Port Arthur, TX Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 14 miles south of Port Arthur, TX
4.58 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 14 miles south of Port Arthur, TX, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 45.8 feet over the last decade.
What "Port Arthur" means on this page
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Port Arthur, TX into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 29.70°N, 93.92°W. 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.
25 years at this rate
If 4.58 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 14 miles south of Port Arthur, TX would retreat roughly 115 more feet, a projection, not a certainty: erosion rates shift with storms, sediment supply and any armoring built in the meantime.
What backs this reading up
38 transects feed this segment's number; 100% of them individually measured retreat. USGS's confidence interval here is ±1.69 ft/yr. Sorted from fastest erosion to fastest growth across all 1211 measured segments nationally, this one lands at 60. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. Rank 247 nationally for erosion belongs to Davenport, CA, 1708 miles from this stretch, measured at 0.67 ft/yr, 0.1x this stretch's rate. 2.1 miles up the coast, Port Arthur, TX shows 5.97 ft/yr of eroding.
One address near Port Arthur: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.