“These hurricanes obliterate the beaches,” said Stewart Coffman, a former general presbyter of the Presbytery of New Covenant.
So, in his retirement, Coffman has joined a platoon of volunteers trying to help rebuild the dunes — in part by hauling used or unsold Christmas trees to the beach, to essentially serve as anchors for the sand.
He’s seen the destruction firsthand. Just northeast of Galveston, along the Bolivar Peninsula, Hurricane Ike hit head-on “and just took out everything,” Coffman said. “The bay is full of debris — refrigerators, cars, everything. You can hardly fish in the thing.”
Coffman lives in Pearland, Texas, a little south of Houston, where he is a volunteer with an environmental organization called “Keep Pearland Beautiful.” And that organization is experimenting with approaches for rebuilding the dunes in Razoria County by collecting Christmas trees after the holiday season and staking them head-to-toe along the shoreline, as a place for the sand to collect and rebuild the dunes.
“It takes a thousand trees for one mile of beach,” Coffman said. “Mother Nature takes hold,” as the needles fall and the sand starts filling in between the branches.”
Local Wal-Mart and Home Depot stores donated unsold trees. Keep Pearland Beautiful collected trees through its recycling program. The county trucked the trees to the beach, dumping them about every 20 feet, and volunteers, from senior citizens to children, showed up on a work day in January to stake them down.
A month later, Coffman went back to check the progress. Already, he’s thrilled to report, a little eight-inch dune of sand had built up in front and back of each of the trees.
