(lively theme music) - [Orrin] It is clear that Ocean City's beaches are in serious trouble.

- [Fish] So many people that own property now, they don't realize what the ocean can do.

They have never seen a storm.

If they think Gloria was a storm, they got a lot of thinking to do.

(waves crash loudly) - [Steve] We had a large hurricane, we'd see major buildings lost and destroyed during the storm.

- [Liz] Goodbye, Ocean City.

A few decades from now, your beaches will have disappeared.

Those are the words of one controversial geologist who said that without drastic steps to rebuild the beaches here, the Ocean City as we know it will only be a memory.

Hello, I'm Liz O'Neill.

Now that may be an extreme view of what the future looks like here in Ocean City, but one thing is certain, the beach is eroding, some say as much as two feet a year.

Ocean City has recognized the problem.

In fact, next fall, they will begin a massive $30 million beach replenishment project.

We'll look into that project during the next half hour, as well as the whole process of beach erosion.

What causes it, and what are its consequences?

And who will control our shoreline in the future, man or Mother Nature?

(lifeguard whistles loudly) ("Wipeout" by the Surfaris) Ocean City, it is Maryland's leading summer resort, a nine mile ribbon of sand that stretches from the Delaware line south to the inlet that separates it from Assateague.

Each year, tens of thousands of people come here for sun and fun.

(rock music) Tourism is booming, and so is development, but it's the ocean and the beach that breathe life into this fragile island, and the beach is eroding.

- [Orrin] It is clear that Ocean City's beaches are in serious trouble.

- [Liz] Far away from Ocean City's pounding surf, a geologist named Orrin Pilkey at Duke University is making waves of his own.

- [Orrin] If the city, and if the state, and whoever, value of the recreational beach of Ocean City, they've got to do something right now.

They've got to do something right now, or they won't have a... They won't have beaches for future generations.

- [Fish] Well, I guess we are setting it up, but you know, how about a town in the Midwest?

- [Liz] Ocean City mayor, Fish Powell.

- [Fish] Or a day or two after Gloria, they had the tornadoes that went through Western Pennsylvania and I believe Michigan and Canada, destroyed whole towns, whole towns, and a lot of the countryside.

And it's an accepted thing, it happens.

So wherever you are, I don't care where you live, you're subject to some kind of act of nature.

(waves crash loudly) - [Liz] Hurricane Gloria showed us last year how unpredictable Mother Nature can be.

And Ocean City is especially vulnerable.

Shrinking beaches provide no storm protection for people or for the thousands of densely-packed buildings here.

But not all the beaches are in trouble.

In the southern part of town, the shore is so wide that the fishing pier had to be extended.

And take a walk up to 34th Street where Alger Abbott has owned his business since 1960.

- [Alger] If anything, it might be a little wider now.

So it goes and comes, the northeast arm, the beach cuts, and on southeast, southwest it builds up.

And I mean, it's been doing it ever since I can remember.

- [Liz] But farther north, the beach narrows considerably.

Between 75th and 80th street there is little beach, even at low tide.

How much has the beach eroded in Ocean City per year?

- [Orrin] Well, it's somewhere between, at the present time, it's somewhere between one and three feet per year, of that order of magnitude.

That's fairly low by East Coast standards.

- [Liz] But as the beach is eroding, Ocean City is stubbornly holding its ground, literally.

$1.5 billion worth of development anchored onto the shore with nowhere to go, a hefty investment, and one the state must protect.

But the ocean knows nothing about investment, it only knows what comes naturally day after day.

- [Orrin] The basic cause of beach erosion is the pounding of the waves on the beach, which I think everybody can readily see.

Above and beyond that, it's the times when a lot of beach material is lost is during storms, so we can say that storms are the principal villain.

(waves crashing) - [Annie] About 11:00, some of these kids walked uptown and they saw it was getting bad, breaking over the boardwalk.

- [Liz] This was one storm that would change the future of Ocean City.

August 1933, 87 year old Annie Bunting, one of the town's oldest residents, remembers it well.

- [Annie] Children kept going to the beach and they kept coming back and saying, "Miss Bunting, that ocean looks terrible."

Well, I said, "Don't keep going up there so much because it's going to come bad."

(waves thrashing) I guess 3:00 or 4:00 the Coast Guard got a call that South End was so flooded that the houses were going down.

- [Liz] You were awake the whole night?

- [Annie] Oh yeah.

