Woman says Christmas tree helped save dunes during Hurricane Matthew

ATLANTIC BEACH, Fla. — Hurricane Matthew swallowed up protective dunes along the Northeast Florida shoreline.

A local woman who added a staple of the winter holidays to her beach says it saved her dunes.

“It’s going to take a long time for this dune to get back to where it was,” Penny Kamish said.

While the ocean ate away at Kamish’s dunes along Atlantic Beach, she says it could’ve been a lot worse.

Kamish credits 15 Christmas trees she placed in her dunes about 15 years ago.

“I would take our 10-foot Christmas trees and we would secure them carefully into the dune to help gather more sand,” she said.

While people living in the Atlantic Beach area aren’t allowed to place Christmas trees into the dunes, Kamish says it worked.

“When you look along here, you can see this is probably one of the taller dunes. It’s one of the tallest because of all the trees that were put in,”

The idea has been around for years. An article from 1981 says students at Flagler Palm Coast High School tried the Christmas tree experiment at Flagler Beach.

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In New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy, many used Christmas trees to replenish their dunes.

It’s not only Christmas trees, but cars. Ryan Wingate lives along Neptune Beach and says people would use old cars from junkyards.

“When we were building on this house, we found the bumper to a 1929 model Ford truck down in the front yard,” Wingate said.

While Kamish knows she can’t put any Christmas trees into her dunes, she’s confident it works and is hoping for change.

“It did its job,” she said.

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