Courtesy of Pleasant Bay Alliance
HARWICH – After years of work, the Pleasant Bay Alliance has completed and released its Erosion Management Guidelines for Pleasant Bay.
The 37-page document provides best practices that towns and property owners can use to best manage erosion along the bay as sea levels rise without heavily disrupting natural sediment flow.
The document was compiled with members of the alliance’s coastal workgroup, which includes conservation commissioners, conservation agents, state regulators and other coastal experts.
“One of the points that the guidelines stress is that any proposal for managing shoreline has to viewed in the context of the larger system, and how management actions in one location can reverberate in other parts of the system,” said Carole Ridley, the Pleasant Bay Alliance Coordinator.
Click here to read the new guidelines
Ridley said there is often an interest in seeing a hard erosion protection approach through revetments and similar measures.
“Those types of approaches can cause a great deal of harm and actually make the shoreline less resilient in the long run,” she said.
Ridley said the management guidelines include soft solutions or innovative approaches that can preserve some of the natural sediment flow while providing protection for property owners.
“Those can help to sustain that natural flow that keeps the shoreline healthy, the habitat healthy, and also increases the long-term resilience of the shoreline against storm surges and sea level rise,” Ridley said.
The alliance took its time to develop the guidelines and reviewed drafts with conservation commissions to receive feedback and incorporate their comments.
Click here to read the Alliance’s Sea Level Rise Report
“We wanted this document to be a resource that conservation commission members, people who go before commissions, and the consultants they hire can all rely on the document as a guide and a resource for evaluating options to deal with the erosion conditions of their particular location,” Ridley said.
The guidelines have been distributed to local conservation commissions and is also available at pleasantbay.org.
“We hope this is a thing that will be consulted regularly,” Ridley said. “We hope folks will continue to review it and consider the wide spectrum of options that it represents as they consider what to do to manage erosion on their property.”
Ridley said the alliance will continue to assess the implications of sea level rise to strengthen the management guidelines.
“We welcome ongoing feedback from commissioners or property owners who review the documents who may have comments, suggestions or questions that can help us strengthen it in future iterations,” she said.
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