Hurricane Season in a Damaged Landscape: Q3 2009 and Coastal Vulnerability on Jamaica’s Shrinking Beaches

Briefing

• 2009 hurricane season relatively quiet for direct Jamaica impacts but storm swells caused erosion.
• Coastal geologists documented beach width losses at multiple monitored sites since 2004.
• Some fishing community beach launching areas becoming unusable at high tide due to narrowing.
• Insurance industry raised concerns about coastal resort property exposure in changed landscape.
• NEPA field teams documented compliance failures at recently completed resort developments.

The 2009 Atlantic hurricane season was, in terms of named storms, relatively active, but Jamaica was fortunate in that none of the season’s significant systems tracked directly over the island. The island was not insulated from the season entirely: swells and storm surge from systems that passed to the north and east caused erosion events at several beach monitoring sites, and flooding at low-lying coastal communities during periods of heavy rainfall and elevated seas. But the island was spared the direct impact events that would have put the question of coastal vulnerability in immediate and undeniable terms.

The coastal geologists’ documentation of beach width losses since 2004 was, in the context of the hurricane season, a reminder of the vulnerability that was accumulating regardless of whether any particular season produced a direct landfall. The beaches that had been narrowed by seawall construction, dune clearance, and sand extraction were not narrowed only during storms; they were narrower all the time, permanently, as a consequence of development decisions that had been made and could not be reversed. When a significant storm did arrive — and the climate projections suggested it would, with increasing intensity — it would arrive on a coast that was less resilient than it had been when those decisions were made.

The Fishing Beach Problem

The report that some traditional fishing community beach launching areas were becoming unusable at high tide due to beach narrowing was a specific and practically significant consequence of the erosion process. Fishing boats require a beach wide enough to store gear and vessels above the high tide line, and launching areas need sufficient width to allow boats to be carried or pushed to the water’s edge without crossing obstacles. As beaches narrowed — at some sites dramatically, at others gradually — the space available for these operations shrank. Communities that had been launching boats from the same beach for generations were finding that their boat-keeping arrangements no longer worked at high water, and that the adaptations required — moving gear further inland, using different launch windows — added cost and difficulty to an already marginal livelihood.

The Insurance Industry’s Signal

The insurance industry’s raised concerns about coastal resort property exposure were significant as a market signal that went beyond the regulatory and advocacy discourse. Insurers who were underwriting coastal resort properties were making their own assessments of the physical risks those properties faced, and the assessments of at least some underwriters were producing premium increases and coverage restrictions that translated the abstract language of coastal vulnerability into financial terms that resort owners and developers could not dismiss. When an insurer refused to write a policy for a coastal structure without site-specific engineering surveys, or when it excluded storm surge coverage for properties below a certain elevation, it was operationalising a risk assessment that NEPA’s guidelines expressed in different terms.

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