- [Liz] And when the sun rose, when the sun came up... - [Annie] Beautiful, come up so pretty that morning, and there was all that water.

And we were cut off from the south end of the island, railroad track was gone.

And... It was really frightening.

- [Liz] Frightening yes, but a blessing in disguise for Ocean City, the water coming from the bay to the ocean came through with such a force that it ripped open the inlet that now separates Ocean City from Assateague.

The inlet gave birth to commercial and sport fishing in Ocean City.

A jetty was driven to stabilize the inlet and trap sand.

And the once unknown town of Ocean City prospered.

(lively big band music) ♪ ♪ - [Annie] But Ocean City used to be nice.

You had a porch, you were private.

You could, they had a living room, they'd even take your lunch out on the beach to you.

And you could live a week, a family of two or three for $17 a week, board and all.

And everybody knew everybody.

- [Liz] People had soon forgotten that the beautiful sea could be so ugly.

Lots were selling for $25 apiece and Ocean City mushroomed into a playground by the sea.

The jetty had trapped sand traveling from north to south and the beaches were wider than ever.

Post-World War II saw the building of motel row.

The Chesapeake Bay Bridge, built in the 1950s, connected Ocean City to the rest of the world.

The town was thriving, but then the beautiful sea would once again turn violent.

(dramatic music) - [Peter] The worst winter storm in recent history batters the Atlantic seaboard, the East Coast from North Carolina to New York is declared a disaster area.

- [Liz] March 6, 1962, a three-day Northeaster, or winter storm, that played no favorites.

Buildings, unable to stand the force of wind and water, crumbled like matchsticks along Ocean City shoreline.

Eleven-million dollars in damages, but incredibly only one death.

Mayor Fish Powell was acting fire chief at the time.

- [Fish] Unless you saw it, yeah, I don't think anybody'd ever make you believe what was left.

I don't care how you build something, or what you build, when you get storms like that, you're going to have destruction.

Your automobiles are gone, they're sanded up, they're floated away.

The roads, I've experienced more wind, many times.

I think, the top winds were in the sixties, but with it you had so much water.

We had to quit using fire trucks and went to using boats.

♪ ♪ I hope, I never see one again like it.

I would hate to see it come through now.

- [Liz] Storms like the 1962 Northeaster can only be expected once every 75 years.

Milder storms that cause moderate damage have a five to 10 year span.

But Ocean City has been immune from any major storm for 25 years now.

And during that time, the town has experienced explosive growth.

Some of the old charm has been maintained throughout the years, but the quaint apartment houses, once the trademark of Ocean City, have made way for shimmering towers of steel, concrete, and glass.

In the 1970s, the tax base here tripled, and so did the population.

- [Fish] It was fast-growing, it's still growing.

But it's people that demand this growth.

It's people that want to come here and enjoy it.

And that's why it's being done.

It's people that want it.

- [Liz] Ocean City has a year-round voting population of about 5,000 residents.

But during the season, those lucrative months from June to September, as many as 250,000 people a week will vacation here.

- I like it down here because people are very, very nice to us, everybody's friendly.

I just love it, I love the atmosphere.

- [Liz] Do you spend a lot of money while you're down here?

- Sure.

(laughing) That goes without saying, of course you do, when you're on vacation, definitely do.

- [Liz] Ocean City has become a jewel in the Maryland economy.

Last year, tourists spent almost $600 million here, created 15,000 jobs, and pumped millions into state tax coffers.

- [Fish] Ocean City is probably the one of the few towns in the state of Maryland that sends a lot more money back to the state than they receive, and I mean a lot of money.

So I think, it's good on the state's part to protect that investment.

- [Liz] But both the investment and the beach that protects it are at risk right now in Ocean City.

- [Steve] We had a large hurricane, we'd see major buildings lost and destroyed during the storm.

- [Liz] Steve Leatherman, a professor of geography at the University of Maryland has spent years studying Ocean City.

- [Steve] The buildings were built too close to the water.

Early on, most people ignored the fact that the shoreline was eroding.

Indeed, the former mayor adamantly stated, "There was no real erosion, that indeed the beaches shift back and forth from summer to winter, but there really was no change."

And I think that and other things led people to believe that there really was no erosion problem.

- [Liz] But don't beaches, in fact, come and go?

- [Steve] They do, yeah.

If you're there in the summer, you see the wide beach, in the winter, it gets narrow.

