SF Gate, by Farley Elliott: Some of Southern California’s famous beach towns are suddenly finding themselves short on their most notable public resource: coastal sand. And with an eye-opening, powerful El Niño on the horizon, the timing couldn’t be worse.
The upscale Orange County community of Newport Beach has invoked a new emergency permit this week that will allow the city, in partnership with Orange County Public Works, to pull some 200,000 cubic yards of sand from the nearby Santa Ana River. The sediment is expected to help shore up jetties and other protective coastal areas that have been battered this season by hard surf and high swells. Without replenishment and other coastal preparedness work, communities like Newport Beach become vulnerable to flooding and larger issues, including the disintegration of vital roadways, the exposure and deterioration of underground infrastructure, and even the loss of private coastline homes and businesses.
While the city already dredges the river for sand to shore up beach loss in a normal year, this season, Newport Beach officials have had to use the emergency declaration to push up the replenishment time frame ahead of what is expected to be a record El Niño year. In a normal year, dredging occurs around January, and this year, the work could start as soon as October.
But that’s only the start of Newport Beach’s issues.
Other areas like the famous Wedge surfing spot have seen dramatic sand loss this summer, and the sediment from the Santa Ana River will not be enough to overcome the retreat. Per the Orange County Register, city officials are already in talks to dredge other areas, including Newport Harbor, to find more sand.
Just to the south, the city of Dana Point isn’t faring much better. The community has had to red-tag several unsafe coastal houses recently that have become so unstable that they risk falling into the sea. Orange County’s Fifth District Supervisor Katrina Foley told KTTV-TV that it was “critical” that Dana Point figure out “how to get the sand on the beaches” as quickly as possible to assist homeowners before further swells come.
Earlier this month, Dana Point declared a local state of emergency in an attempt to free up resources and shorten timelines for important coastal safety work. That includes sand replenishment, which has been ongoing for years. In May, the county spent $440,000 to dump 13,500 cubic yards of sand along the popular Capistrano Beach, part of a group of sand replenishment projects in South Orange County. Supervisor Foley said at the time that the county had already delivered more than 360,000 cubic yards of sand to needed areas, though at least some of that recent work has already receded back into the ocean.
Perhaps nowhere else in Orange County is the bitter battle over sand so visible as in San Clemente, where severe coastal erosion continues to chew up shoreline and destabilize train tracks. Angry locals have pushed for greater restoration work for years, including organizing under the nonprofit Save Our Beaches in 2023. On the group’s website, under the heading “GAMEPLAN,” there are just two bullet points, representing the group’s sole focus: get sand, and keep sand.
The city has already been spending big on sand replenishment for years, yet the problem remains — and this summer, it has even accelerated. San Clemente declared its own state of emergency this month and moved to spend $1 million to drop sand on North Beach. Recent summer storms also damaged braces along the pier, which will take hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix, the Orange County Register reported.
Others are taking a wait-and-see approach. Popular summertime tourist spot Laguna Beach, which has declared its own state of emergency, said on a recently launched El Niño preparation website that the city “does not have plans to undertake a sand replenishment project on its own” at this time. Its more sheltered beaches have been less impacted than elsewhere in Orange County, the site reads, and officials “don’t yet know how much sand, if any, has been lost such that it won’t naturally return to the beaches.”
Much of the rest of coastal Orange County does not have the luxury of time. And with the global supply of sand, the most mined material on Earth, decreasing (at least the useful stuff for coastal conservation), there are no guarantees that all this sand movement can save South Orange County’s famously pristine beaches forever.
Prophetic Link:
“In fires, in floods, in earthquakes, in the fury of the great deep, in calamities by sea and by land, the warning is given that God’s Spirit will not always strive with men.” Last Day Events, 26.2