Image by Frank Carini. United States.
The seed that became a nonprofit ocean advocacy group was planted on a cold January day in 2006, when Dave McLaughlin was told he couldn’t park on a particular road near Salve Regina University and the Cliff Walk.
He and a friend had been surfing at a popular Newport, R.I., spot at the end of Ruggles Avenue. It was a busy day in that section of the city, famous for The Breakers and other Gilded Age monuments, as three events were taking place, including one at Salve Regina University, so the surfers had to park two blocks away on Shepard Avenue.
Multiple Authors Article
In late October 2012, about a day after Superstorm Sandy’s initial surge battered much of Rhode Island’s coast, especially its open-ocean southern shoreline, Janice Sassi navigated her way through a parking lot filled with “mountains of mud” to find a “moonscape.”
“The dunes were completely flat,” recalled Sassi, manager of the 86-acre Napatree Point Conservation Area. “I thought it was done. It looked like one big beach.”
Sandy had ripped chunks of beachgrass from sections, and one area was forced back some 30 feet. At that moment and for days after, Sassi was concerned about Napatree Point’s future.
Multiple Authors Article
In 2015 the pavilion at South Kingstown Town Beach had to be moved back 300 feet because of the beating it was taking being so close to the shore. Image courtesy of Town of South Kingstown.
As increasingly frequent and intense storms batter the Ocean State’s weary coast, the consequences, such as eroding beaches, flooded homes, compromised public streets and threatened infrastructure, become more common. While efforts to mitigate these impacts are underway along Rhode Island’s 400-plus miles of coastline, municipalities must balance loss with timing and limited money.
Twenty-one major natural disasters between 1938 and 2015, including the “Great New England Hurricane” of 83 years ago, punished this Washington County coastal community, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Significant storm events hit Washington County often referred to locally as South County once every 5.75 years, according to a 2018 re