Aug
15
The nonexistent Gray’s Beach
Filed Under Sunrise on KGMB9
Kyo-ya Corp., owner of the four Sheraton/Westin in Waikiki, has decided to move forward with a plan to restore what it calls Gray’s Beach.
There isn’t any Gray’s Beach. But there used to be. It washed out to the reef long ago. If you stand in the hallway at the back of the Sheraton, the one you take to get to the smaller meeting rooms, all you see is a sidewalk, a railing, and the ocean.
Kyo-ya announced last year it was thinking about this but hadn’t decided whether to go forward with it, possibly wanting to see how much opposition there would be. Surfers expressed concern about possible changes in surfing conditions, and environmentalists said they wondered if the plan would actually work. But all sides were muted and measured in their remarks. This week, Kyo-ya confirmed it will proceed. Most of the next two years will be spent seeking the necessary permissions.
The plan is to build three Y-shaped groins sticking out into the water to calm the wave actions at the base of the hotel. If they do no harm they might actually be pretty.
It’s right to be skeptical about any attempts to engineer a solution to beach erosion, though, and I suspect even Kyo-yo is constantly re-evaluating whether an expensive project like this will accomplish the desired effects.
Engineers are notorious failures at constraining the movement of water. For generations they dammed and dyked the marshy shores of the Mississippi, only to find that they had built a river that floods more disastrously than previously.
Not only that, but they sped up the current so the mighty river spews perfect growing soil farther and farther out in the Gulf of Mexico. It takes all day to drive from New Orleans to the end of the river in the outer Mississippi Delta and back — I have done it — and beyond the end of the road is 100 miles more delta. (And a million pelicans.)
Another unintended consequence of all that is that a third of the water in the Mississippi now crosses unstoppibly over into another river that carries it more directly south to the Gulf, and it is possible that one day the Mississippi will simply become that other river, forsaking New Orleans.
Here is Hawaii, beach mitigation efforts of the past seem to have done little but put more sand onto the reef. Engineers say they know more now and will do better, but they have said that over and over for more than a century without yet demonstrating that they actually have figured out how to control water.
In this sense, Kyo-ya has — and its executives know it – a more profound challenge than any opposition there might be — making it work if they actually get to do it.
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