Port Orford, OR Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 3 miles north of Port Orford, OR?
Good news, and an honest one: USGS's data can't distinguish this stretch, 3 miles north of Port Orford, OR, from a flat trend. Whatever small movement it measured here is statistical noise, not a reliable direction, so none is claimed.
What "Port Orford" means on this page
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 Port Orford, OR, rather than showing one arbitrary line. Segment center: 42.79, -124.52. USGS's Pacific Northwest assessment last surveyed this stretch through 2002-2011, 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
This reading comes from 64 individual transects averaged together, 97% of which measured erosion rather than growth. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.23 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, -0.14 ft/yr, would place it 579 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 2012-1008. North Wildwood, NJ sits at national rank 1193 for growth (4.21 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 2572 miles from here. 1.9 miles away, Port Orford, OR is the nearest other measured stretch: slight accretion (beach growing) at 0.53 ft/yr.
One address near Port Orford: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.