I said "which happens every year" 2x in the title on purpose because I have seen this exact same scenario happen every single stinkin year yet people still think it is a good idea to build things this close to the sea. Every year they bring in a crack team of coastal protectors, which I appreciate, good job guys! But at the same time I shake my head in disbelief that after years and years and years of exactly the same thing happening at exactly the same time of year, that people still continue to build on this land without taking any sort of new precautions to attempt to change this.
What happens is that it becomes typhoon season and it just stays stormy and cold here in Da Nang for about 2 months. During that time the waves are unpredictable and very strong and the tides come in with a fury that tears apart the coastline or what I like to call "what nature does in every part of the world that has a typhoon season."
The logical thing to do here in my mind, would be to build a seawall and then not allow anyone to build things on this part of the beach because it happens like clockwork. The seawall will not succeed, they rarely do anywhere in the world, but it would slow the ocean down long enough to make the area safe for people that are coming here.
I do appreciate and admire how quickly they were able to get people out here to help deal with the situation but I think they started too late. The damage has for the most part already been done as two businesses that were way to close to the ocean to begin with have been swallowed up and now the erosion is threatening the "boardwalk" that we have along the beach here. This cannot be rerouted because the busy highway of a road is right next to it. I don't know why this part of the beach is always the hardest hit, but I do know that they don't really change anything about how anything is set up after the typhoon season is over.
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When I first saw this happening 4 or 5 years ago I noticed that the "solution" after typhoon season was to plant a bunch of coconut trees on the beach and hope that the root structure would hold the sand together. This has actually been a bit successful but those roots only go so deep and many of the trees have fallen down into the sea. I am sure that it had some effect but it doesn't change the fact that the ocean disagrees with the humans about whether or not they are supposed to be here.
You can see that there are a couple of trees there that are still upright and seem to be ok and from the closeness I was able to achieve I could see that while their roots were exposed on the other side, they were the only reason that the shoreline wasn't more devastated by this.
Here's another example of where there are a lot of these trees. During the non typhoon part of the year this is a gentle slope down to the ocean, now it is a near 2 meter drop. I think that all of these trees would have been overpowered and fallen had it not been for the intervention of these sandbags locked in steel cages.
I don't want them to fail and I hope that they are able to figure this out. But in the meantime I think that somebody with power aught to look at this situation and realize that simply putting the buildings back every year and hoping for the best is not a solution at all. Will what they are doing now work? I can't say, but we have about 4 more weeks of this to see if it can endure.