As this program clearly shows, people are not content to let nature have its way. In a futile effort, developers, homeowners, and businesses try various engineering solutions to combat the sea. The sea, however, always wins. Jetties, groynes, seawalls and beach renourishment programs are all attempts to defeat the tides. An eight million dollar project of the US Army Corps of Engineers at Folly Beach, South Carolina, was destroyed in March 1993 when the storm of the century hit with hurricane-force winds. The project had attempted to dredge massive amounts of sand and pump it onto the shrinking beachfront. All this work was to replace a beach whose erosion was caused by jetties built just north of the site by the Corps of Engineers some years before.

As Orrin Pilkey, Professor of Geology at Duke University points out, "There is no erosion problem in nature until someone builds some-thing next to the shoreline to measure it by."