East Sandwich, MA Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 1.2 miles northwest of East Sandwich, MA
Good news, and an honest one: USGS's data can't distinguish this stretch, 1.2 miles northwest of East Sandwich, MA, from a flat trend. Whatever small movement it measured here is statistical noise, not a reliable direction, so none is claimed.
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 East Sandwich, MA, rather than showing one arbitrary line. Segment center: 41.74, -70.45. Survey years: 2007-2009, method LRR, from USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic 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 backs this reading up
Averaging 86 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 52% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.18 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, -0.02 ft/yr, would place it 748 of 1211 if ranked directly - but an unreliable rank isn't a useful one, which is exactly why "no significant trend" is the headline instead. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. Rank 1152 nationally for growth belongs to Santa Monica, CA, 2639 miles from this stretch, measured at 1.85 ft/yr. Sandwich, MA, 2.6 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, itself no significant trend.
Not this whole stretch, just East Sandwich itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.