Boothville, LA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 43.2 miles northeast of Boothville, LA?
USGS's shoreline-change data puts this stretch, 43.2 miles northeast of Boothville, LA, at 15.46 feet of erosion a year on average, a long-term rate for this specific ~3.5-mile section, not one storm's damage. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 154.6 feet over the last decade.
The grain of this number
USGS surveys the coast in transects spaced a few hundred feet apart; this page groups the nearest ones into a single ~3.5-mile reading for the stretch closest to Boothville, LA, rather than showing one arbitrary line. Segment center: 29.76, -88.88. Survey years: 2001, method LRR, from USGS's Gulf of Mexico shoreline-change assessment. That's how current the data is here, real, but not a live feed, since a shoreline survey is a major undertaking, not an annual check-in.
What 15.46 ft/yr means over time
Run 43.2 miles northeast of Boothville, LA's 15.46 ft/yr rate forward 25 years and it implies about 387 feet of further retreat, assuming nothing changes, which is exactly the assumption a seawall or nourishment project exists to break.
What backs this reading up
54 transects feed this segment's number; 100% of them individually measured retreat. USGS's confidence interval here is ±4.31 ft/yr. This segment ranks 11 of 1211 measured US coastal segments, ordered from fastest erosion to fastest growth. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. Rank 326 nationally for erosion belongs to Pescadero, CA, 1985 miles from this stretch, measured at 0.45 ft/yr, a small fraction of this stretch's own rate. 1.1 miles away, Boothville, LA is the nearest other measured stretch: severe erosion at 13.9 ft/yr.
One address near Boothville: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.