Brew Engineer - you might Find Orrin Pilkey's Book "Living with the South Carolina Coast" a good read. Orrin is a professor emeritus at Duke, and i sconsidered by many a national expert on shoreline protection and management, although lately he seems to be more the national critic. He has a VERY strong position against the hardening and general intervention on shorelines.
The cool thing about these books (he's writting the "Living With the ...Coasts" series for many states besides South Carolina) is that he goes Town by Town even beach by beach and inlet by inlet for the entire state and summarizes what has been done historically to stabilize the shoreline and the impacts/consequences. There getting pretty old by now so are more of historical interest, but negative impacts are negative impacts...whether they were done this year or 30 years ago.
I see Amazon has a few used ones for just a few bucks.
http://www.amazon.com/Living-South-C.../dp/0822318156