Metro

The City of Miami Beach has a hot new tourist attraction. Nothing to rival the Grand Canyon or even the Liberace Museum, but this natural wonder does involve something of an imposing edifice. Several times each hour people of all ages approach the wooden stairs that normally serve as the 27th Street beach access point from the city’s boardwalk. But they are blocked by a four-foot piece of picket fencing, draped with yellow tape marked “CAUTION.” They look down and try to make sense of what appears to be a sunken beach. “They are going to make an attraction?” asked an elderly woman who hobbled up to the barrier with her husband and peered over.

In order to observe the amazing precipice, however, pedestrians must step onto the sands south of 27th Street or north of 29th and amble along water’s edge. There it looms, a wall of cappuccino-brown earth, nearly three blocks long and nine feet high at one point. By day it looks more like a vertical bank of the Euphrates; by night the edge of a crater.

Geologists and those in the beach engineering business actually refer to the site as a “hot spot.” It is one of three between South Point and Surfside where the shoreline bends at a greater angle than at other places. The ocean constantly erodes sand from the beach and pushes it south. But at the hot spots, because of the angle at which the waves and current strike the beach, erosion is accelerated.

In mid-2002, the Army Corps of Engineers created three elongated piles of boulders on the shoreline between the 29th and 34th street access points. The rocks run parallel to the shore and their purpose is to block waves, thus retarding the natural southerly flow of sand. When the federal engineering crew completed the project they warned that a major infusion of sand at the southern edge of the project area might be needed sometime in the ensuing two years. If not, the waves whipping around the southernmost rocks could create a lagoon. They were right.

“Unfortunately during the winter season, the winds shift and the sand transport shifts a little bit, and the southern side of that structure needs to be filled in,” concedes Jordanna Rubin, Miami Beach’s environmental resource manager. Other than that the breakwaters are “definitely working,” she assures. “There would probably be no beach at this point if there were no structure. A lot of people like to jump and say, öOh, it’s the breakwater that’s causing the problem.’ It’s really not.”

No, not the whole breakwater, just the southern tip of it, where a lot of ocean energy ends up. “You’re always basically transferring energy. There’s always some effect,” says Don McNeill, a marine geology and geophysics scientist at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. “It’s like traffic flow. When you block traffic on one street, it goes heavier on other streets to get around it.”

Given that the beach is “our number one asset,” as Max Sklar, Miami Beach’s acting director of tourism and cultural development, and others like to say, one might wonder why authorities have yet to engineer the massive sand drop needed to preserve the city’s money machine.

Rubin stops short of blaming the other two bureaucracies involved in the equation: the Miami-Dade Department of Environmental Resources Management (DERM) and Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). “We started a while ago to get permits for this,” Rubin explains. “Unfortunately with the hurricane season and bureaucracy in general, we’ve kind of gotten a little stalled. But we’re almost at the end of the tunnel and it should be no more than a week or two and we can start filling back in that area.” DERM is responsible for securing a permit from the state, but has yet to do so.

About 7000 cubic feet of “beach compatible sand” is in a storage area at 46th Street ready for deployment. Another 30,000 cubic feet are expected from a contractor who excavated sand for a Miami Beach high-rise project. “It’s really hard to find compatible sand,” Rubin notes. “It has to be screened. It has to be turtle-friendly, and the sand crabs and stuff have to be able to make their habitats in it. So you’ve got to be careful what you put out there.”

Lest anyone decry the loss of another slice of nature by human hands, or start dreaming about marketing the 29th Street Cliffs, Rubin, who worked for an energy policy institute in New York before taking her Miami Beach job, hastens to remind everyone that Miami Beach is a barrier island. “There was no beach at one point. It’s actually manmade and has to be maintained. In the winter season you just have to keep an eye on it. But during the summer it should fill back in on its own. It’s a natural cycle.”

“I wouldn’t say that, because an undisturbed barrier island system typically has a beach, just because that’s the high-energy transition from ocean waves to vegetation,” McNeill says, noting that the only natural cycle on Florida’s east coast is “a net transport of sand from north to south.”

Meanwhile sand combers are finding the beauty of the exposed sea oat roots and the layers of shell-chocked sedimentation below as breathtaking as the frothy turquoise surf. “It looks like they cut it with a big knife!” exclaims a long-haired Uruguayan man, moving one arm in a big downward chopping motion. A young woman with the Federal Highway Administration, in town from Atlanta for a conference, thinks it would make a good backdrop for a photo. “It’s nice,” she remarks. “Kind of attractive.”

Cliff Notes