. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. 'Frederic' erased miles of houses Photo by Jerry Machemehl. Frederic left open wounds in many Gulf Shores buildings On September 23, Spencer Rogers picked his way through the odd, broken stumps in the beach of Gulf Shores, on the eastern side of Mobile Bay, Alabama. The beach was deserted, almost barren, as if it had been shaved, leav- ing just the stumps, like razor stubble, poking through the sand. Eleven days before, those stumps were the wooden pilings under houses, dozens of them. Now most of those ho
. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. 'Frederic' erased miles of houses Photo by Jerry Machemehl. Frederic left open wounds in many Gulf Shores buildings On September 23, Spencer Rogers picked his way through the odd, broken stumps in the beach of Gulf Shores, on the eastern side of Mobile Bay, Alabama. The beach was deserted, almost barren, as if it had been shaved, leav- ing just the stumps, like razor stubble, poking through the sand. Eleven days before, those stumps were the wooden pilings under houses, dozens of them. Now most of those houses, or what pieces remained of them, were strewn through the woods far inland. Rogers, Sea Grant's coastal engineering specialist, had come with Jerry Machemehl to see first-hand what happens to buildings during a hurricane. Rogers and Machemehl were on the beach, taking photographs and searching the ruins for clues, long before the major cleanup was underway. "That stretch of beach had been almost completely developed," Rogers recalls. "When we saw it, most of the houses were ; Frederic was not an "extreme" hurricane, or even an unusually severe one. It was about average. But its 90 mph winds and 12-foot storm surge had reshaped the coast, eroding as much as 100 feet of shoreline, topping dunes, submerging miles of land and wrecking houses, condominiums and motels. "The problem was not so much the wind," Rogers says. "Most of those houses could have taken the winds. The problem was that the pilings, in most cases, were either too short or in- adequately attached to the floor struc- ; Rogers says that he found most of the wrecked houses were toppled when erosion removed sand from around the pilings. When key pilings were ex- posed, with no sand to support them, they collapsed. Unbalanced on their foundations, the houses then snapped the remaining pilings and floated away. "Most of the destruction could have been
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