Confronting ‘California’s Battered Coast’

Storms and severe tides of recent years have eroded the California coastline and worse may be ahead if coastal development continues unchecked, scientists said Wednesday at a conference in San Diego.

The damming of rivers and “armor-plating” of coastal cliffs is preventing the replenishment of beach sand, thereby hastening the disappearance of beachfront, experts said at the opening day of the three-day meeting coordinated by the California Coastal Commission, state Senate Office of Research and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

About 200 experts, bureaucrats and environmental activists are attending the conference, called “California’s Battered Coast,” which deals with questions such as: How can the erosion be controlled without worsening it? and Who will pay for property losses? The conference concludes Friday.

Heavy rains and the El Nino phenomenon of 1982 and 1983, in which warmer Pacific waters rose an average of half a foot along the California coastline, forced residents to realize that the beaches won’t last forever.

“For the first time, people were calling us and asking, ‘Where’s the beach?’ They were having waves coming in their living rooms,” engineering geologist Richard McCarthy of the state Coastal Commission said.

And climatological and oceanographic records suggest that another El Nino could strike within five or six years, marine geologist K.O. Emery said in his keynote speech.

But there’s no way of knowing if the next El Nino will be as rough as the last one, Emery added. “My crystal ball is broken,” he joked.

Public officials at the conference included Oceanside Mayor Larry Bagley, who complained that the city has “hauled a million cubic yards of sand in from inland” to replenish beaches.

“Erosion’s going to happen,” Bagley said. “The question is How do we combat the erosion or get new sources of sand? There are no simple solutions, no cheap solutions.”

Or permanent solutions, for that matter.

“The winter storms of 1982 and 1983 caused severe damage throughout California’s coast, and recently compiled evidence suggests that such stormy winters are closer to the historic norm than the past 40- to 50-year period would appear to indicate,” commission researcher Mark Prinz-Delaplaine said.

But the most serious problem facing many beaches in Southern California has been the reduction of sediment, as dams are built upstream, Prinz-Delaplaine said.

Today, the scientists will discuss possible ways to prevent or at least modify the erosion.

On Wednesday they considered how to gather raw data about the erosion. One way is by analyzing satellite photos that expose, in spectacular color detail, how ocean currents are nibbling--or gnawing, in some cases--at the state’s most famous beaches.

The space satellites have been making detailed oceanographic observations since the 1960s, researcher Robert L. Stevenson of the Office of Naval Research and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said.

More recently, astronauts aboard the space shuttle have used a special type of radar to track ocean phenomena, Stevenson said.

Events thousands of miles away could affect California beaches, Emery said. For example, fossil fuels are generating atmospheric pollutants that trap solar heat, raising the Earth’s average temperature. The warming trend is speeding the melting of glaciers, thereby raising the Pacific sea level, Emery said.

However, Emery added that the melting can’t be blamed entirely on the industrial age, as the glaciers have been melting for at least 12,000 years.

“We’re losing beaches, we’re losing homes,” commission spokesman Jack Liebster said. “In the long term, we have to do something.”