Slow-moving bureaucracy, finding funding and overlapping agencies are all challenges to addressing beach erosion, but experts say solutions are still possible, but the clock is ticking.
Finding solutions for Southern California’s chronically disappearing beaches — and the money to pay for them — is no easy task.
In 2021, the United States experienced 20 extreme weather and climate-related disasters costing $145 billion — the third-costliest year on record. And it could get worse — research shows that with sea level rise and increasing development in coastal areas, the annual cost of flooding in the nation will jump by more than 26% by 2050.
“State people assume the local communities will come up with some of the money and local communities want the state to pay,” King said of more locally derived plans. “We really haven’t had a good conversation as to who will pay.” “We’re not making the public investment in it, we’re not saying this is really valuable,” Pratt said of preserving sandy beaches, pointing out that nobody wants to visit a cobble beach or rock revetment. “There’s going to be a loss to city coffers and local business if we don’t . It just hasn’t been a priority.
Meanwhile, the California Department of Boating and Waterways in recent years has been giving grants to beach communities in need, including $11.5 million for a restoration project in Encinitas and Solana Beach, $2.9 million for a sand replenishment project in north Orange County and another $1.08 million for San Clemente’s upcoming beach restoration project.
“There’s just so many regulations, green tape,” King said. “They’ve created all these regulations to stop development. But it also stops green progress.” But UC Irvine civil engineering professor Brett Sanders argues sand replenishment sometimes gets a bad rap. Without sand solutions, some coastal wildlife won’t have places to go.
In the four most urbanized coastal counties — Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego — 33% of the shoreline is armored. While permits from the Coastal Commission typically are issued on a temporary basis, the rocks that are piled are rarely removed. Groin jetties north of the Newport Beach Pier. The groin jetties – eight piles of rocks sticking out like fingers into the ocean – were put in place in the 1960s to keep sand from being chopped away and shifting down the coast during big winter storms.
Newport Beach City Councilman Duffy Duffield remembers getting the call as a teenager in the late 1960s to help rescue the houses battered by waves. The water was slamming West Newport homes, so the high school football coach ordered his players to fill sandbags, an attempt to hold back the ocean from overtaking houses.The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers came up with a solution: place perpendicular groins to help capture sand and rebuild the beach as a buffer to keep the ocean away from houses.
Newport Beach also has the benefit of a sand supply from dredging its harbor, though accessing that source still comes with hurdles. A dredging project eight years in the making is just about ready to start. The project, which costs $200,000 for three years, started in 2017 at Doheny and San Onofre state beaches and expanded to San Clemente State Beach in 2020.
San Clemente State Park is the only regional state beach that may get sand replenishment, he said, but that needs to be studied so the sand they put down isn’t simply washed away.
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