But I guess what I'm saying is super imposed on this fluctuation, in other words the beaches are moving back and forth seasonally, but there's a long term trend of erosion we saw clearly on the maps.

- [Liz] Shoreline maps 130 years old provide Leatherman with the history of the disappearing beach in Ocean City.

In a high tech computer mapping room in College Park, Leatherman uses those maps to track shoreline changes since 1850.

- [Steve] He's now crossing about 76th street, coming into that area, digitizing the shoreline around 76th street.

- [Liz] The longitude and latitude of each point on the shoreline are digitized, or fed into a computer.

(machines whirring loudly) The computer then transmits that information onto a large map that graphically shows the erosion rates.

What are we seeing here, Steve?

- [Steve] Well, essentially the story is we see the Atlantic Ocean out here.

We see Ocean City.

You can see that through time each one of these shorelines, 1850, 1929, 1942, each one of these shows the beach has eroded.

And this is the overlaying of all the data which we got out of the computer.

As we saw earlier, we digitize it.

Now, we have played it back, and we can see this shoreline is marching inland.

- [Liz] The graph shows the most dangerous area between 74th and 87th streets.

And indeed in Ocean City, houses in that section of town are literally perched on the water.

And according to Leatherman, the same beach that Alger Abbott says, "Has gotten wider through the years," has actually eroded 32 feet since 1960.

- [Steve] I don't think they realize what they have seen.

I mean, beaches change so much.

We can go down there today and see that beach, you know, in a day we see the beach change considerably.

Over 130 years of data, that tells the story, it doesn't lie, it's telling us that that shoreline is, albeit slowly, that it's about two feet per year eroding, but it's incessant, almost insidious erosion because it's something you don't really quite notice.

It's hard to detect within this beach changing on a seasonal basis, winter to summer.

- [Liz] Underlying the problem of erosion is a natural phenomenon, the rising sea level.

There is controversy over what is causing the rise, but scientists have evidence that the actual elevation of the ocean has risen one foot during the last century.

The rising sea level means that storms move closer to shore and sand now in front of these buildings will move off shore to maintain the natural balance between the ocean and the beach.

- [Steve] But it's certainly gonna mandate a lot of erosion.

And that's something that we have to really be concerned about and we have to start planning for now.

And indeed we have to deal with the narrow beaches, we have today.

- [Liz] Like its neighbor Assateague, Ocean City is a barrier island, bordered on both sides by water.

Barrier islands respond to the rising sea level by migrating landward.

But in Ocean City, buildings have interrupted that natural cycle and anchor the island in place.

- [Orrin] Really the sand is not disappearing, the whole system is just moving back as the sea level rises.

So it's just a shift of position of the beach with time.

But if there's a building in the way of that shift of position, then it becomes erosion, and then it becomes a crisis, and then it becomes a problem that our government has to solve.

And it's important to differentiate where your interests are.

Are your interests here in preserving beaches or are your interests here in preserving buildings?

And in my view, in a long-range sense, you can either have buildings or beaches, but you can't have both.

- [Liz] Having beaches and buildings is an expensive option, as Miami Beach found out in the mid '70s.

The beach had eroded so much that entire root systems of the famous palm trees were exposed, swimming pools were actually sitting in the water.

But they embarked on what is considered the granddaddy of beach replenishment plans, a $70 million project that took six years to complete and widened the beaches 200 feet from the buildings.

- [Orrin] There's not only a possibility, there is an absolute certainty that Ocean City will look like Miami Beach of 1972, where there was no beach.

- [Liz] But as Miami Beach was struggling to protect their buildings, Ocean City was building right on the beach.

- [Steve] Since 1960, we haven't had a major storm.

And it's since '60s and clearly more like the '70s when we built all those high-rise buildings.

They've never been tested.

And they were all built during the most favorable conditions we can imagine.

There's a lot of controversy on how deep those pilings went, and of course...they claim, the people in Ocean City, claim that they went down to bedrock.

Well that's ridiculous because bedrock is 2000 feet down.

What they really drove those pilings into with the big, knock them down, is they hit clay.

A lot of times that was only 20, 30 feet down.

That's the reason why you can never let that shoreline erode back to those building foundations, 'cause that clay will turn to putty.

- [Liz] Duke geologist, Orrin Pilkey.

- [Orrin] Well, the thing that's frustrating to me, I guess, as an outsider again, is that I see in Ocean City a pattern that I have seen elsewhere that they, the city administration encourages unsafe development, and then gets money from the state and federal government to try to um, try to um... Try to do something about that unsafe development, that is try to pump up more sand, and try to build groins, and bulldoze beaches or whatever.

