Beach renourishment never stops

Eleven floors above the sand of North Myrtle Beach, I had an expansive view of the resort town's beach renourishment efforts the past couple of days. A family reunion brought me to what used to be called The Grand Strand, but this weekend, the thing that was grand was the engineering effort. Bulldozers, an other-worldly looking motorized tripod with a cockpit on top, a dredge ship and hundreds of yards of pipes worked almost around the clock to refill the beach with sand.

The bulldozers, which were loud even 100 feet above the work, continued all afternoon Friday and well into the night. Bright lights lit the effort. Dozers pushed sand out toward the waves, creating a porous barricade against the pounding surf, then the dredged sand poured through the pipe to fill the gap between the sea oats-covered dunes and the sand the dozers had just pushed toward the surf. As the dredged sand filled in, the dozers would go back and forth smoothing the new beach into something resembling a natural beach. It continued all day Saturday and late into the night. Workers were back at it Sunday morning.

All up and down the beach once marked by modest little vacation cottages, high-rise condominium complexes have turned the shoreline into a mega-metropolis. In the off-season, the condos can be had for reasonable prices, but during vacation season, millions of northern and midwestern tourists come and ride the elevators and the waves and think how great the beach is. But the beach is disappearing.

The effort my family watched and heard is a desperate attempt to keep sand beneath those soaring high rises and keep some semblance of a beach for the tourists. Farther inland, entertainment complexes feature music and dancing and other spectacles for those for whom the beach is not enough. Without the beach to attract the tourists to fill the high rises and eat at the restaurants and see the shows, all will be lost. So the construction project went on late into the night and all through the weekend. Time is of the essence when the sands of time and the times of sand are ebbing away.