Sargent, TX Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 1.2 miles south of Sargent, TX
4.62 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 1.2 miles south of Sargent, TX, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 46.2 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 Sargent, TX into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 28.78°N, 95.64°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 4.62 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 1.2 miles south of Sargent, TX would retreat roughly 116 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
This reading comes from 47 individual transects averaged together, 100% of which measured erosion rather than growth. USGS's confidence interval here is ±3.11 ft/yr. Sorted from fastest erosion to fastest growth across all 1211 measured segments nationally, this one lands at 58. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. Port St. Joe, FL sits at national rank 33 for erosion (7.6 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 623 miles from here. 1.7 miles up the coast, Sargent, TX shows 4.77 ft/yr of eroding.
Not this whole stretch, just Sargent itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.