Pacific County Ponders What To Do About Eroding Beach

NORTH COVE, Pacific County- The county commissioners went looking for the invisible.

As big gray waves rolled in on the beach below, they tried to visualize where homes and streets once stood.

"It's hard to picture what isn't here anymore," said their tour guide, Darlena Wilson, director of the county's Emergency Management Agency.

As she spoke, the Pacific Ocean kept lapping away at Washaway Beach north of Tokeland at the mouth of Willapa Harbor.

Wilson said she's watched the pace of the erosion rapidly increase in the past year.

In September 1991, Wilson was on a team that measured the distance from the water's edge to the homes at Sea Mobile near North Cove. The closest house at the time was a Surfside Drive home 158 feet away from the beach.

Now it's gone, together with its eight or 10 closest neighbors.

"The last eight houses down there were prime big houses," Wilson says, pointing to where Surfside Drive truly lives up to its name.

Wilson figures anywhere from a 300- to 600-foot strip has vanished since the 1991 survey. The high erosion zone starts about a thousand feet north of the Warrenton Cannery Road.

Its impact can be seen, albeit to a lesser extent, as far south as Tokeland, she said.

Several years ago, Sea Mobile used to have a primary dune out front that absorbed wave impact. Now many of the homes within the 300-foot erosion hazard zone don't have that protection.

If the erosion doesn't get them first, a huge tsunami wave generated by an earthquake could.

Residents at the water's edge in Sea Mobile and Tokeland have two choices - move their homes or be resigned to having a front-row seat for the inevitable.

Like shipwrecks, remnants of former homes appear along Washaway Beach when the tide goes out.

In mid-December an abandoned home on Driftwood Drive hung some 13 feet off the edge of the dune. When the commissioners stopped on their recent tour, the place was flattened, its remains scattered.

The commissioners, including Pat Hamilton of Raymond and the newly installed John Kaino of Ilwaco and Skip Wilson of Long Beach, passed several homes up on blocks awaiting a move inland.

For some residents, moving isn't an option, the commissioners noted. Owners of mobile homes built before 1976 must be brought up to current county building codes if the homes are moved.

That would cost so much it isn't worth doing, said Commissioner Wilson (no relation to the emergency management director).