- [Liz] What do you mean by that, that they encourage unsafe development?

Where have they done that in Ocean City?

- [Orrin] Well, everywhere.

I mean...the very fact that they have allowed buildings to be built so close to the beach is unsafe development.

The fact that they've allowed high-rise condominiums to be built right next to the beach is extremely unsafe development.

- [Liz] In hindsight, do you think that the condominiums were built too close to the water?

- [Fish] Well, who's to say?

I mean, some of them has been here now for over 20 years, and I don't know of any condominiums, you know condominiums, everything's not a condominium, but the buildings that have been built, I don't know of any that's been lost to the ocean.

- [Liz] But some buildings appear dangerously close.

It happened that way because until about 15 years ago there was no building limit line in Ocean City.

And then one day someone who wanted the best view in town went too far.

- [Fish] Building right on the beach was not something new, but when they started the high rises and the multiunit buildings, the condominiums, the large buildings, and some of them being built very close to the ocean, at least people that lived here thought they were very close, I did.

That's what brought about the building limit line.

- [Orrin] A construction line is, is for idiots.

You need a rolling setback line, as the shoreline retreats, that setback line goes back with it.

And to just draw a line in the dust and say, okay you can do whatever you want behind that line is short-sighted, on a moving beach, of course it's shortsighted.

- [Liz] This stretch of beach is referred to by the locals as Little Miami or Condo Canyon.

Whether or not these buildings were allowed to be built too close to the water is an argument that will probably go on for years.

The fact is that the tax base here trails only Baltimore and Rockville among Maryland cities.

And in fact this one building, the Sea Watch, provides more tax revenue to the state than any town in Worcester County.

- [Fish] That is a lot of tax money, but look at the thousands of people that go there and rent those units, and enjoy Ocean City, and the beaches, they do it on their own choosing.

- [Liz] When you allow that kind of building to be built right on the beach, don't you create an environment, a social environment, a political environment, in which you need to take care of those people, you need to take care of the money that they bring into the state, and you need to keep those buildings intact and the beach that they come to see intact?

- [Fish] Sure we do, I think it's important that the government attempt to take care of it.

And I think that's what we're trying to do with the beach nourishment plan is to build more beach and give them more protection.

- [Liz] The beach replenishment plan is a massive construction project that will completely change the shoreline in Ocean City.

The project is similar to this one in Florida where sand was dredged from the bottom of the ocean and then pumped onto the beach.

When it's completed, a beach like this on 78th street will have both storm protection and wider beaches for vacationers.

Phase one is scheduled to begin next October.

That's when the state will come in and elevate the beach up to a level of 10 feet, and then widen the beach 100 feet from the construction line.

The cost to state and local government, $20 million.

Phase two, slated to begin around 1990, will be done by the Army Corps of Engineers.

They will build on the existing beach to form a 17 foot high dune, 98 feet wide, and then extend the beach 165 feet out to shore.

Phase two will also include a seawall, similar to this one in Florida, that extends three feet above the boardwalk.

The cost of phase two is $17 million.

And when it's over, a beach like this on 78th street will look more like this beach on Division Street, bordered by a wide dune.

- [Nancy] The beach replenishment project is a plan to do just that, replenish the beach.

It's going to be done in two phases.

- [Liz] But there is one hitch to the project.

Before phase two can begin, the state must obtain easements from almost 300 beachfront property owners.

So far they've gotten about 50.

At meetings like this one with the Pyramid Condominium, Project Manager, Nancy Howard explains why owners should give the government the right to come onto their property.

- [Nancy] The best thing about this, aside from the fact that it's going to create a wonderful recreation beach, it's going to, it'll give you the protection against the hurricanes, potential hurricanes, that we all need.

Phase one will give us protection against a 10-year storm.

Phase two will give us protection against a 100-year storm.

- At the present time, as the dune is constituted, and you can stand on a first floor patio and view the surf.

That's not going to change, you'll still be able to see the surf from a first floor patio?

- [Liz] In fact, if the unit is already built 17 feet above low tide, and most units built after 1975 are, the view will not be blocked by a dune, but you won't be able to walk out your first floor unit onto the beach anymore.

The dune, considered the first line of defense against a storm, will be planted with grass, and fenced, and access to the beach will be over walkways at every corner.

