Pilkey heads the school's Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines. While here, he dipped his fingers into the region's erosion problems which resulted in a written analysis that is strongly critical of engineering efforts here in the Northwest. It would not have gone on in most states which are far more sophisticated and have had a lot more experience. It's a matter of experience.
Nobody knows what's going to happen.
Most of the guesses indicate there's no reason to think it is really going to work. But I've never seen a structure of that magnitude that you don't pay a pretty stiff price for. The price is erosion somewhere else. As long as you've got, one, a navigable channel where ships want to come in and out, or two, a shoreline lined with buildings, these changes create problems. It is exceptionally poor-quality engineering in the sense that nobody knows what it is going to do.