Balls of Clay in Texas

No that title is not about a certain type of bravado unique to Texas residents. It is what they got in a beachfill on South Padre Island. We've seen many instances of dredge and fill projects leaving poor quality material on beaches; but never like this, never clay balls.
How would you like it if your local beach turned into this?

Read the full story at a South Padre local's blog

And many, many more pictures here.

I'm sure the ACOE did the same lengthy feasibility study that is required for such projects. The end result being a foot-tall stack of paper. It gives the impression that every possibility has been studied and every variable has been tested. Yet we still get end results like this. You'd think they tested the borrow area material right?

Lawyers Screw their Clients out of Sand

State calls off big Galveston beach project

Last week the TX Supreme Court took some of the teeth out of the Open Beaches Act, ruling that properties that suffer erosion from storms can't be ceded to the public, as was previously the case. The TX General Land Office (GLO), who manages public shorelines, decided that this ruling means the state can't go forward with a large Beach Fill project because it would now benefit private property. Of course the project would have benefited the very people who brought the original case.

"It's kind of ironic that the Pacific Legal Foundation, who supposedly is on the side of property owners, has just screwed the property owners who were going to have a direct benefit from the renourished beaches," Patterson said. He said that without the project, the rapidly eroding beach will put some of those houses in the Gulf of Mexico much faster.

So much for unintended consequences.