Orick, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 1.2 miles northwest of Orick, CA
1.2 miles northwest of Orick, CA: USGS's transects didn't pick up a trend here that beats the survey's own uncertainty. That's the majority case nationally, and for this stretch specifically it means the coast is holding, not that the data failed to find anything.
The grain of this number
This is a roughly 3.5-mile stretch of coast, not one address or parcel - USGS's own transects run every few hundred feet, but that's finer than any one property needs, so this page reports the stretch nearest Orick, CA. Centered near 41.30°N, 124.09°W. USGS's California assessment last surveyed this stretch through 1852-2016, computing the rate with its LRR method. Other US regions were surveyed in different years, sometimes decades apart, so this page states its own rather than implying one national vintage.
What backs this reading up
Averaging 110 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 60% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.46 ft/yr. Taken at face value, this segment's raw -0.14 ft/yr reading would land it 587 of 1211 nationally - a number worth ignoring, since it's statistical noise rather than a real trend. Source: USGS National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. Newport Beach, CA sits at national rank 1098 for growth (0.94 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 631 miles from here. 3 miles away, Orick, CA is the nearest other measured stretch: also no significant trend.
Not this whole stretch, just Orick itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.