The Public’s Radio — Dude, where’s my beach?

South Kingstown resident Taylor Ellis walks north of Narragansett Town Beach on May 15, 2024. Credit: Alex Nunes/The Public’s Radio

May 28, 2024

By Alex Nunes — The summer beach season is here, but the beaches themselves look very different this year. Coastal communities are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair shoreline damage from last winter’s severe storms. The damage is a warning sign to Rhode Island of the tough road ahead as climate-related sea level rise and increasingly heavy storms continue to swallow up the beaches.

Editor’s note: This story is part of “Washout: Our vanishing beaches,” a series about the reshaping of Rhode Island’s shoreline.

Taylor Ellis loves the Rhode Island shoreline so much that about a year-and-half-ago he decided to see as much of it as possible. By foot. The long-time South Kingstown resident walked most of the state’s ocean-facing beach: from Westerly up the coast, down to Little Compton and even into Massachusetts. He walked around the islands where he could pass through legally – Aquidneck, Jamestown and Block Island. 

“I really, really loved doing that,” Ellis said on a recent visit to Narragansett Town Beach. “Just feeling the sea air on your face, hearing the ocean waves coming to the shore – all of that, with me, just gives me a feeling of peace.”

But his journey was also an eye-opener. Ellis saw, even back in 2022, how the beaches are disappearing. Some of the hardest hit areas in Rhode Island have been eroding at a rate of five feet per year, or 250 feet over the last half century, according to J.P. Walsh, professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. The Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council says, on average, the state’s coast is losing .7 feet per year to erosion, and barriers are eroding at a rate of .9 feet per year.

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