Carrabelle, FL Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 4.4 miles southeast of Carrabelle, FL
0.52 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 4.4 miles southeast of Carrabelle, FL, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 5.2 feet over the last decade.
The grain of this number
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Carrabelle, FL into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 29.82°N, 84.61°W. 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.
25 years at this rate
If 0.52 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 4.4 miles southeast of Carrabelle, FL would retreat roughly 13 more feet, a projection, not a certainty: erosion rates shift with storms, sediment supply and any armoring built in the meantime.
How solid is this number
This reading comes from 86 individual transects averaged together, 80% of which measured erosion rather than growth. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.26 ft/yr. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 292 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. Rank 460 nationally for erosion belongs to Coronado, CA, 1931 miles from this stretch, measured at 0.24 ft/yr, 0.5x this stretch's rate. Carrabelle, FL, 0.8 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, itself no significant trend.
Not this whole stretch, just Carrabelle itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.