Using R44 And A PowerBook To Bust Illegal Seawalls

Sylvestre writes "Ken Adelman, founder of TGV and Network Alchemy, is using a digital camera, helicopter, and a Power Book to take a high resolution photograph every 500 feet down the California coast. The goal? Busting people putting up illegal sea walls. The catch so far? One golf course covered the beach with boulders. Also of note: the website has 44 gigs of photos so far, runs on solar power, and is Microsoft Free. Best use of technology I've seen all month!"

Comments

Why illegal?

[dsanfte]

Question... why would making a "sea wall" be illegal?

Re:Why illegal?

[SirKron]

Sea walls are illegal if it can obstruct the natural sea life from living its life. Example: frogs cannot get from the water to the land to multiply and be fruitful.

Re:Why illegal?

[El]

Because beaches are public property. Erecting a wall in the middle of the freeway might improve your property too (cut down on that damn traffic noise!) but that's also illegal.

Re:Why illegal?

[ender81b]

No you would be the one stupid enough to *buy* property about to slide into the sea you deserve what you get. If you buy beachfront property and need a sea wall you shouldn't be buying it in the the first place or *shock* you should've built your house on a different location. There are other solutions to building a sea wall btw, that is just the cheapest. Also, people

Seriously, this is crap. The beach is the most dynamic enviroment the earth has to offer, and one of the most vital to organism reproducing. I could care less about your 400,000$ beachfront house that is going to be rubble the next time a hurricane/el nino/mudslide comes around anyways. Repeat after me - never build that close to a beach.

Bah, sorry for the rant it has been a long day. I took a oceanography class last semester from a really good professor who drilled into us how dumb beachfront building really is.

Re:Why illegal?

[dubl-u]

Yes, but wouldn't the added benefit of not having your entire property slide into the ocean give you a legitimate claim against the frogs?

The no-seawall stuff isn't just for the little froggies, although destroying a public resource (the ecosystem) for private gain is generally a no-no. Other reasons include

• California requires public access to the coast; some seawalls impede that, often intentionally
• seawalls on one property can increase erosion on nearby properties
• stopping erosion means that beaches aren't replenished, destroying them

So turn it around: Why would being dumb enough to build on an eroding piece of land give you a legitimate claim to build a seawall?

Re:Why illegal?

[tbmaddux]

All seawalls should be illegal, because they destroy beaches. The landowner is tossing rocks or concrete into the ocean to save his property at the expense of the public's property (the beach). Seawalls erode beaches by burying them under rubble (placement loss), reflecting waves and causing the sand to move offshore (active loss) and by simply being there as the shoreline retreats towards them (passive loss). Read works by Orrin Pilkey, or visit The Surfrider Foundation for more information.

Many states have banned seawalls altogether. Washington is one example. In California, seawall construction is limited by the Coastal Act (passed in 1976) but not banned, and there are major loopholes, including language to protect "existing structures" which can be creatively interpreted to include a structure that did not exist yesterday but exists today. More and more of California's coastline is being buried under seawalls, including "temporary" "emergency" piles of rock that are never removed because the Commission doesn't have a police force to patrol the beaches. What little monitoring there is, is done entirely by volunteers, and kudos to them if they've gotten access to a helicopter to keep our beaches from vanishing!

Re:Why illegal?

[!splut]

Frogs do not live in saltwater. No frog larvae (tadpoles) are able to survive in salt water. A very small minority of frogs are able to tolerate brackish water as adults (Bufo marinus, the infamous caine toad, is one such animal), but no adult frogs live in seawater either.

I'm sure you're right about why sea walls are illegal, but if the legislation is limited to points along the coast, then your specific example is incorrect. Destruction of the habitat of shorebirds or the nesting sties of seaturtles would be a better example.

Damn..

[unicron]

I'm assuming any golf course that has "field of boulders" as a hazard is pretty damn hardcore.

MicrosoftFree.com's hearts in the right place....

[mgpeter]

But what the heck are they doing using Microsoft FrontPage 4.0 as the HTML editor ???

