As Erosion and Floods Swallow Buildings, Washington’s Coastal Communities Strain to Adapt

By Claire Carlson and Julia Tilton

This story was produced through a collaboration between Daily Yonder and Climate Central. Climate Central scientists Jennifer Brady and Joseph Giguere contributed data reporting.

Connie Allen sat at a wooden table in her home in North Cove, Washington, a quarter mile up the road from the beach. Cranberry bogs extend on all sides of her property, which sits 10 feet above sea level.

She described her nightmare: All the bogs flooded by storming seas.

Salt left behind after a powerful coastal storm could kill the cranberry vines, threatening more than 70 farmers and their workers, families and buyers. Cranberries grown along the southwest Washington coast are harvested for fresh fruit, and many are processed by Ocean Spray and distributed globally. Coastal flooding fueled by climate change, dam-building and other human activity threaten that economy.

“It would destroy the community,” Connie said from her kitchen.

Connie Allen and WashAway No More are working to restore this section of beach in North Cove, Washington by installing these dead trees at an angle that helps to capture sediment to build up the eroding shoreline. (Photo by Ilana Newman / The Daily Yonder)

The encroaching coastal hazard is nothing new. For years, North Cove was said to have the fastest eroding shore on the Pacific Coast. In just a few decades, the community lost an abandoned Coast Guard station, a post office, and a schoolhouse to the sea. The local beach was known colloquially as “Washaway Beach” for how fast the sand disappeared into the sea.

That was until 2017, when Connie and her late husband David Cottrell put a $50,000 grant from a local nonprofit to work. They built a cobble berm on the beach and created a speed bump-like barrier to weaken strong waves. Every few months, through community donations, they would add more rocks and stones to the berm.

“Part of our campaign was, this matters: this is our beach, let’s take care of it,” Connie said.

Building cobble berms won’t be enough to permanently stave off rising seas, intensifying storms, and stronger waves, but they help to buy time and reduce damage.

A similar action-based mindset is taking hold in the region, which could help it adapt to the changes underway. The biggest challenge may be finding enough money.

Across the Pacific Northwest, scientists are tracking how climate change is altering the seas and storms. Warmer temperatures mean more precipitation is falling as rain rather than snow during winter. Generally speaking, less rain is falling during summers while winters are producing more precipitation.

Connie said she’s noticed the changes.

“Our storms are stormier, our winters are wetter,” she said. “We have the same amount of rainfall, but it comes all at once. And that’s where our issue is.”

In seaside towns like North Cove, the same storms that can dump several months’ worth of rain at once tend to deliver another hazard: coastal flooding. Strong waves associated with storms rolling off the Pacific coast can surge past normal high tide lines.

North Cove is in the northwest corner of Washington’s Pacific County, where sea level projections show a 96% chance that at least one coastal flood reaching five feet above the high tide line will happen before 2050. In that scenario, a storm surge could reach some of the area’s lower-lying cranberry bogs. Sea water would flood parts of the state highway in the neighboring town of Tokeland, much of which would also be underwater.

By 2100, the chance of a severe flooding event over seven feet occurring in Pacific County given the same projections is 84%. Two additional feet of flooding above the high tide line would inundate almost the entire town of Tokeland south of the state highway, and put many more cranberry bogs below the water level in North Cove. Rapid global deployments of clean energy generation would help to avert such severe outcomes.

Researchers are still working to understand how different sea level scenarios will interact with a geological phenomenon called vertical land motion, which is lifting Washington’s coast. By 2050, the region’s communities will have to grapple with varying degrees of sea level rise, depending on where they sit in relation to the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a fault line off the Pacific Coast. As sea level rise accelerates with warming temperatures, it could outpace the rate of land uplift.

In 2017, Connie Allen and her late husband David Cottrell started selling t-shirts to fundraise for a community effort to save North Cove’s eroding shore. The group named themselves “Washaway No More”. Every time they sold $580 worth of t-shirts, the group commissioned local contractors to dump a truck’s worth of large rocks at the end of the road leading to the beach. The material created a natural barrier for the waves, slowing the erosion. The group’s efforts eventually led to the construction of a cobble berm along the entire beach, and funding for continued erosion control. (Photo by Ilana Newman / The Daily Yonder)

Instead of waiting for permission from the local government, Connie and David took matters into their own hands to stop the beach from eroding at the end of their street. Once it became evident that the cobble berm was working, Pacific County officials supported it. Now, thanks to their efforts, the beach is growing. In one section, the amount of sand has grown sevenfold since the berms were first placed.

