Environment |

South Orange County’s beaches are rapidly disappearing

Rob Edwards looked toward the ocean during his daily walk Tuesday, Feb. 5, and pointed out how much sand had been chomped away at the stretch of beach in San Clemente.

About two feet of sand disappeared from under an abandoned concession stand at North Beach in just a day, exposing concrete pylons and a four-foot drop from a small staircase. It was a stunning visual of how much sand had been washed away with recent storms and high tides. “It’s sketchy,” he said, looking the building, where caution tape warned people to stay off.

City planners, coastal engineers and residents who live by the coast are carefully watching the beaches in South Orange County — especially at Dana Point and San Clemente — trying to safeguard stretches of sand from disappearing for good. They point at a complex puzzle involving not just Mother Nature, but also human impacts like developments further inland that choke sand supply, that could cause extinction to one of the area’s most valuable treasures: the beach.

“We’re a tourist town, people like to come to Southern California beaches,” said  Tom Bonigut, public works director for the city of San Clemente. “And we’re just slowly but surely losing our beaches to long-term erosion… We’re just trying to save what little we have left.”

A sea of signs

In the past, cyclical erosion would naturally occur — wintertime storms washed sand out to sea, while summer swells deposited it back on the beach. .

But now, there are other things “pinching our sand,” said Stefanie Sekich-Quinn, Surfrider Foundation’s coastal preservation manager.

Besides climate change melting ice at the poles and causing sea levels to rise, strong storms such as those seen over the last few days can also pull sand out to sea.

But there are also the hard structures that are having an impact, such as construction inland that stops the natural flow of sand down creeks and riverbeds to the beach.

“In the past, we haven’t put those variables together,” Sekich-Quinn said. “Now it’s time. We don’t have any more time, actually.”

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There’s no shortage of signs that South County beaches are dwindling and disappearing.

Capistrano Beach in Dana Point took a beating, with a basketball court closed and a seawall crumbling into the ocean when storms, high surf and tides hit a few months ago.

This week, a decades-old palm tree near the waterline toppled, its roots no longer held by layers of sand.

For safety, the county plans to demolish the basketball courts and the restrooms, and there will be public meetings for long-term plans, said Marisa O’Neil, public information officer for OC Parks.

A nearby section of Doheny State Beach’s south parking lot has recently closed as the sand there disappears — a precautionary move that makes about 30 parking spots no longer available to the public.

The city of San Clemente recently gained approval from the California Coastal Commission to put in a steel pile seawall and concrete cap to try and protect its at-risk Marine Safety headquarters from beach erosion.

“Things are changing so rapidly … once you have these visible impacts to your community, people start to pay attention,” said Sekich-Quinn.

No sand, no treasure

Chris Davies spent Tuesday morning trying to find treasure with his metal detector along North Beach in San Clemente, where a day earlier workers scrambled to put a sand barrier up to protect lifeguard towers from big surf and a high tide.

Davies had to call it quits for the morning as the tide crept up over the beach, with little sand left for him to explore.

He wondered if rock jetties here would help save the beach, like they did in West Newport Beach in the ’60s, not only helping to keep sand between groins but potentially bringing better surf to the areas.

He pointed out the Dana Point Harbor, built in the ’60s, as one of the reasons the beaches further south have diminished.

“It was a natural bay. Since they built the harbor, all the sand gets trapped, the current doesn’t deposit sand,” he said.

Sekich-Quinn said the build of the Dana Point Harbor interrupted the sedimentation cycle — what’s called a “littoral cell” — which moves sand in and out of an area. The sand can no longer shift the way it naturally would.

The developments inland have also choked off sand that would come down the San Juan Creek to replenish beaches.

“When you block a watershed miles off the coast, you’re interfering with that existence of sand. The San Juan watershed has been severely compromised,” she said.

A San Juan Creek Watershed Management Study in 2002 showed that development in the watershed had gone from 3 percent in 1964 to 32 percent by 1990. The study predicted the watershed would be close to 50 percent built over by 2050.

“You just don’t get the big slugs of natural sediment from San Juan Creek, after paving over the watershed,” said  Bonigut. “There’s just less natural supply over the last 40 years or so.  It’s been slow, but overall steady. Our beaches have been getting narrower.”

Next steps

San Clemente has been working with the Army Corps of Engineers since 2001 to bring in 251,000 cubic yards of sand to fill in the area of Linda Lane to the south end of T-street.

The project, which would widen beaches by about 50 feet, costs upwards of $11.5 million, to be paid for by the city, federal and state grants once approvals are complete and sand becomes available.

Meanwhile, the city is currently applying for a five-year permit from the Army Corps of Engineers to bring in smaller amounts of sand when it becomes available, much of the time from dredging projects that pull sand from rivers to avoid flooding, or from harbors when they fill with sand.

The County has applied for a beach restoration grant from the State Department of Boating and Waterways to try and save Capistrano Beach, according to Toni Nelson, a resident who has documented the decline over the last few years.

“This beach is part of our identity as a community,” she said. “We can’t lose it.”

But sand replenishment and sea walls can be costly, often at the taxpayers expense, and is often a temporary fix, Sekich-Quinn said, calling it a “Band-Aid.”

Long-term solutions?

Inland, there should be efforts to remove dams to release impounded sediment and a halt to development to ensure healthy sediment flow in watersheds, Sekich-Quinn said.

Coastal communities like Seattle and Hawaii have been experimenting with porous concrete that allows water to move through structures, beach boardwalks and parking lots. “Living shorelines,” or beaches that have plants and dunes to help keep sand in place, are another idea.

There’s the solutions of “managed retreat,” moving structures away from the changing coastline, and what Sekich-Quinn likes to call “resilient relocation,” lifting structures up to allow sand to move naturally.

Ken Knatz, principle civil engineer for the city of San Clemente, said it’s a constant struggle trying to figure out what’s the best way to save the beaches — and at what cost.

“We’re trying to control something that is almost uncontrollable,” he said.”Anything can be engineered, but funding and money drive what we can and cannot do.”