If you talk the talk, please walk the walk

I'd love to see the "panoramic" from THOSE shots

[Goldenhawk]

It would be way cool to have a panoramic photo of the entire California coastline (or at least a significant chunk of it) from stitching all those photos together. Set it up as a movie, perhaps, offering a sort of virtual fly-by of the coastline.

Why not just use a digital camcorder?

[Goldenhawk]

After thinking about my post above... Seems like it would be much easier to just take a decent digital camcorder and fly down the coast at a moderate rate of speed. Better continuous coverage, much much faster, and if the real purpose IS to look for breakwaters or illegal rockpiles, certainly a digital camcorder image would work for that.

I wonder if there isn't some other motive here, requiring high-res images.

(Like getting free publicity on Slashdot for using exclusively non-MS technology for a cool task, perhaps.....? Naaaaahhhh....)

This hardly has anything to do with privacy.

[ApharmdB]

It's the coastline after all. The guy isn't breaking into buildings or anything. What he is doing is similar to a very successful group called the Riverkeepers. This group patrols the Hudson river and watches for people dumping illegally. They are the major reason that the Hudson is no longer the utter cesspool it used to be. The government has neither the resources nor the inclination to enforce its environmental laws and so it is up to citizens to do so.

Maybe you should look into some facts

[Sacarino]

Um

Perhaps you ought to look into fuel consumption for a R44 before you go spouting off.

If you were to look at the R44 Spec Sheet you'll see that the standard fuel capacity is 30.6 US gal. with a max range of 400 miles.

A little simple math shows us that 400/30.6 is equal to what kids? That's right, 13.07 mpg. Now, let's take a look at the gas economy on your SUV..... hmm... Comparible, is it?

Re:Where ?

[pheph]

http://www.microsoftfree.com:

and I quote:

<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0"> <meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">

Re:Brilliant use of tech

[dubl-u]

Yes, it's much better to deny people the right to build a seawall, and then spend billions on beach reclamation projects. Sheeeeerrrrr Genius (said in Wile E. Coyote voice)

This is wrong twice over:

1. The coast is a public resource. A private landowner who was dumb enough to build on eroding land doesn't have any right to build a seawall, anymore than a guy who lives next to a public park has a right to put in a vegetable garden.
2. Putting up seawalls will require you to have beach reclamation projects. Beaches are the result of erosion; if you stop erosion, the existing sand gets washed away.

Why seawall bad? Basic physics

[Anonymous Coward]

Good on this guy. If the government won't pull their finger out it is the obligation of the citizens.

Seen a lot of comments here about why seawalls are bad and the only explanations given are legals ones. Not suprising given most people here are americans.
The reason is one of basic physics, the legal arguments have to take second place.Unless you think you can legislate against nature. Please ignore this if you think you have a right to destroy other people property and public property and the general environment to protect your own interests.

If there is a rock, a wall, a washed up spare tyre, anything that is a hard object on the beach, then when the water hits it during normal wave action, the wave will retreat back to sea at a higher speed because it's energy hasn't been absorbed. Normal beaches (with sand) absorb the wave impact. If the water is going faster, it removes sand as it returns to the ocean and thus erodes the beach, much faster than natural movements. Even a small hard object on a beach can show this, one season I saw the tire I mentioned above, a tractor tyre, chop a gully about 0.5m deep and about 6-7m wide, just from wave action on this one small object. A wall will destroy the beach.

Remember beaches ARE NOT FIXED in the earth, they rise, fall and move around on a seasonal basis. Beach nourishment is not to replace sand that is lost, but to re-build the natural shoke absorbing action of an already eroded one.

Sydney residents please visit http://www.realsurf.com/nowall/ and please think about supporting this cause, we know what private interests have f**ked up in the states through ignorance and greed, lets not let it happen at home.

phil

Re:Why not build islands off the coast

[El]

When asked why they go through the trouble of reclaiming the sea, the Dutch are said to answer: "We had two choices for expansion: invade Germany or reclaim land from the sea. We took one look at the Germans and decided taking on the sea was much easier" or words to that effect.