As he drove a city-owned SUV slowly up the beach just hours after Hurricane Irene blew through this high-rise vacation spot, Phill Roehrs, the city's coastal engineer, liked what he saw: a flat, wide, beautiful beach, even bigger than before the storm hit.

Call it luck: By the time it arrived here Saturday, Irene had weakened to a Category 1 hurricane. But here as elsewhere, officials and engineers say years of strategic planning and millions of dollars spent on erosion control and shoreline protection minimized the storm's impact. Others say Irene actually showed that, in especially vulnerable areas, such as North Carolina's Outer Banks, it may be a waste of money to try keeping up with beaches' shifting sands.

On New York's Long Island, the beaches fared "pretty well," said Moke McGowan, president of the Long Island Convention and Visitors Bureau. "We expected heavier erosion, especially on the South Fork and the East End," home to the Hamptons and Montauk. A handful of beaches, including parts of Jones Beach and Fire Island National Seashore, remain closed this week. They're scheduled to reopen for Labor Day weekend.

Here in Virginia Beach, Roehrs said, a 10-year, $140 million project kept Irene's waves from topping the boardwalk. The project included a beach replenishment project that imported 4 million cubic yards of sand — enough to fill a line of dump trucks from here to Denver — and construction of a concrete boardwalk built atop a 10-foot-wide pipe that runs its length. The huge pipe gathers storm water and, through a series of massive pumps up and down the beach, delivers it 2,000 feet out to sea.

The system "worked like a charm" during Irene, Roehrs said.