Documenting Beach Loss in Front of Seawalls in Puerto Rico: Pitfalls of Engineering a Small Island Nation Shore

The island of Puerto Rico is densely populated and heavily developed in some places, particularly along the shore and in coastal lowlands. Hard shoreline engineering is commonplace, even in low development density portions of the island. There are many examples of small trash revetments or cemented rock seawalls in front of individual buildings. In some cases, buildings themselves located within reach of waves and tides at the shoreline are behaving as seawalls too. Gabions have proliferated, even though they are decidedly not designed for either high-wave energy or salt-water usage.