Seawalls, explained by somebody not selling one
What a Naples seawall costs you to ignore, and what it takes to fix. Six pages, all of them about the privately owned wall holding up the waterfront lots along Naples Bay, the Gordon River and the canals cut behind them. No forms, no quote funnel, no phone number that rings a call center four counties away.
Updated August 2026
Start here
Seawall repair in NaplesFlood elevations measured by neighborhood, what Ian and Milton put into the bay, and the five checks you can run yourself.
Repair or replaceSymptom by symptom, with the mechanism behind each one and the four scope tiers a bid can land in.
PermitsCollier County's Marine permit, the state's 18-inch exemption, the control line, and federal coverage.
Material take-offPanels, cap yards and bags, tiebacks, riprap tons, with every line of arithmetic shown.
MaterialsConcrete, vinyl, composite, steel, aluminium and riprap, and what ends each one.
Repair methodsEight methods, what each fixes, and what each one quietly leaves alone.
Three numbers worth carrying around
- 6.79 feet NAVD88. The highest water NOAA's Naples gauge recorded during Hurricane Ian, and it is an understatement: that was the last reading the gauge sent before it stopped.
- 8 to 13 feet. The range of base flood elevations across the 12 Naples waterfront areas checked against FEMA's flood layer, every one of them well above where a residential seawall cap sits.
- 100 panels and 13 tiebacks. What 100 feet of anchored wall at 4 feet exposed actually contains, which is the sort of thing worth knowing before three contractors quote you three different numbers for it.
Who writes this
One person who got interested in why a whole city's worth of seawalls is reaching end of life at once, and who could not find the elevations written down anywhere useful. Everything on the site is sourced to the agency that publishes it, and the method page lists every one of them. Corrections are welcome and get made.