Toni Capretta stood on a patch of Texas’ Gulf coast where just seven months earlier the dunes were nearly her height. Now they are gone.
Her town of Surfside Beach comes alive during the summer months, when Texans flock to the coast, but the landscape’s saving grace is straight out of a winter wonderland: the beloved Christmas tree.
The recycled evergreens are used to construct new dune barriers to protect the sensitive area from the ravages of powerful storms.
Photo: AFP
Every winter, the Save our Beach association, which Capretta heads, gathers hundreds of volunteers to rebuild its dunes — much of which was washed back into the ocean by last year’s record storm season.
For the inhabitants of nearby Lake Jackson and populous Houston a bit farther inland, the 40km of beaches in Brazoria County — which includes Surfside Beach — offer a welcome haven for fishing and sun-bathing.
The Gulf dunes also provide refuge to hundreds of species of birds, to the sea turtles that lay their eggs there, and even at times to alligators.
Photo: AFP
On a county-sponsored “Dunes Day,” Capretta was busily dispensing advice to the volunteers who had come to renew their defense of the sandy coastline.
Hunched over or kneeling, they used untreated pine stakes and natural fiber twine to fasten about 3,000 donated Christmas trees firmly to the sand
After a few months, wind-blown sand begins to pile up, trapped by the branches and needles of the recycled trees, until eventually they are entirely covered over.
“It’s kind of a perfect fit,” said Bryan Frazier, the parks director of Brazoria County that has supervised the operation since 1978.
“Over time, once the sand builds up on top of those natural Christmas trees, those Christmas trees will deteriorate and actually fertilize some of the vegetation that will grow on top of it,” he said.
The technique works so well that the county regularly fields requests for information, as it did in 2012, when Superstorm Sandy ravaged the faraway Atlantic coasts of New Jersey and New York.
Coastal erosion is a particular problem in Surfside Beach. Between the powerful currents of the Gulf of Mexico and the mouths of two rivers, the coast features “some of the most rapidly depleting shoreline anywhere in Texas,” Frazier said.
Last year, the Christmas tree barriers built by volunteers helped protect homes and the shore road during a particularly violent storm season.
“The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season was extremely active,” said Phil Klotzbach, an atmospheric researcher at Colorado State University. “The season had 30 named storms — the most on record for an Atlantic hurricane season.”
The coast around Surfside Beach had not seen such severe damage since 2008, with Hurricane Ike.
However, because no hurricane passed directly over, it received no federal aid.
“The storms were not direct hits,” Capretta said. “When they are direct hits, you get a lot of government funding.”
Still, the coast there was ravaged by sea surges from four powerful storms.
It began in early June last year, when Tropical Storm Cristobal roared through the Gulf of Mexico before heading up the Mississippi Valley river.
In late August, Hurricane Laura struck Florida and Louisiana after claiming dozens of lives in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
By the middle of September, meteorologists had run through their usual list of storm names and had to turn to the Greek alphabet. Late that month, tropical storm Beta rumbled through the Gulf before making landfall 88km from Surfside Beach. The devastating storm series ended in October with Hurricane Delta.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in