Orick, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 7.6 miles north of Orick, CA?
Unusual good news for this stretch: the shoreline 7.6 miles north of Orick, CA has grown by a measured 1.86 feet a year on average, per USGS's long-term transect data for this section. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 18.6 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 Orick, CA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 41.40°N, 124.07°W. The survey behind it runs to 1852-2016, in USGS's California 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
Holding the 1.86 ft/yr accretion rate 7.6 miles north of Orick, CA for 25 years would add roughly 47 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
What backs this reading up
111 transects feed this segment's number; 0% of them individually measured retreat. Uncertainty on this specific number: 0.53 ft/yr either side. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 1153 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. Kennebunkport, ME sits at national rank 933 for growth (0.22 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 2691 miles from here. 2.3 miles away, Orick, CA is the nearest other measured stretch: accretion (beach growing) at 1.26 ft/yr.
One address near Orick: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.