Photos of a Tape Measure

It is obvious that the beach near Lido Shores has eroded significantly, but just how much? I last attempted to answer this question two years ago. During the intervening two years, the beach has continued to erode, but at a slower pace. Recently, the beach has once again experienced more significant erosion, leaving the LSPOA pavilion at risk for an existential crisis. After that first year of measurements, I settled on the one measurement I would use to capture the extent of erosion - the distance from the edge of the pavilion to the edge of the dune. Here are four measurements presented in photos.

January 19, 2016

April 27, 2016

March 12, 2018

May 6, 2018

Although I didn't start measuring this until 2016, Google Earth had been tracking the dune with its aerial photography.  There was about 30 feet of vegetated dune during the five years leading up to my measurements.  This remained extremely stable over those years. It was so stable, in fact, that the photos would be both boring and repetitive. Here is one shot from 2014.

April, 1, 2014

And to wrap it all up, go back to the top of this article to see the progression of the erosion over the last four years in chart form. The chart shows how the distance from the edge of the pavilion to the edge of the vegetated dune has changed over time. If charts were emotive beings, this would be a very sad chart.

~ Diane Desenberg