Shared from the 1/16/2022 Houston Chronicle eEdition

Surfside Beach builds dunes with Christmas trees

Volunteers turn out in beach town for a tradition started in the 1980s

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Mark Mulligan / Staff photographer

Angleton High School FFA student Riley Garza pulls a recycled Christmas tree over to classmates Saturday for Dunes Day.

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Mark Mulligan / Staff photographer

Volunteers lash together discarded trees to give sand and grass a place to build larger dunes along the beach at the San Luis Pass.

For more than four decades, volunteers in this beach town have been fighting a never-ending battle against rising sea levels and coastal erosion with an unusual weapon — discarded Christmas trees.

No one can quite remember who came up with the idea. But every year after Christmas, they fan out along the beach and tie down hundreds or even thousands of dead trees to restore vital sand dunes that protect this barrier island from destructive storm surges.

The tree branches create baby dunes by trapping loose sand. As the dunes grow and coastal grasses take root on top of them, the trees decompose and nourish the grass, which helps ensure that the dunes don’t blow away.

Officials say it’s a clever way of putting the trees to good use instead of wasting them in a landfill.

“Without a dune there, the water’s just going to come straight through in high tides and things like that, so the dunes are our protection,” said Gregg Bisso, Surfside’s mayor and a former president of the Save Our Beach Association, which helps organize the annual Dunes Day event.

About 80 volunteers showed up early Saturday to spread up to 1,000 Christmas trees on the beach using wooden stakes and twine that will decompose along with the trees. The volunteers endured strong winds from a cold front that flung sand in their eyes and tossed some trees along the beach like tumbleweeds.

“I know there’s some good people here who don’t want to lose their homes,” said Zane Dietz, a 15-year-old freshman at Angleton High School who spent the morning dragging trees into position with his agricultural science class.

Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon said laying the groundwork for new sand dunes is an effective, short-term solution to protect beaches. But he stressed that it’s ultimately a “Band-Aid” against the global crisis of rising sea levels caused by climate change.

“It can help at a hyperlocal level,” Nielsen-Gammon said. “It’s not a long-term solution. And climate change will eventually make what’s being done irrelevant as the ocean keeps getting higher.”

Rising sea levels make storm surges from hurricanes more powerful. Levels along sections of the Texas coast are rising between 3.5 and 6.6 millimeters every year, according to a report last year by the state’s climatologist office, and most of the coastline is receding.

Climate scientists also predict busier hurricane seasons as the planet warms. The goal of this year’s Dunes Day was to restore the damage caused by Hurricane Nicholas last year.

“We’re doing what we can do,” said Toni Capretta, Surf-side’s mayor pro tem and president of the Save Our Beach Association. “It’s a matter of getting everybody involved. Citizens have to start changing the way they think about things.”

Surfside was a pioneer in using Christmas trees to restore sand dunes, and other parts of the country have adopted the technique. An October 1979 news article published by the Houston Chronicle quoted federal and local officials saying they experimented with the idea a year earlier with the help of a 4-H club in Pearland.

It was a rough start — some beachgoers used most of the dead trees to fuel campfires. But the idea showed promise, and Dunes Day has been an annual tradition since the early 1980s. john.tedesco@chron.com

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