Lynn Timberlake used to kick her feet in the waves from a seawall behind her Indian Rocks Beach home.

Now, she watches sea turtle nests emerge in the sand between the wall and the water, the sea oats that sprout from it and a heron that tries to snatch snacks from fishermen on the shore.

That’s a result of beach renourishment that takes place every several years in Pinellas County. It’s a process where sand is pumped from seabeds and dumped on beaches to create distance between buildings and the shoreline.

This month, renourishment started along some of Pinellas’ most severely eroded beaches on Sand Key, including Timberlake’s Indian Rocks Beach. But the outcome promises to look a little different this go around.

To do the work, the county needs easements to access landowners’ private property. But obtaining them has proven a difficult task. Nearly 100 property owners haven’t signed agreements to give the county access to their property for its $125.7 million project this year.

As a result, the county will only pump sand from the edge of their private properties to the water.

That will leave some property owners with dips or pits behind their homes or businesses, and potentially more vulnerable to storm surge. One county official described it as a “sawtooth” approach to the periodic exercise of beach renourishment.

The Tampa Bay Times used public records from Pinellas County Public Works to map the gaps in the project. The visualization reveals whole stretches of barrier island that will go without full fortification. Other parts of the beach will end up with peaks and valleys between neighbors.

Some of those valleys will even out over time. But those who monitor beach erosion said it’s not an ideal approach to hardening the shoreline against flooding.

“We found a cure, and these people just don’t want to participate,” University of South Florida coastal geology professor Ping Wang said. “We’re kind of stuck…”