to nature.

Thousands of oceanfront homeowners such as Parham are battling the sea to save their property. The taxpayers are battling nature, too, spending millions to keep pumping sand onto beaches as a buffer to protect houses and high-rise developments.

Geologists contend that in the end, it is a losing battle. The oceans throughout the world are rising and have been for a century. When that happens, the beaches want to migrate. If they were natural beaches, they could; people would barely notice the shift. But put condominiums and houses and roads there, and you "freeze" the beaches, thereby accelerating erosion, scientists say.

A prime example of that phenomenon is Sandbridge, a graceful old beach town on the southern end of Virginia Beach, with more than 240 houses smack up against a thin strand of sand.

It wasn't always thin. When the community was built in the 1960s, a broad, glistening beach reached 300 feet out to kiss the Atlantic. Now in some places, there is no beach, the waves slapping hard against the twisted metal of a disintegrating sea wall. "About 10 or so years ago, the sand dunes were so high {that} you could not see the ocean from here," said Mike Salmon, standing at his Sandbridge Restaurant and Raw Bar. "Now you look right out and the water is about 60 feet from the building."

Felix made things worse, tearing apart stairs that led to the beach, eating at the foundations of houses and sending seaweed and foam onto the streets. Rob Thieler, a Duke University research assistant, flew along the Atlantic seaboard after the storm, and, he said, the worst damage he saw was at Sandbridge.

But serious erosion occurred in other places, too. In Kill Devil Hills, N.C., and nearby coastal towns, the heavy seas gouged trenches in the beaches and stripped away foundation sand holding up houses on stilts.

Making good on predictions that its course would be erratic, the hurricane today slowly drifted back toward Bermuda, where it had felled trees and power lines Monday. The island's government warned residents and tourists to get ready for Felix's possible return, and by this afternoon, most airlines had canceled flights in and out of Bermuda International Airport.

At 10 p.m., the storm was about 250 miles northwest of Bermuda, with winds of 80 mph. The National Hurricane Center said that it appeared to be on a slow loop back to the East Coast and that residents from the Carolinas through New England should closely monitor its progress. For the moment, at least, summer life has returned to normal along the Atlantic. But Felix has left government officials with the decision of whether to replenish the narrowed beaches.

The City of Virginia Beach wants the federal government to put up $6.5 million of the $10 million it would cost to build a beach in Sandbridge that would be 175 feet wide at low tide. It would be the first beach restoration project there since 1962, when 262,000 cubic yards of sand were added.

Virginia Beach leaders and residents echo the arguments of those in other seaside resorts who want federal tax money to help hold off the ocean. They need to continue drawing the tourism that keeps their towns alive. They want to preserve history. A whole way of life is at stake, they say.

During the summer, Sandbridge is packed with groups of family and friends renting oceanfront homes.

"It is an absolutely, spectacularly beautiful place," said Jo Belin, of Lexington, Ky., whose family has been visiting Sandbridge for 25 years. "The sound of the ocean and the breeze and the sand slipping through my feet – we don't have that in Kentucky. To let these homes all fall into the sea would just be tragic."

Phillip J. Roehrs, the city's coastal engineer, said it is cheaper for the federal government to rebuild the beaches than pay the disaster-relief bill when a major storm knocks dozens of houses off their stilts.

"It makes economic sense to do this," he said. "The area is developed now, and we have to deal with it."

Despite such sentiments, leading specialists on coastal issues argue that trying to hold back the sea is folly. With the cost of beach replenishment rapidly escalating and new beaches eroding at an embarrassing clip, their arguments have begun to resonate. The Clinton administration has proposed slicing the federal government's role in beach rebuilding projects. That proposal would cut the federal contribution from about 60 percent to 25 percent and restrict federal spending to projects deemed to be in the nation's interest. Orrin Pilkey, a Duke University geologist and one of the nation's foremost specialists in coastal issues, concedes that at a handful of the nation's premier resorts, such as Miami Beach or Jones Beach in New York, beach replenishment is probably worth the money.

But he contends that at most shore towns, the long-range strategy should be to abandon beachfront property. That is happening already in places such as Kitty Hawk and Nags Head on North Carolina's Outer Banks, where a few houses wash into the ocean every year. They are not rebuilt.

"The big picture, if we look 50 years into the future, is that we are going to have to retreat from our shorelines," Pilkey said. "We can retreat now in a strategic fashion, or we can retreat later in tactical disarray in response to a bunch of disasters, namely storms that take out a lot of the beach."

Environmental groups and scientists argue that from New England to Florida, efforts to slow erosion with groins, jetties and sea walls are misguided. Such structures may lessen the damage in spots but worsen it overall, they say.

Yet human intervention continues apace. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is in the middle of a project to pump sand onto 20 miles of New Jersey shoreline, a plan that will cost more than $1 billion over 50 years. In the last 30 years, about $4 billion has been spent nationwide on beach replenishment, Pilkey said.

"You've got all these real estate developers and owners and towns screaming for help," said D.W. Bennett, executive director of the American Littoral Society, a coastal study group at Sandy Hook, N.J. "The mess is that the federal government is listening."

Some argue that it would be cheaper to buy the houses and destroy them, much as the government is doing in the flood plains of major rivers. Others say that if the subsidies from Washington stopped, people would come to grips with the true costs of beachfront property and give up on it.

A couple of hours up the coast from Sandbridge is a barrier island that was battered as hard as any other by Felix. At the wild and scenic Assateague Island National Seashore, the winds still blew Saturday and the big waves still crashed, but it was hard to notice any damage.

Natural dunes topped by sea oats stand behind the beach, serving as a storage reservoir for extra sand. The beach itself is free to move wherever it wants. It has been retreating inland since the big hurricane of 1933, if not longer.

Deer graze in meadows; the famed ponies of Assateague still frolic in the surf; people soak up the sun on wide, beckoning beaches.

"The dunes themselves are moving. The whole island is moving," park ranger Doug Buehler said. "It is a natural system."