Pushing the Limits of Coastal Engineering

The limits of coastal engineering may be reached in several ways. This paper concentrates on three limits of engineering reached at the project approval stage. First, we identify two types of approval processes – called here traditional and contemporary. The paper describes the traditional process, its advantages (projects are approved) and its obvious deficiencies in evaluating environmental impacts. Then it analyses the contemporary process in some detail and identifies from experience where the process fails, how the process might be improved and how engineers can contribute to the process to improve the likelihood of project approval. Traditional approval processes often result in daring, experimental designs, which test the limit of existing coastal science and engineering knowledge. Contemporary project approvals, on the other hand, require assessments of impacts with such accuracy that they constitute a second test of the limits of present knowledge in science and engineering. The measurements and calculations for such impact assessments contain substantial uncertainties and therefore the assessment becomes necessarily a combination of objective input (hard numbers) and subjective input (experience). Because the numbers alone cannot provide the complete assessment, the public or project opponents can easily say that the studies are worthless. Any legal process also has great difficulty understanding uncertainties. This results in a third limit to engineering discussed here; the fact that many projects are delayed, postponed or cancelled, either because of the uncertainties in the results or because the contemporary approval process provides too many opportunities for opponents to block the project.