Dredging material from Norfolk VA harbor prior to the Civil War was used to top off fields played out by years of tobacco growing and backfill coastal swamps for use as additional fields.
I was there in 2008 and they were pumping dredging material onto one such coastal swamp to protect a new resort on Virginia Beach.
One such backfilled swamp field filled in during the 1860s was developed as housing in later decades. The area has settled over 14 inches since the houses were built, but that has not stopped the global warming nut jobs from blaming global warming for the floods that have increasingly hit the area. As this story portrays the problem.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/science/earth/26norfolk.html?_r=0The calmer people in the city like to blame global warming and recognize the sinking ground as a contributing factor.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/built-on-sinking-ground-norfolk-tries-to-hold-back-tide-amid-sea-level-rise/2012/06/17/gJQADUsxjV_story.htmlThe realists know it is just the sinking ground.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/26/nyts-sort-of-clarity-on-norfolk-sinking-aka-sea-level-rise-and-an-inconvenient-map/A similar situation is happening with Plum Island MA. The island mostly did not exist until the rock jetties were installed at the Merrimack River in the mid 1800s to stabilize the mouth of the river. Prior to the jetties being built the mouth of the river would move up to a mile some years based on how bad the winter storms eroded the coastal river plain.
Much of the original island was created by the dredging of the first fixed mouth of the river. When the island was nearly wiped off the face of the earth by a series of storm in the late 1890s into the early 20th century it was a manmade retaining wall and more dredging that rebuilt the island to slightly larger than its present size.
Dredging during WW II to open the Parker River channel to the sea for fishing trawlers briefly shrunk the island.
In recent decades storms have again been eating at the island, but in the past 10 years global warming is magically to blame. Not mother nature moving the river again or fools building on the shifting sand.