This, Connie said, is the advantage of being from a “forgotten place” with less government oversight.

“You can get away with stuff like that,” she said.

Changing Tides

A few miles down the state highway from the cranberry bogs, the town of Tokeland opens onto a spit along Willapa Bay. There, the ancestral homelands of the present-day Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe date back over 2,000 years.

Kristine Torset is the cultural specialist and interim director of the Shoalwater Bay Tribe’s cultural department. For Torset, the threats posed by climate change are just the latest in a generations-long history of humans influencing the natural landscape.

“When I was a kid, the beach was full of driftwood, and we would play on it,” she said. “When my mom was a kid, it was driftwood for miles.”

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Columbia River was dammed and jetties were built along its mouth and farther north at Grays Harbor, where the Chehalis River meets the Pacific Ocean. Over time, the changes affected flows of river sediment, reducing the amount of driftwood and sand that washed up on some of southwest Washington’s beaches.

In some areas, like North Cove, the changing dynamics meant faster erosion. “There’s these big human imprints on what’s changed along the coast,” George Kaminsky, a coastal engineer with the Washington Department of Ecology, said.

In other parts of Pacific County, the dams and jetties have the opposite effect. One such place is Long Beach, a small town at the southern end of a 20-mile stretch of coastline separating the Pacific Ocean from Willapa Bay. There, sediment from the Columbia River tends to build up, or accrete. The farther a beach is from the mouth of a nearby river, the more likely it is to be “fed” by river sediments and sand that have washed down it, Kaminsky said.

Long Beach has been kept well-fed the past few decades, according to Shawn Humphreys, the director of community development at Pacific County. Humphreys, who specializes in environmental health and oversees Pacific County’s sea level rise planning, grew up just south of the county and has spent his life along the coast. Like Torset, he has watched the shoreline’s dramatic changes.

The boardwalk in Long Beach used to have ocean views, Humphreys said. Now, a big sand dune occupies the space between the boardwalk and the beach. The city’s 2022 Shoreline Master Program noted that the total accretion on the beach since 1889 has been just under 2,000 feet, growing over 15 feet per year, on average.

While a coastal flood might spare the western shoreline in Long Beach, the other side of town would face flooding from the southern end of Willapa Bay. At the bay’s northern end is where Tokeland and North Cove face some of the greatest risks of complete inundation.

Much of the work Humphreys does now revolves around sea level rise planning and coastal adaptation strategies for Pacific County. Armed with a robust portfolio of scientific studies and risk assessments, there is a relatively solid understanding of what the future could look like under different climate change scenarios. Coastal engineer George Kaminsky said there is also a good amount of information on what solutions are available and how to build them.

But these solutions can be costly, and obtaining funding could be Pacific County’s biggest hurdle on the road to climate resilience.

Shortfalls Worst in Rural America

Across the country, rural communities have less access to grant funding than urban communities.

A 2023 Headwaters Economics analysis found that the majority of climate change grantmaking from the federal Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program went to “high-capacity” communities that have more money and more staff dedicated to writing grant proposals. Less than one-fifth of the grants went to “low-capacity” communities, which typically have fewer resources and staff to produce competitive grant applications.

These low-capacity communities tend to be rural, according to Headwaters Economics.

Compared with other rural counties, Pacific County seems to have a leg up grant-wise. In 2021, it was awarded $88,000 by the Washington State Department of Ecology to pay for the first phase of a sea level rise risk assessment, which was completed in 2023.

The county is now onto phase two of the assessment, which is studying how stormwater and groundwater interact. It was awarded $157,000 for this work.

The city of Ilwaco got a separate, $136,500 grant from the state Department of Ecology in 2023 to investigate how it will be affected by sea level rise, along with funding from the state Department of Commerce to integrate salmon recovery efforts into land use planning.

But all of the money is for planning, not for the actual projects needed to physically reduce flooding.

