Sargent, TX Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 4.9 miles southwest of Sargent, TX
Averaged across every transect USGS ran 4.9 miles southwest of Sargent, TX, the shoreline has been moving inland at 4.3 feet a year, a real measured rate, not a regional estimate applied to this stretch. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 43 feet over the last decade.
What "Sargent" means on this page
Sargent, TX is the nearest named place, 4.9 miles away, to a ~3.5-mile stretch of coast USGS has surveyed - the reading below covers that whole stretch, not a single property in it. Segment center: 28.75, -95.70. USGS's Gulf of Mexico assessment last surveyed this stretch through 2001, 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 4.3 ft/yr means over time
Run 4.9 miles southwest of Sargent, TX's 4.3 ft/yr rate forward 25 years and it implies about 108 feet of further retreat, assuming nothing changes, which is exactly the assumption a seawall or nourishment project exists to break.
Where this fits nationally
This reading comes from 104 individual transects averaged together, 100% of which measured erosion rather than growth. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.8 ft/yr. This segment ranks 67 of 1211 measured US coastal segments, ordered from fastest erosion to fastest growth. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. For scale: Modest Town, VA, 1321 miles away, ranks 133 of 1211 nationally for erosion, 2.05 ft/yr, 0.5x this stretch's rate. 2.5 miles up the coast, Sargent, TX shows 4.01 ft/yr of eroding.
One address near Sargent: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.