Environment |

Can Southern California save its disappearing beaches?  

Finding solutions for Southern California’s chronically disappearing beaches — and the money to pay for them — is no easy task.

Sand dredging that builds up a beach has been a go-to in the past, but comes with a big price tag and long waits; piling boulders to keep the sea at bay has been the emergency fix, but creates its own problems that can be hard to undo. More recently, there have been trials at creating “living shorelines” to mimic what the coast looked like before people came along.

Some experts are asking if out-of-the-box methods should be explored, if there are other solutions rather than waiting for dredging projects and spending millions for sand, or if other easier, cheaper sources of sand can be found.

One thing is clear: the cost of doing nothing is too great and the longer the government waits, the more likely the rising ocean will destroy homes, streets and infrastructure, experts say. Already, tourism revenue is threatened as Southern Californians lose access to beaches that were once popular.

Donne Brownsey, chair of the California Coastal Commission, said communities can wait no longer.

“It’s nervous time,” she said. “It’s really hard for people to understand. This is a huge and complex issue and it’s very difficult (for communities) to grasp the fact it’s happening.”

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.

“Whole communities can be destroyed,” said beach economist Philip King. “What happens if you have large swaths taken out if there’s a storm? Who is going to pay?”

That’s the million, perhaps billion, dollar question.

The dollar dilemma

Experts say federal, state and local governments need to hammer out who will cover the bill.

Getting federal funding for Army Corps of Engineers projects takes an act of Congress and competition is fierce; two sand replenishment plans for Orange County that are approved and on the books have be waiting years for the money to get started.

“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.”

Money needs to come from a combination of sources — state and local taxes, taxes collected on hotel stays and the creation of special taxing districts to cover the costs of restoring the beaches, King said.

But government sources are struggling themselves, trying to triage where limited dollars will go.

“State Parks are not well funded and that funding has decreased over the decades. We can barely keep up,” said Riley Pratt, senior environmental scientist for the Orange Coast District of State Parks.

“State Parks, we’re a drop in the bucket,” he said. On a budget pie chart, State Parks isn’t even a slice; it’s in the category of “other,” Pratt said.

The Orange Coast District gets about $29 million annually to cover costs and pay salaries, including the labor to manage the parks. The parks department needs grants or funding allocated by California legislators to do anything more. Just like wildfires, the money usually doesn’t come until the houses are burning.

“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 (do something). It just hasn’t been a priority.”

As coastal erosion intensifies, however, some dollars are getting through.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Coastal Resilience Fund recently announced $138 million in grant money to 29 states, an “investment in coastal resilience” to help communities prepare for increasing coastal flooding and more intense storms, while improving thousands of acres of coastal habitats.

The agencies recognized “while 40% of Americans call the coast home and coastal communities contribute $9.5 trillion in goods and services annually to the U.S. economy, these areas are increasingly being affected by flooding and other coastal hazards.”

Manhattan Beach, despite having wide, expansive beaches, earlier this year launched a sand dune restoration program with the help of the California State Coastal Conservancy, which gave a grant of $340,000 to fund the project.

The state also is working with OC Parks on a South OC Regional Coastal Resilience Strategic Plan using a $214,500 grant from the Ocean Protection Council and is teaming up with the county to try one of those living shorelines at the ravaged Capistrano Beach in Dana Point.

More money has come from the California Coastal Commission, which awarded $8 million in grants to 40 communities to assess the threat of sea level rise and update their plans to respond.

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.

Stefanie Sekich-Quinn, coast and climate initiative senior manager at the Surfrider Foundation, has little patience for those who complain there’s not enough money to do anything meaningful. She pointed to the federal Inflation Reduction Act, which offered $2.7 billion for coastal resilience. And as of June 2022, she said, California had a $97 billion budget surplus.

“Let’s use the money and stop complaining about it. I think the argument of no money is another excuse to continue the inertia,” she said. “People are playing dumb or not doing their job.”

Besides money, another roadblock has been the overlapping bureaucracies and the many regulations that govern California’s coast.

