Quinby, VA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 5.9 miles southeast of Quinby, VA?
16.73 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 5.9 miles southeast of Quinby, VA, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 167.3 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 Quinby, VA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 37.48°N, 75.68°W. USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic assessment last surveyed this stretch through 2007-2009, 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.
25 years at this rate
If 16.73 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 5.9 miles southeast of Quinby, VA would retreat roughly 418 more feet, a projection, not a certainty: erosion rates shift with storms, sediment supply and any armoring built in the meantime.
How solid is this number
2 transects feed this segment's number; 100% of them individually measured retreat. USGS's confidence interval here is ±6.21 ft/yr. This segment ranks 9 of 1211 measured US coastal segments, ordered from fastest erosion to fastest growth. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. West Hampton Dunes, NY sits at national rank 344 for erosion (0.41 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 277 miles from here. Quinby, VA, 1.6 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, reading accretion (beach growing) at 3.21 ft/yr.
Not this whole stretch, just Quinby itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.