Boothville, LA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 51.7 miles northeast of Boothville, LA?
Averaged across every transect USGS ran 51.7 miles northeast of Boothville, LA, the shoreline has been moving inland at 4.47 feet a year, a real measured rate, not a regional estimate applied to this stretch. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 44.7 feet over the last decade.
What "Boothville" means on this page
Boothville, LA is the nearest named place, 51.7 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: 29.90, -88.84. The survey behind it runs to 2001, in USGS's Gulf of Mexico assessment, using the LRR method. Shoreline surveys aren't repeated every year, so this is the most recent long-term measurement USGS has published for this coast, not a live reading.
What 4.47 ft/yr means over time
Run 51.7 miles northeast of Boothville, LA's 4.47 ft/yr rate forward 25 years and it implies about 112 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
89 transects feed this segment's number; 98% of them individually measured retreat. USGS's confidence interval here is ±1.72 ft/yr. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 61 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. Rank 122 nationally for erosion belongs to Edgartown, MA, 1292 miles from this stretch, measured at 2.21 ft/yr, 0.5x this stretch's rate. 3.4 miles away, Boothville, LA is the nearest other measured stretch: severe erosion at 6.36 ft/yr.
Boothville, LA on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.