Permanence Is Just an Illusion
TRUTH BE TOLD, VILANO BEACH MAY NOT BE long for this world. This popular stretch of Florida beach, which is just over the Francis and Mary Usina Bridge from St. Augustine on the Atlantic Coast, is located on a barrier island, which is to say it’s part of a big pile of sand that, due to a particular mix of currents and tides, has temporarily accumulated along the coast. The shape of the island has shifted over time, according to the rhythm of storms and surges, but that never bothered the Least Terns and sea turtles and other species that nested here every year. If the beach moved, they moved with it. This concert of rising tides and shifting sand and nesting wildlife has played out for millennia.
Then about 100 years ago, human beings began building on Vilano Beach. At first it was just tourists making day trips from St. Augustine on ferries or in horse-drawn trolleys. Then a casino went up, a road was paved, motels appeared, homes were built on the beach, power lines were erected, and the whole ever-changing nature of the island came to a halt. Or at least, that’s what many people thought until last year, when Hurricane Matthew battered the coast, followed this year by the ravages of Hurricane Irma. These back-to-back storms not only destroyed dozens of homes and made Vilano Beach a poster child for shortsighted beach development, but they also reminded the people who lived there that they inhabited a spit of sand that is highly vulnerable to rising seas and more intense storms. If they want to stick around, they’ll have to radically rethink how and where they live.
When I visited Vilano Beach two weeks after Irma, the power of the storm was still evident: The parking lots of hotels were still buried in sand, jetties were jumbled, half-destroyed homes hung off hollowed-out dunes. I walked along the beach with Chris Farrell, 47, an Audubon policy associate in northeast Florida. Farrell, who has a master’s degree in biology, has lived in St. Augustine for a decade and knows the contours of the coastline very well. He strode with one eye on the gulls
