Breach has Chatham riding a tide of uncertainty
 The ocean cut an opening through Chatham's Nauset Beach peninsula this week that grew to about 150 yards by yesterday. (US Coast Guard Auxiliary) |
This week’s fierce northeaster punched a hole through Nauset Beach peninsula in Chatham, creating an island with a tiny colony of summer cottages and leaving other houses vulnerable to erosion if the breach continues to widen.
On Wednesday, the ocean cut an opening 50 feet wide, but by yesterday it had grown to about 150 yards, Chatham harbormaster Stuart Smith said, and the Atlantic was getting close to a house.
‘‘It’s pretty ominous,’’ Smith said yesterday afternoon after flying over the area during high tide. Officials hope the cut will fill in naturally, but they won’t know if it will for several days. If the breach continues to widen and deepen, the loss of the protective beach could put houses on the mainland at risk of damage from erosion and flooding.
‘‘We have to wait and see what happens,’’ he said.
The storm pummeled coastal areas from Cape Cod to Maine on Sunday and Monday, tipping a house on Nantucket from a dune onto the beach and breaking through a barrier beach that had connected Chappaquiddick to 8Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard. (A woman killed with her 4-year-old granddaughter on Monday when their car was swept into the Little River in Lebanon, Maine, was identified yesterday as Danvers native Donna Dube, 50.)
In Provincetown, the storm eroded public ways to beaches; and the town has asked the state to repair the foot paths by dredging sand that piled up elsewhere. Scituate’s coast was also battered, but damage to structures was minimal, a state official said.
Chatham is often the epicenter for erosion during storms on Cape Cod. Sitting at the Cape’s elbow, the community’s beachfronts are in constant flux as waves deposit sediment at the same time vast amounts are washed out to sea. The result is a coastline that no cartographer can keep up with, and boats are known to get stranded on sandy shoals that appear seemingly overnight.
Still, significant coastal changes happen only every few decades. In 1987, a powerful winter storm cut through the middle of the long, narrow Nauset barrier beach that had protected downtown Chatham from the Atlantic, allowing the sea to eventually wash away 10 mainland houses.
Today, the gap is more than a mile wide. This week’s breach occurred about 3 miles north of the cut and 6 miles south of the Nauset Beach parking lot in Orleans.
Yet the ocean gives back, too, most recently during a Thanksgiving storm that deposited enough sand to reconnect remote South Monomy Island to mainland Chatham for the first time in 50 years.
This week, only minor damage was reported to houses near the new Chatham breach, although Coast Guard, local and state officials were keeping a close watch on the area yesterday afternoon.
The breach is flanked by two small settlements. On the north side, First Village has a dozen or so summer cottages, including the one that has water near it.
On the south side, Second Village has a dozen cottages completely cut off from the mainland. Smith said most of the houses in the villages appear safe for now.
He said he is worried that if the new inlet continues to grow, houses on the mainland could be at risk because they will no longer have Nauset Beach, known locally as North Beach, to protect them.
Jim Mahala, a coastal geologist with the state Department of Environmental Protection, said that normally he would anticipate that the breach would close because it probably wouldn’t get a large volume of water flushing through it during each tide.
Most of the water between Nauset Harbor and the mainland flushes out through the inlet that was created in 1987. But he said he had not seen the cut and wanted to see what happens to it over the next few days.
If the breach remains, Mahala said, the town could ask the state for permission to plug the hole with sand or possibly protect vulnerable houses with sand bags.
But he cautioned that the area is hard to reach and that the state would have to make sure no environmental damage would occur as a result of any attempt to tame the coastal movement.
Smith and Orleans Park Superintendent Paul Fulcher said plugging such a gap would be difficult.
‘‘Any time you are dealing with Mother Nature and the ocean, any work only stalls things,’’ Fulcher said.
‘‘You are putting off the inevitable. Mother Nature is strong, and she is going to do what she is going to do.’’
Globe Correspondent Nathan Hurst contributed to this report. Beth Daley can be reached at bdaley@globe.com.
