Surf’s up BY AL DIAMON

Michael Heath, executive director of the Christian Civic League of Maine, often acts as if he’s a couple of converts shy of a congregation. So it wasn’t at all out of character when Heath implied in a recent email newsletter that God sent Hurricane Katrina to destroy New Orleans because the city was about to host a gay pride celebration at which people might dance naked on Bourbon Street.

Apparently, Heath is unaware that people, many of them heterosexual, have been dancing naked on Bourbon Street for decades without bringing down God’s fury on a wide swath of the fully clothed, Bible-thumping South.

So it should be easy to dismiss Heath as a guy who can’t resist preying on any convenient disaster in order to advance his homophobic agenda. Except for an odd coincidence.

Ferry Beach in Saco hosts an annual gay pride celebration (although one devoid of public nudity). And Ferry Beach and neighboring Camp Ellis are slowly sinking into the sea.

The wrath of God? Just like New Orleans?

Well, no and yes. The flooding and beach erosion that have plagued the area for over half a century don’t appear to be the result of divine retribution, since those problems began years before men in feather boas and women in leather chaps took to marching. But Camp Ellis’s situation does derive from a cause similar to that behind the levee breaks and general incompetence that overwhelmed the Crescent City:

The federal government.

Just as the US Army Corps of Engineers designed the Big Easy’s original levees and, for more than 50 years, resisted efforts to correct their flaws (for an excellent book on the subject, read Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 And How It Changed America, by John M. Barry), so too did the Corps design and build the breakwater at the mouth of the Saco River that’s slowly destroying Camp Ellis and Ferry Beach.

The stone jetty on the north side of the river was originally constructed in the 1880s, but has been expanded several times. After each addition, erosion and flooding increased. Residents blamed the breakwater, which deflects waves onto the beach while preventing sand washed down the river from replacing that flushed away by the ocean. The Corps blamed severe storms.

In the 1960s, the jetty was lengthened (it’s now over 6000 feet). Since then, about three dozen homes, two city streets, and a couple million cubic yards of sand have vanished into the Atlantic. At least 23 scientific studies of the problem have been conducted at a cost of over $1.5 million. Nearly all those studies, including several done by and for the Corps of Engineers, have concluded the breakwater is at least partially responsible for the destruction. (None of those investigations blamed God. Or gays.)

In 1993, the Corps invested a half-million dollars in a house-lot-sized model of the area, designed to measure the impact of waves on the beach. After months of sloshing around, the engineers concluded the answer to the erosion was building another breakwater running parallel to shore a quarter mile out to sea.

Civilian scientists claimed this new construction would result in Old Orchard Beach and Pine Point being washed away by the redirected force of the ocean. One expert told the Maine Sunday Telegram the plan was "inexcusably incompetent" because the Corps hadn’t bothered to include these adjoining areas in its expensive model. Nevertheless, the government engineers claimed their study was 90-percent reliable.

However reliable it was, there was no question the project would be expensive. So while the Corps spent hundreds of thousands of additional dollars over the last 10 years studying the problem, it didn’t actually build anything.

This spring, a series of storms pounded Surf Street in Ferry Beach to pebbles. In a matter of hours, a decade-long city-funded project to restore sand dunes and plant dune grass was smashed by the waves into scattered patches of mud. Camps that had never been threatened found the ocean creeping toward their front steps.

The Corps (and Maine’s congressional delegation) asked Congress for $25 million to build a modified out-to-sea breakwater. The House agreed, but a Senate committee cut the appropriation down to $20 million. The matter remains in limbo, although it’s likely enough money will soon be approved to begin construction.

Meanwhile, less expensive ideas developed by citizen groups and civil engineers — lowering the breakwater to allow some waves to pass over it, roughing its surface to absorb wave energy, dredging river sand to replenish the beaches or buying the most threatened houses and tearing them down — languish like flotsam in a tide pool.

Speaking of stuff washed up by the tide, if Michael Heath had studied his Bible, he’d know God promised not to destroy the world a second time by flood. Unfortunately, the Army Corps of Engineers has made no similar pledge. Until it does, head for high ground.

Think I’m all wet? Email ishmaelia@gwi.net, and run me through the wringer.