Orange Beach, AL Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 1.1 miles south of Orange Beach, AL
0.37 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 1.1 miles south of Orange Beach, AL, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 3.7 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 Orange Beach, AL into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 30.28°N, 87.59°W. 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.
25 years at this rate
If 0.37 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 1.1 miles south of Orange Beach, AL would retreat roughly 9 more feet, a projection, not a certainty: erosion rates shift with storms, sediment supply and any armoring built in the meantime.
Where this fits nationally
57 transects feed this segment's number; 100% of them individually measured retreat. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.18 ft/yr. Sorted from fastest erosion to fastest growth across all 1211 measured segments nationally, this one lands at 362. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. Rank 277 nationally for erosion belongs to Port Hueneme, CA, 1857 miles from this stretch, measured at 0.57 ft/yr, 1.5x this stretch's rate. 1.5 miles up the coast, Orange Beach, AL shows the same lack of a significant trend.
Not this whole stretch, just Orange Beach itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.