Dunes badly damaged, Surfside pleads for gift of Christmas trees
Thousands needed to rebuild protection from storms, erosion
Suzy Mitchell watched with growing concern last summer as storm after storm entered the Gulf of Mexico and neared Texas, their winds pushing water over the sand toward her Surfside Beach home.
Sand dunes, built up over years, protected her. But last year’s storm season saw more tropical cyclones form than ever. The seemingly ceaseless tidal surges eroded the dunes until some broke through.
Now, with their defenses weakened or gone, the 84-yearold Mitchell and other Surfside Beach residents know they need to start building their dunes back. How? They’re hoping for thousands of donated Christmas trees.
“We need trees,” Mitchell said. “We need trees terribly.”
The idea isn’t new to Surfside — or unique to Texas. For decades, local volunteers have used real Christmas trees, now staked down with biodegradable rope, to reinforce their dunes. Sand catches in the branches and builds up over time.
This year, they’re hoping to reconstruct dunes on a bigger scale than ever. The city and Brazoria County help on the project, too, and Brazoria County Parks Department Director Bryan Frazier said they have more need than
any year in recent memory.
Though none of the tropical storms or hurricanes — Hannah, Laura, Delta and Beta, to name some — directly hit the area, their surges were pronounced, lingered and took their tolls, Frazier said.
Michelle Booth, tourism specialist for the Village of Surfside Beach, said she’d never seen Gulf waters come down their street in the six years she’s owned a home there. When Hurricane Laura approached, she did.
The dunes did their job, Booth said, but the damage was done. Usually, they hope for one or two thousand trees to bolster them. This year, they are wishing for nine or ten thousand — maybe five times what they’ve collected so far.
Donated pines or firs are piled up for yards past the one stoplight in town, where Texas 332 dead-ends at the beach, which is about 65 miles south of downtown Houston. Brazoria County is collecting them, too, at precinct offices and the parks department.
They hope to get most trees by Monday, before volunteers nextweek begin moving them to the beach. They will stake them down Jan. 16, known as “Dunes Day,” and need help with that, too.
Joanie Steinhaus, who lives in Galveston and is the Gulf program director for the Turtle Island Restoration Network, wishes they had such programs up and down the coast. She likes that the trees are natural and decompose; they’re not a detriment to wildlife.
It seemed to her a good way to keep them out of landfills — unlike the ones she sees dragged to the curb when she walks her dog.
In Surfside, the urgency makes for a different mood
than in recent years, when the program had even reached a point where volunteers weren’t pushing so hard for trees, said Toni Capretta, president of the Save Our Beach Association. The dunes had grown large enough.
“This year’s just the opposite,” Capretta said. “We need every single Christmas tree we can get down here.”
Capretta had known they would have an issue fromthe first surge that hit, she said. Each time they began trying to repair what was damaged, another storm neared, requiring more fixes, she said.
The season also brought another unexpected issue:
Retail stores in past years typically donated unsold trees, but this year, with so many stuck at home because of COVID-19, there were fewer of those to be had.
Mitchell, who is 5 feet 5, couldn’t see over the dunes in front of her home at the beginning of summer. Now she looks at a bunch of dead foliage. When renters of another home left a tree on the beach, she rushed to get it.
Tami Ekstrand, 54, spent Christmas in the Surfside home she recently bought and got a real Christmas tree precisely so she would have one to donate.
The summer had shown Ekstrand, who lives primarily in Minnesota, the strength of Gulf storms. When she bought her home in June, the dunes had been tall enough that they couldn’t see the cars on the beach.
“Now we have an unobstructed view of the surf,” she said. “It’s just, they’re gone.”
But she knows the plan to rebuild them hasworked before: After one storm, she found the skeleton of a Christmas tree from the past in her yard.