“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.”

Planners should look outside the United States at what is being done globally, King said. The Dutch, for example, perform regional sediment management for one-tenth of what it costs in California. The Netherlands is a progressive country with environmental rules, but it has fewer layers of regulations, he said.

And it’s not just a matter of dumping sand on depleted beaches. The sand nourishment has to be strategic or the rising waves will just wash it away.

“Regional sediment management has just stalled. It is bureaucracy…Beach restoration can work if done properly or it can be a waste of money,” King said.

Think out of the box

Sand nourishment isn’t always the best answer.

“With sand nourishment, you are smothering a piece of coastline,” said scientist Pratt. “If you have sensitive tide pools like at Crystal Cove, you need to be sensitive about your nourishment.”

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.

Hard armoring — dumping boulders by the tons to block the waves — has been used on several Orange County beaches to immediately protect infrastructure. But it’s a fix that takes up sand space and also can create further erosion by intensifying wave action, which experts say claws away even more of what sand is left.

According to the California Regional Assessment National Shoreline Management Study in 2018, more than 10% of California’s shoreline, or 136 miles, was “armored.” And more rocks have been dumped on beaches in the years since the report was released.

In the four most urbanized coastal counties — Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego — 33% of the shoreline is armored.

In 2019, an emergency rock barrier was placed to protect a wall and parking lot that abuts the beach in front of what’s known as First Point at Malibu Surfrider Beach.

Crews have dumped boulders by the truckload the last several weeks along the damaged Orange County Transportation Authority railway line in south San Clemente, which had to be closed to passenger service in September — for the second time — because the tracks shifted several inches.

While permits from the Coastal Commission typically are issued on a temporary basis, the rocks that are piled are rarely removed.

The commission, however, is trying to clamp down on hard armoring, adding regulations on new developments, such as a proposed junior lifeguard headquarters in Newport Beach that was approved earlier this year with the condition that no sea wall be built if it turns out the ocean batters the building.

The more innovative solution is a mix of the previous two, the living shoreline being tested in several beach towns grappling with severe erosion.

A 3-acre project started in Santa Monica in 2016 is self-sustaining now, with the dunes at about 3 feet in some places.

That’s what county officials are planning to try next at Capistrano Beach — a cobble rock base will be poured and topped with a layer of sand and native vegetation to help secure the sediment. Similar models have been successful in Carlsbad and Ventura.

The idea is for threatened sections of the coast to mimic what once existed years ago: natural dunes where wildlife and native plants can thrive. While the method may still cut down on towel space for beachgoers, it’s a solution many are hopeful may just save disappearing beaches — and the infrastructure they protect.

Sekich-Quinn called the Capistrano Beach project “a poster child for a living shoreline.”

While that pilot project has been approved by the Coastal Commission, OC Parks officials wonder where they’ll get the upward $8 million to actually carry out the plan.

So what other options are out there?

Building an offshore reef is favored by Carl Nelson, retired Orange County public works director and OC Parks manager. He believes it could work at Capistrano Beach.

Nelson is suggesting a rock groin offshore — like a jetty but smaller — close enough to dissipate wave strength, designed to also create a surfing wave. The “Nelson Groin,” as he’s dubbed it, could also be created so a second break closer to the shoreline would generate a softer, second wave safer for children.

Decades ago, Newport Beach had eight jetties installed by the Army Corp of Engineers when homes were threatened by big storms that chomped away at the sand.

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.

“It was very explosive,” he recalled. “The waves are licking at these homes.”

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. They also created some great surfing spots.

But getting approval for something similar through the Coastal Commission today would not be as easy, said Newport Beach Public Works Director Dave Webb.

“From an engineering standpoint, the groins where we are and other cities, they’ve worked really well, and I don’t think it’s detrimental to the beach,” Webb said. “We would probably have more challenges if we didn’t have them. By now, we’d have to have done something different here.”

They can be tricky, needing a constant sand supply to fill them in, which Newport has from the Santa Ana River. However, that supply is dwindling, because of inland development and a lack of rain during the recent droughts that would transport the sand toward the coast, he said.