- I'm absolutely delighted that the government's going to step in and help save the beach.

As an owner down here, I've been naturally concerned about any kind of conservation that would take place, but if we don't have a beach, we don't have a building.

- I'm all for it.

I think, it's a very valuable thing to do, but I think that we need to be careful as to how the easement is worded, such that there will be no abuse in the future by anyone.

- [Liz] But not everyone sees the merits of the project.

Some local residents like Alger Abbott say, they are paying for what they call the mistakes of others.

- [Alger] Yes...I do, personally I think they realized a mistake had been made by issuing these permits too close to the ocean, and now all of a sudden, they want to bail 'em out.

I think it's ridiculous.

- [Sam] I also realize that something has to be done or there won't be any beach in 100 years, but I just don't like this idea.

- [Liz] Bob and Sam Griffin have been staying at 34th street for 10 years.

What concerns them is not being able to walk out their first floor unit onto the beach.

- [Sam] And another thing that concerns me, now who would maintain the dunes?

I mean, would they be littered, as they are other places, with paper filth and this and that and the other?

- [Liz] The replenished beach and dune will cost about $2 million a year to maintain.

But proponents of the plan say, that's a small price to pay for protection from storms.

- [Fish] Biggest problem with the biggest group of people that may object to giving the easement are people who has really never seen what nature can do.

They have never seen a storm.

If they think Gloria was a storm, they got a lot of thinking to do.

- [Liz] Gloria was a class four hurricane, vicious and unpredictable.

For a while it was like a child's spinning top, unsure of which direction it would take.

Luckily it missed Ocean City.

- [Steve] Ocean City never saw the impact of the storm.

They just saw the fringe effects, just a little bit of the fringe effects, which, as you know, tore up the boardwalk, eroded the beach considerably, just the fringe.

The wind speeds off shore were 135 miles per hour, and the water was domed up under the storm as much as eight to 12 feet above normal.

If it had come ashore, it would have really cut Ocean City to slivers, as they say.

It would probably overtop the entire beach, probably cut deep inlets through the barrier, all the way through its core, and we would have had massive, I mean millions and maybe tens to hundreds of millions worth of damage, and certainly a lot of destruction of buildings.

So absolutely, you had to evacuate.

If you hadn't evacuated and it came ashore, we're looking at tens of thousands of people dead.

- [Liz] To get an idea of what Gloria could have done, this is the damage done to Galveston, Texas three years ago when a hurricane named Alicia, much milder than Gloria, landed on top of the town.

Galveston is protected by a massive seawall, but still Alicia caused $100 million in damages.

The fact is that Ocean City hasn't had a major storm since 1962, and no one knows how these buildings would respond.

Is there a way to build a building so that it's hurricane proof?

- [George] Well, we think all these are, let's hope so.

- [Liz] But they haven't been tested yet.

- [George] Not real well.

- [Liz] Builders like George Purnell put their faith in modern construction techniques, walls designed to break away during storms, allowing water to flow underneath, and buildings bordered by a protective dune.

These are safeguards that will lessen the damage in the face of a major storm.

In a long-term sense, however, most agree that widening the beach is the best defense, but there are no guarantees.

A replenished beach requires constant maintenance and regular transfusions of sand.

- [Steve] How many of these areas can we afford?

As you know, it's coming down to the state taxpayer this time.

We're hoping to get federal matching funds, which is you and I. I just wonder as we find the beaches eroding all up and down the coastline, there's very few places I could point to where there's really any accretion.

So therefore, as we continue to build more of these high-rise expensive structures, which are immovable, next to the shoreline, who's going to pay that tab over the longer term, particularly when we're looking at a large national budget?

- [Orrin] We don't know how much it's really going to cost in the long term, nor do we know how long the beach is going to stay there once it's put in.

So there are a lot of questions that only will be answered once the beach is put in there.

- [Fish] One person doesn't have any better crystal ball than anybody else.

You can pump the beach in this year and lose it all, certainly, within a year if you had, maybe if you had a bad storm, depending on where the tides and winds, and everything else, what nature does, or it may last for a number of years.

But the point is, if you don't pump it in and you have the storm, what's going to protect you?

- [Liz] And so, Ocean City will move forward with a new awareness that what is needed is a balance between the development that has made this town flourish and the mighty Atlantic that has made it all possible.

And with the knowledge that the future here, like the past, will only be determined by Mother Nature.

This is Liz O'Neill reporting.

(waves crash loudly)