National Park Service Management of Coastal Resources
Addressing the threat of coastal change to the National Seashore’s public facilities and structures are of top concern for the NPS. The condition of these assets are carefully monitored and managed according to their structural needs because of their value as community resources as well as their significance to the culture and history of the Cape. Long term monitoring is essential to help plan accordingly for the upkeep of these resources, in light of the relative unpredictability of coastal change. Consideration of how these changes will affect the visitor experience and satisfaction is also forefront.
It is important to note that the Marindin Project is an especially timely study because it will be able to provide a historical analysis of coastal change over the past 120 years and assist in predicting future changes to the coastline. This is invaluable for coastal management because it will assist in long range planning and predictive modeling:
Cape Cod National Seashore’s public facilities and infrastructure are increasingly threatened by coastal change at a time when the pressures from users magnify the value of these facilities. Since coastal change is unpredictable and construction requires a long planning horizon, expense to the government can be significant and disruption of public expectations likely. Uncertainty and short-term unpredictability of change leads to emergency actions with higher attendant costs and periods of lower visitor satisfaction.[i]
Visitations to the Cape have continued to increase exponentially over the past twenty years, in accordance with a greater demand for park facilities and coastal access.[ii] Increasing access is a difficult balance because the coastline can be negatively influenced by consistent heavy use and visitor traffic. To keep visitor satisfaction high, the park is heavily invested in the maintenance of the park’s facilities and assets to the best of their financial ability. The challenge of maintaining these assets is that it is costly: preserving them may necessitate moving a structure a number of times because the dune continues to erode or maintaining a parking lot being inundated by sand.
In 1996 and 1998 the lighthouses at Nauset and the Truro Highlands were moved… [and erosion caused] incremental losses occur at all the ocean beaches (except Race Point) requiring new stairways, cleanup and repaving. Even at sites like Race Point and Herring Cove beach parking lots require the annual upkeep of sand clearing and repair.
Assessing Structures for Preservation
When assessing an affected NPS structure, several questions are asked to assess the feasibility and importance of relocation, removal, rebuilding or redesign. To cite a selection of this criteria:
- Is there an alternative location for the facility that would not impair public use of the beach or resource area but would reduce its environmental impact?
- Is the facility currently preventing natural coastal processes from taking place, such as coastal erosion, dune migration, sediment supply to adjacent beaches, flooding or flood protection, or vegetation succession?
- Is the facility serving a core public use or park management function? Can this function be provided at an alternative location?
- Is the facility on top of, in, or encompassing sensitive resources, such as a barrier dune, wetland, coastal bank, pond, or ocean beach, or is it causing impact to adjacent residences? 7
This rubric is asked of every facility that requires preservation, illustrating the way in which the NPS is critical of even the impact of its own facilities within the National Seashore and how it may be impeding on natural processes. By in large, most NPS facilities are located in stable coastal areas but over time, an area that was stable may become volatile and that structure will need to be assessed according to this criteria.
The NPS is ultimately a pragmatic and resource-limited agency that has a restricted amount of funding to be able to invest in maintenance projects of this nature because of competing demands. The NPS prefers to invest in projects that retain their functionality but have a lower operating cost if possible like transitioning a costly historic lighthouse to a simpler solar powered lighthouse rather than continuing to invest in assets that require a costly upkeep. In regard to the Highland Lighthouse, Gerard Smith, a docent, articulates this trend:
The government and the coastguard would not maintain these [lighthouses] because they are expensive to keep up. They would certainly not have maintained the lighthouse structure and building here because they didn’t have the budget for it but they absolutely would have had a light here probably operated by a solar powered battery system to be of use to navigation. I think a lot of people assume because of the development of radar and GPS that lighthouses are just interesting artifacts but for the boaters out there be they amateur or professional they still rely on lighthouses.
Lighthouses reside in a significant part of the Cape’s history and are still greatly valued for both their functional aid in navigation and as iconic parts of the scenic landscape. While this remains true, because of funding limitations within the NPS, projects such as erecting a solar powered lighthouse in lieu of what currently stands as the Highland Lighthouse would have been a preferential replacement. Smith remarks on how this transition is also reflected in greater trends within the US Lighthouse Service as the manpower that was once dedicated to operating lighthouses has been significantly downsized.
The history of the US Lighthouse Service has been to do things in the most economical way possible but at one time it took three lighthouse keepers to operate the light here and today there are three coast guardsmen stationed at Woods Hole that maintain this lighthouse and twenty two others between Provincetown and New Bedford.
[i] Giese, Graham, and Mark Adams. Cape Cod Shoreline Change and Resource Protection. Prop. Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies and Cape Cod National Seashore (U.S. National Park Service).
[ii] Giese, Graham, and Mark Adams. Cape Cod Shoreline Change and Resource Protection. Prop. Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies and Cape Cod National Seashore (U.S. National Park Service).
