Cinco Bayou, FL Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 0.6 miles east of Cinco Bayou, FL?
The coast 0.6 miles east of Cinco Bayou, FL is actually gaining ground, not losing it: USGS's transects measure 0.34 feet of accretion a year here, sediment building up rather than washing away. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 3.4 feet over the last decade.
What "Cinco Bayou" means on this page
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 Cinco Bayou, FL, rather than showing one arbitrary line. Segment center: 30.42, -86.60. 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 0.34 ft/yr means over time
Holding the 0.34 ft/yr accretion rate 0.6 miles east of Cinco Bayou, FL for 25 years would add roughly 9 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
How solid is this number
95 transects feed this segment's number; 1% of them individually measured retreat. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.25 ft/yr. This segment ranks 975 of 1211 measured US coastal segments, ordered from fastest erosion to fastest growth. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. Rank 995 nationally for growth belongs to Beach Haven, NJ, 942 miles from this stretch, measured at 0.4 ft/yr, 1.2x this stretch's rate. 3 miles away, Lake Lorraine, FL is the nearest other measured stretch: also no significant trend.
Not this whole stretch, just Cinco Bayou itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.