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.

And, the city forged a partnership with the Army Corps and the county to remove sediment from the Santa Ana River, Webb said. The project is twofold: to reduce flood risk and replenish the sand between the jetties.

Another discussion underway is tapping into the sand upstream near Prado Dam, Webb said.

The right solutions

Not every beach is eroding, some are thriving. Officials must determine where to spend their resources.

State Parks is collaborating with UC Irvine to conduct high-tech studies to pinpoint problem areas, said Orange Coast State Parks Superintendent Kevin Pearsall. Researchers are using drone images, topography, monitoring and surveying to measure beaches and track sand movement.

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.

“It takes years to research that stuff to really figure out what’s happening. You never know 100%, all of a sudden the earth moves and it changes everything again,” Pearsall said. “Will we get answers? I don’t know, the earth’s movement is the same as the weather, everything changes so much, all of the time.”

Calafia State Beach, just north of where the railroad tracks were damaged by the sea, is “definitely on our radar,” Pearsall said.

“Everybody says ‘bring sand.’ Nobody understands the complexity of bringing sand — the weight, the vehicles, the whole process is a challenge,” Pearsall said.

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.

“I need a survey, someone who can prove that if I do that, it’s going to stay. Ultimately, the cost is lower to get the right solution,” he said. “You have to do these surveys to do that.”

Meanwhile, Huntington State Beach has grown by more than 100 feet in the last two decades. The Talbert Marsh and the Santa Ana River mouth get clogged with sand, so it gets placed on the state beach.

“Wouldn’t it be fantastic to take it to Doheny?” Pratt said. “But it’s so expensive to move it.”

Sand is money

According to the 2018 shoreline management study, about 40% of California beaches had eroded by the late 1900s, increasing to 66% over the past 25 years.

Southern California’s ocean economy in 2013 was valued at about $27 billion, according to the report.

Of that, ocean-based tourism and recreation in coastal counties generated $18.4 billion and 384,000 jobs in 2013, a figure no doubt much greater a decade later, especially following the pandemic that sent droves more people to the coast to seek outdoor space.

“The rates of erosion along California’s unique and picturesque coastal cliffs range from a few inches to a foot per year,” the report says. “The loss of sediment supplying beaches is not good news for a state that draws so much wealth from the coast.”

What better argument is there that more needs to be done to protect the coast than to avoid more costs, said Michael Beck, director of the Center for Coastal Climate Resilience at UC Santa Cruz.

“We spend hundreds of billions of dollars after the disaster instead of billions of dollars before disaster hits,” he said. “We’re having to respond to so many disasters, beach erosion, we have less and less money available. These sorts of impacts are straining budgets more and more.”

The cost of replacing property at risk of coastal flooding is estimated to be nearly $100 billion (in 2000 dollars).

In the San Mateo County city of Pacifica, a two-story apartment complex teetering on the edge of a bluff had to be demolished beginning in 2016. In Sonoma County, homes were red-tagged and fell onto the beach in the 2000s.

Sea-level rise, and the fact that waves are getting larger and doing more damage, is complicating the search for solutions to the disappearing beaches. Scientists are concerned that anything that is done will simply get washed away by 2100.

Pratt, the State Parks scientist, shares worries about the future.

“My real fear is the sea level rise over the next 20 to 50 years. We’re in for a big surprise and I don’t know if we can nourish our way out of that change,” he said. “We’re just going to be losing beaches.”

He estimated, modestly, that the sea could rise by 3 feet in 70 years.

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to keep up with the pace of sea level rise,” he said. “In a lot of places, there will be essentially no beach. The water will be right up against houses, streets, railroads. You can put things there, but it won’t stay because the water level will be so high.”

That doesn’t matter to Toni Nelson, founder of community advocacy group Capo Cares.

“My feeling is we save as much as we can for as long as we can,” she said. “The sea is a resource available to everybody and it behooves us to protect it for our grandchildren.”