If you’ve heard of Upham Beach, you have either lived in the area long enough to hear about it via word of mouth, or you took multiple wrong turns trying to navigate St. Pete Beach’s somewhat confusing northern half.
For those who do discover Upham, it becomes a default beach. While other beach accesses are scant on parking and typically involve tolerating gnarly beach traffic, Upham has tons of parking spaces and, if you’re coming from the north, you’ll get there after just a few right-hand turns through a residential neighborhood.
It’s a favorite of local surfers (on the rare instances when waves are present), skim-boarders and fishermen, and is wide enough for everyone to find a stretch of sand.
It’s also the subject of intensive scientific study, as well as the recipient of millions in city, county and federal dollars.
That’s because the beach is rapidly eroding, and has been for years.
Scientists have long been trying to figure out how to keep more of Upham’s beach sand in place.
“Basically, along our coast, the sand tends to move from north to south,” says USF coastal geology professor Ping Wang. “That is driven by the winter cold front passages. In the wintertime, you have a cold front coming in every ten days or weeks, then you have a few days of northerly wind that really drives the waves coming from the northerly direction. Those waves tend to move sand from the north.”
This movement of sand would be fine — the beach would stay intact — if it weren’t for seawalls and jetties aimed at maintaining the width and depth of Blind Pass Inlet, which lies directly to the north of Upham Beach and separates St. Pete Beach from Sunset Beach at neighboring Treasure Island’s southern tip. That inlet is part of a key route for boaters and is crucial for the health of the waterway.
But the interruption of the flow of drifting sand essentially starves Upham Beach.
“Basically…the [jetties] at Blind Pass block the flowing of sand from north to south,” Wang said. “Upham Beach is located right at the headwater, if you will, so the sand is leaving Upham Beach and moving to the south. There’s sand leaving that stretch of beach, but no sand coming to that stretch of the beach.”
That’s why every four years, the county, with funding from the state, dredges sand from either Egmont Shoals or Blind Pass and pumps it onto Upham. Beach nourishment is common in numerous vulnerable areas along Pinellas County’s coast. It’s an expensive practice paid for in large part by federal and state money, as well as local bed tax dollars. Some of those funding sources can be tenuous, which is why people like Tampa Bay Beaches Chamber of Commerce
Director Robin Sollie work so hard to inform elected officials of the importance of funding.
“If we’re not nourishing those beaches, we won’t have beach for [tourists] to come and enjoy a sunset, or have their kid build a sandcastle, or have a picnic and all the great things we can do on our beaches,” she said.
The sand that replenishes the beach doesn’t take too long to wash away, though — hence the experiments in alternative means of stabilization.
If you go to Upham Beach at the right time after enough sand has eroded, you’ll see what looks like a bunch of yellow school buses (or perhaps stranded manatees) half-buried in the sand in a T formation. There are five such groupings on the beach, some more exposed than others. They’re called T-groins, though it’s also acceptable to refer to them as geotubes.
They’re experimental, said Wang, who has been studying the temporary structures’ slowing effect on erosion. The county is gearing up to replace them with four permanent structures in the coming year; they’ll be made of rock, like a jetty.
“Geotubes don’t last very long,” Wang said. “They can be destroyed by natural forces, and they can also be damaged easily by people. Rock, on the other hand, doesn’t move.”
Wang, accordingly, favors the rock.
“You head out there on a rough day, you can see the waves crash right over the tube. The rock structure, it will break the wave considerably more efficiently.”
County officials hope the rockpiles will help save the county money by cutting back on Upham Beach’s need for nourishment from once every three to five years to once every six or seven years.
But not everyone is confident that using rock rather than plastic will be effective.
The Suncoast Surfrider Foundation, an environmental nonprofit, is against the rock structures, citing concern over their safety for beachgoers, lack of proof that the T-groin structures are effective, and skepticism over the project’s total cost.
But there is another group that seems to like the geotubes just fine, albeit for another purpose. If you go to Upham’s northern reaches you’ll likely see them standing on the geotubes, fishing.
This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 2, 2015.