RINCON, Puerto Rico _ For 16 years, guests at the Tres Sirenas Oceanfront Boutique Hotel could walk down concrete steps from the resort's deck directly onto Sea Beach, where they lounged on the expanse of sand and took dips in the water.
Then, one year ago, Hurricane Maria struck, bringing surging tides that caused the steps to shatter. The water carried away the sand. The deck collapsed. The coast shrunk. Nearby homes and businesses that overlooked the water crumbled atop the rocks meant to keep out the rising sea.
The beach disappeared.
"My guests used to be able to walk for miles," said Lisa Masters, who co-owns the hotel with her partner, Wanda Acosta. "If tourists don't come ... then the markets suffer, the maids suffer. ... Everybody is affected by it."
The surf town of Rincon wasn't the hardest-hit municipality in Puerto Rico. By the time Maria reached the island's west coast during the early afternoon of Sept. 20, it had weakened to a Category 3 hurricane.
But the storm has hastened Rincon's steady loss of something fundamental to its community: the beach.
Maria stole the sands on which tourists used to sunbathe and from which surfers used to paddle out into the waves _ accelerating the process known as coastal erosion, which had already been slowly eating away at Puerto Rico's coasts and threatens to reshape the entire identity of oceanside communities like this one.
Erosion causes the coastline to retreat, driven by natural events like sea-level rise, flooding and storms. It usually happens slowly. But Hurricane Maria caused catastrophic losses for about four miles of Rincon's beach _ half of its eight-mile coast.
Though all of Puerto Rico's beaches saw the effects of erosion after Maria to some degree, Rincon's case is shocking to environmentalists and officials alike.
"We used to play baseball with four bases on those beaches. That doesn't exist anymore," said Rincon Mayor Carlos Lopez Bonilla. "I know the entire coastline like my own hands and I watched how with time, we lost those beaches."
