ICF Regret! Hurricane Ida and Beach House Troubles

hey guys i wanted to take a few minutes today and just kind of show you uh kind of our home away from home we've got tours on this channel you can see of the two houses we built in dolphin island alabama but that was kind of showing you the uh the rosy side of uh beach house ownership um the reality is um a lot of times we have hurricane damage and we have to fix things this uh drone video is right after hurricane sally last year i was down there doing some fixes you can see the beach is in a long way from some erosion but uh we got we got nicked by ida it wasn't terrible it definitely wasn't as bad as louisiana got it but uh you can see here i'm pulling onto the island and it was bad enough we're having to cross checkpoints to get to our houses and i titled this video icf regrets simply because this picture is kind of famous after hurricane michael mexico beach there was this one house left standing and it was actually a new dura built house and when i built our houses in 15 and 16 i was doing a lot of icf work but not a lot of light deck work and hadn't really wrapped my head around what's possible and just to show you how bad it can get this picture here is an oil rig that was directly off of our uh southeast shore of our lots um after katrina it washed ashore from um her um uh from louisiana it came off its moorings and washed all the way to alabama and washed ashore on dolphin island so pretty crazy what can happen that that's a good chance that that oil rig took out the uh the houses uh that we built over the top of so like i said we we just got a glancing blow from ida um most of what we had was beach erosion and um i'll get into later in the video kind of why our erosion can be so bad um and what the corps of engineers kind of did to exacerbate that over the last 50 years and what they're saying they're going to do to do better in the future but these pilings are actually from the old house houses that were there before we built um before katrina and ivan or ivan and katrina in 0.405 took out both houses and these pilings are generally under many feet of sand at this point and not a hazard but after a storm you've got old rebar and concrete and old pilings sticking up like land mines just looking to hurt somebody so anytime we get a chance at them i like to clean them up a lot of people just wait till they get covered back up by the wind but i just think about the the jagged edges of these things sticking up and uh getting somebody's foot and we just tried our best to get it all out i think i've got almost all of it out after this trip um back in 2017 after hurricane nate i got a lot of concrete debris out but i couldn't get the pilings out because i didn't have that nifty little tree puller for my skid steer at the time and that made it a lot easier to just get the physics uh you got to lift them straight up they're down in the water table and the suction is pretty great on those things so got those cleaned up but like i said most of what we had was driveway damage you see my dad here trying to help out we had a we had a little damage to our handicap ramp we lost part of the railing this is more the rebar sticking up out of a slab that was way down in the ground i got i got it down into the water table and cut it off so i mean it's just a lot of little stuff this time we didn't lose any siding we had no wind damage at all this is another house uh this this is a lot in front of us up the way you can see rebar out in the water that's normally under many feet of sand but right now is obviously a pretty good hazard okay so i thought i'd walk down the beach a little bit and show you some uh engineering disasters if you will a lot of people don't want to spend the money dropping actual pilings in for their landings and these six by sixes and stuff they're just if they're not jetted in deep they'll you know they'll fail they'll break off and these people just gave up you can see where they just patched it in now they got stairs coming down around the side but again they uh they don't put them on pilings and they end up see i mean they're not losing like we tend to lose just that little bottom section they're losing their whole set of stairs and uh now they've got a set of stairs going out the back of the house so they can get here okay so as i pan over here i'm to show you a bigger disaster and this guy uh supposedly owns the company that built like the atlanta falcon stadium or something saying the guys should know construction he's got these cable rails just dangling all loose so this okay so i should say this after katrina dolphin island passed some stuff that said you know you cannot do rebar in concrete anymore as you've seen from a lot of my clips there's still rebar poking up out of the ground after every storm that's just embedded in pilings embedded in concrete and everything but what happens is the water the wave action gets under the stuff pulls all the debris out leaving these huge voids i mean i could drive my skid under there almost and then the weight of the waves on top of it crushes and he's had these engineers come in like two or three times tell them how to do this concrete patio without having any uh rebar i mean they won't let you use post tension cables i mean all the things that would work in all likelihood they don't let them happen and look at that he actually did like a little board form this time that's actually pretty cool it's sad that this happened because guys if you look at this concrete it's like two months old this is like a tragedy uh and but i mean it's also kind of bull headed i mean this has happened i think this house got built the same year as my second house of 2016 and i know this is the at least the second failure of this patio and if the codes won't allow you to do it right i don't think i'd do it at all i mean look at all that undercutting under undercutting of the water and these these piers are supposed to do some but they don't obviously obviously you think they don't but anyway um there's lots of things i'll get into all the uh the why the beach does this and you know real mitigation and what could be done and all that but uh in the meantime we just try to do things that are sustainably you know workable it's like this house here just kind of show you how much sand's gone you see the green on these pilings that's where the beach normally is i mean that's about four feet right here and his parking pad is way up there i mean it's almost over my head and that's all that sand's gone and it'll spend all winter unless we have more storms coming back um but you know it's uh it's in and out thing but we usually have a net loss at the end of the day and they're they're the corps of engineers are doing the dredging a little differently now but you know 60 years