About Dick Holmberg

Dick Holmberg learned about the world’s oceans first hand, as a ship’s master and professional salvage diver. His observations led him to study hydrology and the history of rivers, shorelines, and erosion. For the past 40 years, he has studied natural and unnatural patterns of coastal sedimentation, and has experimented with various beach restoration techniques.

Holmberg, who spent much of his early career around Lake Michigan, knows that the lake was once rimmed with wide, sandy beaches. He can tell you the exact date when those beaches started eroding—it was 1825, just after the first navigational inlet was cut and dredged. Today, after the cutting of many such inlets and the building of many jetties to protect them, thousands of acres of property and hundreds of homes have been lost to shoreline erosion there.

His studies led him to A Text-Book of Geology by James D. Dana, LL.D., Professor of Geology and Natural History at Yale College. This 1864 text book contained the following passage concerning the transporting power of water: “The transporting power of running water is very great when the flow is rapid. Doubling the rate of flow increases sixty-four times the force of the water.”

Holmberg immediately saw the application of this formula in the transporting power of currents and waves in large bodies of water as well as in rivers. Holmberg discovered that the formula also worked in reverse: The shoals and sandbars that built up naturally along shorelines helped to reduce the velocity of incoming waves, which would then drop the sand they carry, forming — and building — beaches. Experimenting in the 1970s with sand-filled bags and tubes, he discovered that he could mimic the function of the sandbars and restore depleted beaches. Now his Undercurrent Stabilizers are made of geotextile fabric filled with special concrete slurry.

As early as the 1970s his designs for concrete-filled geotextile stabilizers were published in the manuals of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The designs were incomplete to protect trade secrets and engineering details, but immediately many engineering firms began to use the concepts of his designs. These same firms proved their effectiveness while denying it in favor of the more lucrative dredging/pumping method of renourishing beaches — a process that has been ongoing for 50 years and responsible for the taking of hundreds of thousands of square miles of United States territory, including natural estuaries, whole ecosystems, and many acres of private property.

Early on, his patented Undercurrent Stabilizers regenerated beaches in Florida, Indiana, and Michigan. All the sites were successful in regenerating eroded beaches, but a few were the subject of false criticism by competing interests. This resulted in attempts still in use today to discredit Holmberg and his technology. You can read about this in Competing Ideas.

Over the last 30 years, homeowners, mostly in Michigan, have contracted with Holmberg Technologies to restore their beaches, all with highly satisfactory results (see before-and-after pictures). The technology has been further developed and perfected, and by the end of the1990s had evolved into finely tuned beach-building method.

In 1999 Holmberg was invited to Saudi Arabia after a five-year search for a method that would save the beaches at Ras Tunera in the Arabian Gulf. His success there was spectacular (see Photos).

Since then, while several localities have invited him to plan beach-restoration projects — notably one in 1998 that would have restored a North Carolina beach near Cape Hatteras rather than having to move the famous lighthouse — his opponents in the powerful dredging industry (which stands to lose the most if Undercurrent Stabilizers are widely used) and their friends in regulatory positions have prevented him from carrying any of them out.

At the moment, groups in Texas, Michigan, New England, Canada, and North Carolina, as well as several in various parts of Florida, are actively campaigning to have Undercurrent Stabilizer systems installed to save their beaches, their beach-side roadways, their property, their businesses, and their homes.

They all know the folly of seawalls, revetments, and the continuing scandalous practice of dredging — the practice responsible for erosion in the first place — and are trying to persuade their elected officials to turn their backs on these outdated and damaging methods and turn instead to the one method that has consistently proved itself to be permanent, sustainable, and environmentally friendly.

Dick Holmberg lives with his wife, Marie, in East Englewood, Florida.

Marie and Dick Holmberg