See how Hurricane Idalia reshaped Pinellas’ beaches

Change is the nature of barrier islands. Wind and waves constantly move their sand, rendering their shapes fluid. Storms carve paths through them. They migrate, grow, shrink and sometimes disappear entirely.

Life on many of Pinellas County’s barrier islands, like others where humans have built homes and industries, represents a constant battle against nature. Sea walls have been built around them in an attempt to wrangle them into static shapes. Sand has been pumped there at regular intervals for the past few decades: To the federal government, the process is crucial to bolstering the beaches’ ability to protect infrastructure from storms; to locals, it also maintains the county’s greatest tourism draw and important natural habitats.

But a single storm can wipe away much of that work, and Hurricane Idalia did. It was in many ways the perfect storm to cause massive erosion on the coast, said Ping Wang, a professor in the University of South Florida’s School of Geosciences. Storm surge allowed waves to reach farther onto land, pounding away not only at the already depleted beaches but also at dune fields that took decades to grow.

As Idalia approached, on Aug. 28, Wang and two of his graduate students visited several Pinellas beaches, where he took photos. On Aug. 31, with the waves still choppy from the just-departed storm, they returned to the same spots, and Wang repeated the process.

The striking before-and-after photos show the toll Idalia took, even with a glancing blow: After studying erosion on the west-central Florida coast for two decades, Wang said the erosion was the most dramatic he’d ever seen from a single storm on Pinellas’ beaches.

Pass-a-Grille Beach

Looking closely at Wang’s before-and-after photos from Pass-a-Grille (above), those who have visited will see a familiar landmark: the bright yellow roof of the Hurricane Seafood Restaurant. But the stretch of beach in front of it has been rendered nearly unrecognizable.

The once-healthy dune field is especially worth noting, Wang said. Pass-a-Grille was heavily eroded by Hurricane Elena in 1985, and it took years of protection and nourishment for the dune to grow.

“This storm took out 30 years’ worth of dune development,” he said.

The Pass-a-Grille dune field was hit so hard in part because there wasn’t much beach left to protect it, Wang said. Like many other Pinellas beaches, it’s due for renourishment — new sand hasn’t been added there in a decade.

That process was set to begin this fall but has been postponed: It’s one of three renourishment project areas on hold in Pinellas as the Army Corps of Engineers says it needs all owners of beachfront property in the project areas to provide permanent public access to part of their land. The Long Key project, which includes Pass-a-Grille and Upham beaches, has a handful of holdouts, while the larger Sand Key project to the north still needs more than 200 owners to promise public access.

Sunset Beach

Like Pass-a-Grille, Sunset Beach, in Treasure Island, was already heavily eroded before Idalia, Wang said. The pre-storm photo shows about 20-30 feet of sand, he estimated; a renourishment would take it to about 150 feet.

The buckled swimming-pool deck seen in the post-storm photo was among the most significant structural damage Wang saw, he said. Out of view, the storm had driven sand into nearby driveways and Gulf Boulevard.

But one of Idalia’s silver linings is also visible here: The storm moved fast, battering the Pinellas coast for about 10 hours, Wang said. Had it been slower or stalled off the coast, the damage to beachfront property could have been much more widespread.

“If the storm lasted a few more hours, that kind of beige-looking building would take on some serious problems,” he said. “We are really walking a fine line. We are not giving ourselves much of a buffer.”

Madeira Beach

Madeira Beach experienced erosion similar to Sunset, Wang said, but it also shows how a wider beach can provide protection — no structural damage here. A cordoned-off turtle nest is visible in the pre-storm photo, a reminder that Pinellas’ beaches are a crucial home for endangered species. The nest was washed away during the storm.

Indian Rocks Beach

Like at Pass-a-Grille, Idalia eroded dunes on this section of Indian Rocks Beach. Unlike the other beach, this dune field was far younger: It grew after the last round of major erosion here, from Tropical Storm Debby in 2012.

“We have been able to maintain a relatively wide, healthy beach over there,” Wang said. “So that dune we’re looking at is basically 12 years of dune growth.”

Wang chose this location for another reason, he said. The sea walls along Pinellas beaches don’t go in a straight line — they jut out toward the sea and come back landward based on the property they’re meant to protect. The building visible here comes closer to the water than the others around it, Wang said; with the beach in front of it now totally eroded, it could be hit harder by a future storm.

“It’s a little late for us, because we’re heavily developed,” he said. “If we do more development, setting it back a little more helps.”

Belleair Beach

This area of Belleair Beach is “a very aggressive erosion hot spot,” Wang said. Most erosion either pushes sand landward or pulls it seaward, and when it’s the latter, the beach can sometimes partially recover as sand washes back in. Here, though, the sand tends to move north and south.

Renourishment, which takes place here on a five-year cycle, extends the beach about 200 feet. Because it’s so prone to erosion, it’s not unusual to see all that sand gone by the time the next renourishment comes around. That’s where Belleair was before the storm: Renourishment is scheduled for next year but likely won’t take place amid the standoff between Pinellas County and the Corps over the Corps’ policies.

Now, Wang said, going to Belleair Beach is like stepping into a time machine: This “is what it looked like in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s, before the west-central coast of Florida started this large-scale nourishment.”

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