Boothville, LA Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 44.1 miles northeast of Boothville, LA
Averaged across every transect USGS ran 44.1 miles northeast of Boothville, LA, the shoreline has been moving inland at 13.9 feet a year, a real measured rate, not a regional estimate applied to this stretch. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 139 feet over the last decade.
What this reading actually covers
Boothville, LA is the nearest named place, 44.1 miles away, to a ~3.5-mile stretch of coast USGS has surveyed - the reading below covers that whole stretch, not a single property in it. Segment center: 29.77, -88.87. 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 13.9 ft/yr means over time
Run 44.1 miles northeast of Boothville, LA's 13.9 ft/yr rate forward 25 years and it implies about 348 feet of further retreat, assuming nothing changes, which is exactly the assumption a seawall or nourishment project exists to break.
Where this fits nationally
Averaging 8 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 100% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. USGS's confidence interval here is ±5.05 ft/yr. This segment ranks 13 of 1211 measured US coastal segments, ordered from fastest erosion to fastest growth. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. For scale: Guadalupe, CA, 1881 miles away, ranks 156 of 1211 nationally for erosion, 1.54 ft/yr, 0.1x this stretch's rate. 1.1 miles away, Boothville, LA is the nearest other measured stretch: severe erosion at 15.46 ft/yr.
Boothville, LA on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.