VILANO BEACH, Fla. — Restoring the dunes in St. Johns County can sometimes look like an uphill battle as storms and high tides wash away re-nourishment work every year. One expert points out that putting the sand back isn't enough to keep the sand dunes in place.
Beach erosion is becoming an ongoing and expensive problem as storms become more frequent.
Kevin Brown, who works with the Sea Turtle Patrol in Duval County and has been involved with multiple beach restoration projects, has seen the destruction get worse over the years.
"The Nor'easter are more intense the hurricanes that just miss us are more intense," Brown said.
St. Johns County is just finishing a restoration project that started last year where more than 480,000 cubic yards of sand was replaced along 11.5 Miles of shoreline.
The county is still gathering data for how much sand was lost during hurricane Ian and Nicole, but for comparison we looked at one estimate for sand lost in Jacksonville for the same distance of shoreline, which totaled 1.2 million cubic yards of sand.
If we expect similar numbers, that means St Johns County could have lost more than double what was replaced last year, leaving some to wonder its worth putting sand back on the beach.
"The question is do we need to do this, the answer is yes, cause we don't let this occur naturally there's to much development," Brown said.
But brown believes dumping sand onto the dunes isn't enough.
"Add to the vegetation, the sea weed, the sea oats, the sea grasses, so that when we do get these big storms, we don't lose the whole dune, we lose half of the dune," Brown said.
St. Johns County is still collecting data along the 42 miles of coastline on storm damage and potential restoration projects.