From the Delaware beaches through Ocean City to Assateague, the Delmarva Atlantic shore is the textbook case of sand that moves — jetties starve one island while the sea climbs 3.77 mm a year at Lewes. We read the federal record for any address on it.
Every figure below is drawn from a public USGS, NOAA or FEMA source and stamped with it — no estimates, no proprietary model.
It depends entirely on where you stand: engineered beach towns are held near-stable, while unmanaged Assateague retreats several meters a year in places.
The USGS National Assessment of Shoreline Change places the Delaware and Maryland sandy coast within the Mid-Atlantic's long-term erosional trend. But the headline story is Assateague Island: USGS mapping found its northern end has migrated landward nearly a kilometer in the ~70 years since the Ocean City Inlet was stabilized. The populated beach towns — Rehoboth, Dewey, Bethany, Fenwick and Ocean City — hold their width only through repeated state and federal nourishment.
USGS OFR 2010-1118 (Hapke et al.); USGS OFR 2004-1020, Assateague Island National Seashore.The jetties built at Ocean City Inlet in 1934–35 trap the sand that used to drift south, starving Assateague of its supply and driving it landward.
Southward longshore transport carries roughly 150,000 cubic yards of sand a year down this coast. The inlet jetties intercept it, widening Ocean City's beach while the north end of Assateague — cut off in the 1933 storm — erodes and rolls back. The Army Corps now dredges inlet sand and places it on Assateague every year to slow the loss. It is the clearest example anywhere of how one coastal structure rewrites the sediment budget for decades.
USGS OFR 2004-1020; U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Assateague sediment-bypassing program.At Lewes, DE the sea has risen 3.77 mm a year since 1919, and slow land subsidence across the peninsula adds to it.
NOAA's Lewes gauge (station 8557380) records a relative sea-level trend of 3.77 ± 0.23 mm/yr — above the global mean, because the Delmarva Peninsula is slowly sinking as the land bulged up by the last ice sheet relaxes (glacial isostatic adjustment). On a low, sandy peninsula with large back-bays, that rising baseline raises the reach of every ordinary storm, not just the rare one.
NOAA Tides & Currents, relative sea level trend, Lewes DE (8557380), 1919–2024.Oceanfront blocks sit in V/VE coastal high-hazard zones; bayside and interior land is largely AE, with base flood elevations that govern how a home must be built.
Fenwick Island, Ocean City and the Delaware resort towns carry V-zone designations along the beach and AE zones behind them. The zone and the base flood elevation decide flood-insurance pricing, lender requirements and elevation rules for any rebuild. We read the current FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer at the exact coordinate rather than the town average.
FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer.Enter the address and Psammite assembles a Certificate of Coastal Impact for $99 — the USGS, NOAA and FEMA record for that exact parcel, in one screening.
Published rates are reach-wide, so no table gives a per-parcel number. Our method takes the point, pulls the nearest USGS DSAS transect for the long-term shoreline-change rate, applies the Lewes relative sea-level trend, reads the FEMA zone and base flood elevation, and flags inlet- and jetty-driven sediment effects where they apply — every figure sourced. It is a screening assessment, not a survey, and it is the packet a coastal engineer would otherwise rebuild by hand.
Psammite Certificate of Coastal Impact — USGS DSAS, NOAA Tides & Currents, FEMA NFHL.Records © USGS / NOAA / FEMA, public domain. Screening only — confirm present conditions with a recent survey or field inspection.
The $99 Certificate of Coastal Impact reads the full federal record for your parcel in a single screening.