Quonochontaug, RI Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 0.3 miles southeast of Quonochontaug, RI
0.29 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 0.3 miles southeast of Quonochontaug, RI, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 2.9 feet over the last decade.
What this reading actually covers
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Quonochontaug, RI into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 41.34°N, 71.70°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 0.29 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 0.3 miles southeast of Quonochontaug, RI would retreat roughly 7 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
Averaging 92 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 86% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.14 ft/yr. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 409 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. Pacifica, CA sits at national rank 270 for erosion (0.6 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 2683 miles from here. 2.6 miles up the coast, Weekapaug, RI shows the same lack of a significant trend.
One address near Quonochontaug: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.