“We know those areas already flood, we’re seeing an increase of flooding,” said Dawn Spilsbury, an ecologist and GIS analyst for the environmental consulting firm Facet. She helped produce Pacific County’s sea level risk assessment. “The people that have lived there for a long time know this.”

Spilsbury said the data they have found through the assessment helps justify to state and federal agencies the need to fund climate adaptation in Pacific County. The challenge is getting the amount of money they need to pay for costly infrastructure projects.

In Tokeland, for example, the city was working with the U.S. Army Corps to address their shoreline erosion problem. But the community did not satisfy the Army Corps’s cost-benefit analysis, which found North Cove had less at stake in property value and business impacts than was needed to protect it.

“We aren’t in New York City, we aren’t even the Outer Banks,” said Jackson Blalock, the marine and estuarine resilience program manager for the Pacific Conservation District. This organization helps funnel climate grants to Pacific County. “It’s a different context.”

Sanpisa Sritrairat and Jackson Blalock stand outside the Washington Sea Grant office in South Bend, Washington. (Photo by Claire Carlson / The Daily Yonder)

This example illustrates the larger need for rural-specific climate funding that incorporates local knowledge. “We’ve seen over and over that after 10 years sometimes of spinning our wheels with all the different agencies, it’s the local visions and ideas that end up panning out,” Blalock said.

“It’s like, yeah, the shellfish farmers were saying that 10 years ago, but now everyone’s finally on board with it. Great. What have we lost in the meantime?”

The sense of climate urgency is palpable in Pacific County. In Tokeland, Shoalwater Bay tribal member Kristine Torset remembers a jarring experience from two summers ago when she was out on the water in Willapa Bay with a friend.

When Torset and her friend touched their hands to the water’s surface, they both instantly knew something was wrong. “We looked at each other because the water was so warm and we’d never felt it that warm, ever, in the bay,” Torset said. “That was kind of scary.”

This past summer, Torset said a tropical fish far flung from its normal habitat washed up on the docks in Tokeland – yet another sign of warming waters. “What does that mean as an Indigenous person with salmon problems and population, what does that mean for us?” she said.

As pollution traps heat within the atmosphere, most of the additional heat is being absorbed by oceans. Temperatures at the surface of the ocean off Pacific County were 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer this summer than they would have been without climate change, analysis using the Climate Shift Index: Ocean shows.

Throwing Money at the Ocean

North Cove received $13 million from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration to continue the erosion mitigation work that Connie and David started seven years ago. Now, the trick is getting funding for other rural communities in Pacific County.

“Even though the cost-benefit analysis might not show a lot of dollars being affected, it’s the livelihood of people who have a long history and story of their own,” said Sanpisa Sritrairat, a community engagement specialist at Washington Sea Grant, a research group based at the University of Washington.

Shoalwater Bay tribal members are reckoning with their own changing story.

After years of “throwing money at the ocean” trying to control the area’s erosion, the tribe is now working to relocate homes and tribal headquarters uphill from the floodplain. In 2023, after repeatedly filing applications that were rejected, the tribe was awarded $25 million by the U.S. Department of Transportation to start this process.

While the move is necessary for the community’s longevity, Torset said the process is a painful one for many tribal members whose cultural identity is deeply connected to living on the shoreline. There are certain things the tribe will not be able to move during their relocation, including the cemetery. “If we’re leaving our relatives down here, what kind of impact does that make on our spirit?” she said.

Torset said she feels as though she is in “survival mode” most of the time. It is a burden she does not want to bestow on the next generation.

“For a tiny tribe, we should be thriving one hundred percent, especially in the area that we’re in,” Torset said. But after generations of human influence on the environment, with the effects of climate change just the latest challenge the tribe must contend with, thriving is no longer feasible on a disappearing shoreline.

“We were lucky enough to retain a village where we have been for millennia, a lot of other tribes have not been so lucky, and so that makes me really upset that my people are still continuing to struggle,” Torset said.

Part of Torset’s efforts are to ensure that young tribal members have opportunities beyond doing what is necessary to survive.

“My biggest concern,” Torset said, “is can we do this in a way that the next generations coming don’t have to worry about any of this.”