Coastal Storm damage reduction program in Salerno Province after 2008 storms

In this paper the coastal protection system of the inhabited coastline near the city of Salerno, designed by the Salerno Province, is discussed. This low urbanized coastline, which has already suffered serious erosion over the last 40 years, had a lot of damage due to the storms of the winter of 2008: inundation of the roadways, vertical beach loss, generalized scour around bulkheads, overwash of infrastructures and recreational facilities. These huge amounts of damage induced the design of an extensive defence project on the whole inhabited coastline of Salerno, with advanced technologies of beach nourishment, in order to assure flood damage reduction and environmental sustainability. After analysis of the long-term erosion of the coastal site, the procedure for the choice of the coastal protection works is reported here in some detail. The description of the coastal protection system follows, which consists mainly of a long series of parallel submerged breakwaters in order to reduce the storm wave impact on the most exposed infrastructures (roads, buildings, seawater facilities). The proposed intervention takes into account the suggestions of the international EU projects “Eurosion”, “Beachmed” and “Messina”