Delray Beach, Florida: Forty years of dune management

摘要

The nourished beach in Delray, Florida, had no vegetation when first constructed. Through trial and error, the city has since developed and carried out a plan to restore a coastal dune ecosystem to enhance storm protection and create natural habitat. By 1972 the "City of Delray Beach" was a misnomer because the namesake beach (Figure 1) was gone... GONE. Decades of updrift inlet construction and development had sand starved the 1.3-mile public beach and three-mile city shoreline, with erosion so bad that the barrier island highway, homes and swimming pools - and indeed the local economy - were falling into the sea. The recreational beach was often unusable during winter. Rock and concrete revetments and truck hauls placing sand failed (Figure 2) until the first full-scale nourishment (using hydraulic placement from an offshore dredge) restored the beach to partial function, with a 150-foot-wide new sandy beach, in 1972.