of their old practices have done done their work so anyway i'll uh keep keep going here and show you some other stuff okay so after a couple days of hard work we have got it all put back together and renters showing up about an hour after we leave so um you can see we've kind of cleaned up the beach got rid of all the debris rebar old piling sticking up we've fixed our driveways got a couple big hay bales there to protect the handicap ramp until the beach can build itself back up instead of hauling off the old pilings i use them to line the driveway where the berm has washed out and people might not be able to see where to back up and if they get in that sand they are officially stuck my neighbor dominic told me he's very tired of helping my renters dig out after they back into the sand so i did what i could to keep them keep them lined up and we're heading home to missouri and coming back in about a month for actual vacation hopefully fingers crossed there's no more storms okay so now that i've kind of shown you the the situation and what we deal with a little bit i want to kind of explain to you what how the how the barrier islands are created and what the core of engineers has been doing that's been damaging damaging the situation for a number of years so this is mobile bay you can see dolphin island in the bottom left and dolphin island is created by about four rivers that flow into mobile bay that end up flowing uh pushing sand and sediment out into the gulf and then wave action and storms roll it up into dolphin island creating dolphin island then dolphin island donates um sand to the next island in the chain to the next island of the chain to the next island of the chain which creates the mississippi sound um and that creates a intercoastal waterway that's kind of protected from the waves and allows barges to travel from mobile bay into new orleans in fairly protected water so this is um an image that's a kind of a close-up of uh the mouth of the mobile bay um where we have about three miles between dolphin island and fort morgan which is like the gulf shores orange beach side of the bay and you can see the dark water the dark water in the middle under that green line and that's where the corps of engineers has been dredging the ship channel to allow access for the big ships to get into the bay for decades and they do that the government wants to do everything as cheap as possible so they do that with deep water dredges and they're the cheapest to operate but just like when i'm talking about icf being cheaper over the long run shallow water dredges and like pump and pipe systems are cheaper to operate so over the lifetime of their you know usable life they're able to put the sand back where it would naturally be deposited much easier and cheaper than the deep water dredges so what they've been doing for decades is they dredge the sand that would normally end up just south of our island and renourish the beaches naturally and they um they go dump it in the deeper part of the gulf where it's just gone forever and to never wash up on the shore so we've been you know losing sand you know since the 50s or 60s you know every year we lose a little bit of sand so the storms do more damage than they would and a lot a lot of small town politics and stuff like that debate on why and what to do and yada yada but the corps of engineers at least a couple years ago did admit that you know their dredging practices are definitely not helping and that they're going to start depositing the sand back closer to the island we're still not sure you know as long as we're using deepwater dredges we're not sure that that's going to be close enough but you know we'll see so this is an interesting time lapse of satellite photos of the island from the mid 80s as pelican island on the south side of dolphin island slowly moves this is just kind of showing you how the sand is supposed to build back into the beaches and normally the pelican island happens over like [Music] a couple hundred years it'll collapse in on the island you see the cut in the middle of the islands actually the katrina cut where the island was severed after uh after katrina but you can see that pelican peninsula actually is now connected and i'll show you a close-up here in a second of um it actually swallowed the state fishing pier okay so this is a close-up of the south side of the island and that is the fishing pier you can see directly that straight line coming off of the beach and after katrina in 2005 you see pelican uh peninsula republican island turning into pelican peninsula i started coming to the island to build houses in 2008 and it looked about like this where the pierce still crossed water but was getting landlocked and then after about three big hurricanes in 2008 it connected and landlocked the pier and has the pier has been landlocked for about 13 years now it is completely on the sand it is hundreds of yards away from the actual water now which is sad but um it's kind of just part of the natural progression of the sand um through wave action and storms that build the island to the west um just happens over a slower period of time than most people are willing to accept but uh just kind of wanted to show you guys this because i mean a lot of people just go oh yeah the beaches are eroding this that they don't realize that a lot of its issues are man-made but it's also a a very long-term cycle it happens over hundreds of years and it's pretty interesting to watch okay here's a quick drone shot from a couple months ago where you can actually see just how far the end of the pier is from the actual water anymore but ultimately guys the juice is absolutely worth the squeeze the place is wonderful time slows down on the island and it's got so much rich history and it's all worth preserving um all of its problems are man-made for sure um the solutions are probably man-made too and that's just gonna be uh the a matter of getting the right people in the right rooms making the right decisions and uh hasn't happened yet but we're hoping we obviously got married down here um back in 2016 right about the time the houses were done um this is about that time there in this photo but uh the prettiest sunsets and sunrises you'll see anywhere in the country and uh really wonderful place to visit just hoping to uh kind of keep it going for years to come you

Channel: Cutting Edge Homes !

Views: 9,963

Rating: 4.5529413 out of 5

Keywords: 春田, 斯普林菲尔德, 密苏里, 投资, 买房, springfield mo, builder, cutting edge, cutting edge homes, cutting edge pools, icf, insulated concrete forms, dauphin island, Hurricane ida, beach erosion, climate change, man made climate change, army corpse of engineers, hurricane, Katrina cut, katrina, hurricane ivan, icf pools

Id: HfsMwz9q13w

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021