Folly Beach asking beachfront homeowners to host AI surf cameras on their properties - Live 5 News

FOLLY BEACH, S.C. (WCSC) — Folly Beach is turning to artificial intelligence to get a closer look at how its shoreline changes over time, but the city needs some homeowners to provide the vantage points.

The city contracted with Surfline Coastal Intelligence for $76,500 earlier this summer to use artificial intelligence cameras to document erosion patterns and wave activity along the shoreline.

City officials say cameras installed at beach access points and piers alone will not provide enough data. They are now asking some Front Beach homeowners to allow cameras to be installed on their properties.

The city and Surfline are considering select locations stretching from Folly Beach County Park to Summers Place Lane.

The cameras will provide live monitoring of the beach following storms and other major weather events, potentially reducing the need for post-storm surveys typically conducted by the city’s contracted coastal engineer.

The technology also would allow the city to track changes to the shoreline in real time, including the health of the beach and sand dunes and how much sand is gained or lost each day.

“It’s going to be really beneficial to us, especially for post-storm analysis and end-of-year kind of look at how our beaches are doing, especially after renourishment,” Mayor Chris Bizzell said.

Bizzell said the technology also could speed up the process of documenting storm damage when the city seeks state and federal assistance.

“Every year if we have a storm, we have to do a post-storm analysis so that we can apply for federal and state aid,” Bizzell said. “We can do a post-storm analysis using this camera data in one day. Additionally, we can also turn this around very quickly to give people in Columbia a return on investment for their resilience grants and so forth.”

There is also a tourism component. City officials say the cameras could count the number of people on the beach at a given time, helping the city quantify the economic impact of its beach investments.

“The benefit really is so we have real-time monitoring of the beach health, the sand dunes, accretion, how much sand we’re losing and gaining each day,” Bizzell said. “But there’s also a tourism component there where we can count the number of people on the beach at any given time. So, at the end of the day we can go back to Columbia and say, ‘Here’s where your investment in the beach is pays off in tourism dollars.’”

Hosting a camera would come at no additional cost to homeowners. Surfline will reimburse property owners for electricity costs at their request.

“They get paid each month for the electricity and so forth,” Bizzell said. “So, it’s a kind of low entry point for the homeowner and it does help the city significantly. But again, it’s all voluntary.”

The city has contacted 10 homeowners about hosting the cameras. Three have agreed, three have declined and four have not responded.

Homeowners who agree would enter into a three-year contract with Surfline and give the company access to their properties for installation and occasional maintenance.

Bizzell said participation is voluntary and Surfline would handle the logistics of installing and maintaining the cameras.

These cameras differ from artificial intelligence license plate reader systems, such as Flock, which have raised privacy concerns in other communities. Bizzell said the key difference is that Surfline cameras are low-resolution and cannot identify people’s faces.

“These cameras are very low resolution. They can’t identify a face. It’s basically shapes,” Bizzell said. “So, when they make an identification on the beach, it’s more or less there’s a person on the beach or there’s a person in the water. It doesn’t have any identifying data associated with that.”

Bizzell said the goal is to monitor the beach rather than individual people.

“There’s no privacy concerns here because we’re not monitoring the individual; we’re monitoring the beach,” Bizzell said. “Most of this is about making sure that the beach information is as easy to assemble so that we can provide that information to all the decision makers that are managing our renourishment programs, our aid after a storm, those types of things. So, it does benefit everyone if we have those numbers in front of us.”

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