Parts of Texas’ shoreline were unrecognizable after Hurricane Beryl wreaked havoc on the Gulf Coast, destroyed dunes and immediately caused the shore to become largely inaccessible, new drone imagery shows.
University of Houston researchers captured images along the shoreline near Galveston and Matagorda Bay before and after the devastating storm made landfall on July 8. The images show a washed-out beachfront with damaged dunes.
Large channels immediately opened up along the shoreline in some places after the storm surge retreated.
Geologists with the university are conducting an environmental study on Beryl’s effects and working to calculate the amount of land along the Texas coast that eroded between May and July this year.
Sargent, a coastal Texas city between Matagorda and Galveston, sustained the most damage from Hurricane Beryl, Shuhab Khan, a geology professor working on the study, said in a statement, according to the university. That’s where the hurricane came ashore.
“Sargent Island experienced the most significant impact and is unrecognizable,” Khan said. “The flooding, overwash and scarping caused by Beryl wiped out nearly all the dunes and left the area virtually inaccessible.”
He said the data being collected by researchers at the university will help to quantify erosion along the coast, track the land’s recovery process, and improve predictive models for storm damage.
“Our ongoing research demonstrates that restored dunes along the Texas coast are vulnerable to major storms,” Khan said. “It emphasizes the need for adaptive, proactive dune management and regular monitoring to assess the durability of these restoration efforts.”
You should click over and see the pictures. There was a similar study done after Harvey in 2017 that found a massive amount of erosion compared to what the coast normally experiences in a year. The researchers are still determining what the total numbers are for Beryl.