Achi news desk-
For as long as David Cottrell could remember, his hometown had fallen into the sea. In the early 1960s, when Cottrell was 3 years old, an abandoned US Coast Guard station bobbed above the waters of the Pacific Ocean in North Cove, Washington. In the middle of the decade, the station disappeared – as well as a post office, a school and one of the country’s early lighthouses.
As the buildings of North Cove melted into the ocean, many of the town’s residents also melted, loading their log homes onto trucks and retreating inland. With each boom and crash of the tide, those who remained were reminded that it was only a matter of time before their homes fell too.
Still, there was a life to be had here. For the next 55 years, Cottrell would work on one of 70 family farms that together provided 60 percent of the state’s cranberries on 800 acres of marshland just inland from North Cove, behind Highway 105. The highway provided a vital transportation link and served as a natural dike, but Like the land around him, his future was uncertain; Route 105 has already been moved once by rising waters, in 1995, and a 2015 assessment by the Washington State Department of Ecology suggested that even in its new location it would be underwater by 2030. A seawall to stop the ocean would cost tens of millions of dollars.
With his livelihood and community teetering on the edge, Cottrell felt he had “nothing to lose.” One day in 2016, he walked to the end of North Cove’s main ocean-facing thoroughfare, Blue Pacific Drive — its end a mess of crumpled asphalt culminating in a 14-foot drop into the ocean — and dropped a $400 basalt rock. In a last ditch effort to fight erosion. Against the odds, it worked. Where there was once only a meandering ocean, seven years later there is a new beach, with dune grass, driftwood and a thriving ecosystem.
Cottrell’s success sparked a grassroots movement, with people from the local Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe, volunteer citizens and members of the local drainage district coming together to form an action group to work on beach restoration projects along 2 miles of nearby shoreline. For George Kaminsky, a coastal engineer with the state Department of Ecology, Cottrell’s work may have revolutionized the field. “He never tried to take credit for it,” he says, “but David contributed this thing with enormous benefit, basically saving the community.”
North Cove, founded in 1884, lies behind Cape Shoalwater, a shrinking cove of land that winds its way to the northern end of Willapa Bay. Here, a perfect storm of conditions has turned it into the fastest eroding shoreline on the US West Coast, earning it the nickname “Washaway Beach.”
While global warming is blamed for rapid sea-level rise and coastal erosion around the world, Kaminsky says the loss of Cape Shoalwater and the retreat of the North Cove shoreline is attributed to a number of complex coastal processes. Storms and tidal currents driven by El Niño play a role, but Kaminsky and his colleagues believe the issue is exacerbated by several nearby piers as well as dams built along the Columbia River to the south.
