'GROIN': Stone wall into bay praised by farmers, attacked by environmental groups

Dean J. Koepfler/The News Tribune

Cranberry grower Nick Wood led a local lobbying effort to secure federal funding for the building of a groin out into Willapa Bay to protect Highway 105 and keep erosion from destroying area cranberry bogs near Cape Shoalwater.

It happened in 1995 on the north side of Willapa Bay, where the tidal channel that has undercut Cape Shoalwater threatened to take Highway 105, which connects Raymond and Westport.

Enter Vladimir Shepsis, formerly one of the Soviet Union’s foremost coastal engineering experts. He speaks accented, broken English, ties his bottle-glass-thick spectacles to the back of his head and carries a laptop computer.

Shepsis takes measurements, runs the numbers through a host of computer models and comes up with a solution: dump 400,000 tons of rock into the bay.

Dean J. Koepfler/The News Tribune

Vladimir Shepsis, a coastal engineer from the former Soviet Union, stands on the groin hed designed to save Highway 105 from being undermined by tidal forces in Willapa Bay.

It works, or at least has so far, and has helped earn Shepsis a savior’s reputation among coastal residents who believe engineering and a whole lot of rocks can protect their homes, roads and businesses from nature’s fury.

Thanks to Shepsis, cranberry grower Nick Wood no longer worries about erosion. Wood praises the engineer, who emigrated from Ukraine in 1991.

“This was a challenge for him down here. He was willing to work for nothing to make this work,” Wood said.

At the same time, the $27 million project has vexed environmentalists, beach preservationists and others who insist the rock structure is a waste of public money and that it endangers its surroundings in ways that may not be evident for years.

“This is one of the larger atrocities built on the American shoreline in the last couple of decades,” said Orrin Pilkey, director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Duke University. “There is every possibility this will ultimately increase the rate of erosion. What it will do to the channel is anybody’s guess. I’ve lost sleep over that.”

Pilkey, who grew up in Washington, recently spent a year on sabbatical in the Puget Sound area.

The Federal Highway Administration completed the pile of rocks that locals call Jacobson’s Jetty – after an old Cape Shoalwater family – in 1998. Technically, it’s not a jetty. Shepsis describes it as a unique combination of dike and groin, or a perpendicular breakwater.

You can’t see much of it from the side of the road. The rocks are mostly underwater. They extend 1,600 feet from the shoreline into the 70-foot-deep channel. While protecting the highway, the groin also prevents the loss of a tide gate, which is part of a cranberry-bog drainage system.

No cranberry grower lives closer to Highway 105 and the groin than Wood, 48, who grew up nearby and helped lead a local lobby for federal money to pay for the project. In the end, the Federal Highway Administration covered most of the cost.

Of course, Shepsis made money on the design. Since 1993, his company, Pacific International Engineering, has had a hand in millions of dollars worth of engineered, anti-erosion projects along the Southwest Washington coast.

“All of a sudden, he became the local guru for coastal erosion,” said Dick Sheldon, who raises oysters in Willapa Bay, and believes Mother Nature eventually will prove the groin is a waste.

He and others suggest it would have been better to move the highway, as was done decades ago, but folks like Wood didn’t want that. It might have cost $40 million to realign the road, far more than the rocks in the bay.

“It came down to a dollars-and-cents issue,” said Pacific County Commissioner Pat Hamilton.

The region’s 75 cranberry growers cultivate 800 acres. If erosion broke the tide gate, saltwater would ruin the fields and cause $20 million in damage, Wood said.

About two years ago, Wood, his wife, Mary, and their three children moved into a 3,280-square-foot house with a three-car garage. It’s a new house, surrounded by a new bog, among 14 acres Wood cultivates.

If not for the groin, erosion could force the Woods out of their new home within 20 or 30 years.

“We’d either move the house or tear it down,” Wood said.

As it is, Shepsis believes the groin protects about a mile of shoreline from erosion. Part of his job is to monitor its effects. He believes the groin has deepened the tidal channel, and the highway remains intact.

“I keep my finger crossed,” he said during a recent visit to the coast. “All the systems are working good. It’s only 212 years.”

His only regret is that the groin does nothing to protect the homes of elderly people at nearby Washaway Beach. He recalled fielding a question about one couple’s home.

“‘Vladimir, can you tell me how long is left for us?’” he said they asked. “It’s very difficult to see the real people, the poor people. It’s maybe two years for them.”

Shepsis has made a career of coastal crisis management. In the Soviet Union, where he earned his doctorate, Shepsis supervised 40 people in the Federal Research and Development Institution and worked worldwide.

“I wasn’t allowed to make a mistake,” he said.

Shepsis is 54, married and the father of two and has been a U.S. citizen since 1996. He and his family abandoned a fancy Odessa apartment and were allowed only two suitcases when they left to join other family members in the United States. At first, they lived in Boston.

“I didn’t speak English. I didn’t write. I was cleaning apartments and delivering newspapers until I learned the language,” he said. He got help from fellow Russian-speaking immigrants and other coastal engineers who knew his work. He moved west when an engineering firm offered a job. He and his wife now live in Edmonds, but he’s on the road a lot, cell phone and laptop always close by.

Hiram Arden, an engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers, now working on a Willapa Bay navigation project, says no one knows whether the groin will stay in place or what eventually will result from it.

“The jury’s a little out on this. It takes a few seasons to assess what the impacts are. That’s why they’re continuing to do monitoring,” he said.

Meanwhile, a consultant who works for the Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe has asserted that the groin has induced erosion near the tribe’s mile-square reservation, a couple of miles east. A sand spit near Tokeland has begun to erode, leaving the reservation vulnerable. The tribe has asked for federal help and the Corps has begun to investigate.

“In my opinion, we’ve got about three years before the situation becomes critical,” said Doug Davis, the tribe’s 44-year-old vice chairman. He’s a crab fisherman who lives in a rambler that faces the ocean.

“It’s pointing right at us. The Corps is in full agreement. We have a situation that could turn into a really bad thing.”

As a short-term fix, the Corps has dumped sediment from a Willapa Bay dredging project near the reservation. It’s still too early to say what a long-term solution might be, said Larry Scudder, the Corps project manager assigned to the Shoalwater project.

What caused the Shoalwater erosion problem is unclear, Scudder said. Has the groin made it worse?

“It would be too early to say one way or another,” he said.