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Residents of Seacoast Bluffs in Strange Battle With Nature

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Times Staff Writer

One bluff-top resident in Encinitas does a little moonlighting when the tide is out. He works at night on a timber seawall he hopes will blunt the waves that are undercutting the bluff where his home is perched.

To the south, a Solana Beach resident plays a game of weekend tag with county inspectors. His attempts to refill an ocean-carved cave are frequently interrupted by the county watchdogs who order him to dismantle his handiwork.

In Leucadia and elsewhere along the North County coast staircases to state and county beaches dangle uselessly in midair, victims of waves and bluff collapses during the severe winter two years ago. They are unlikely to be repaired.

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North Coast residents know their enemies--the wind, the rainstorms, the high tides--and know the ways to protect the sandy beaches and sensitive ocean bluffs from all but the worst of these seasonal onslaughts.

But what they have failed to realize is that, in trying to save and improve their precious ocean-front real estate, they have become enemies of the natural assets they seek to preserve. Chuck Damm, assistant district director of the state Coastal Commission, admits that the agency is becoming concerned over the increase in permit activity for beach protective devices because each seawall, groin and bluff revetment further disturbs the natural processes which, for centuries, have built up the sand along the county’s 90-mile coastline and provided a barrier that kept all but the most vicious of storms from attacking the seaside bluffs.

“Property owners have a right to protect their property, and the Coastal Commission recognizes that right,” Damm explained. “The real question is, what is the best protective method, the one that has the least effect on beach access and on coastal processes?” Damm is interested in protecting that ages-old cycle that provides a sand buffer to protect the bluffs.

That sand historically was formed inland and carried down rivers and streams to the sea, where waves and currents carried it southward and deposited it along beaches. Researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography sounded the warning more than 25 years ago that the man-made dams on rivers and the man-made harbors, jetties, groins and breakwaters along the coast were impeding the natural sand replenishment cycle.

That fact of life is kindergarten lore for coastal residents, who note that they did not construct the dams or erect the coastal structures that block the sand from reaching local beaches.

But, Damm points out, some of the public and private beach protective devices that have been built have been effective in impeding another major source of beach sand: natural erosion of the coastal bluffs.

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When Seascape Shores condominium residents’ group sprayed gallons of plastic-based glue on the ocean bluff beneath their homes in 1980, they sought to seal the bluff face against the forces of winter storms. They also messed with nature’s erosion system.

Recently, state coastal commissioners granted half a dozen permits to condominium homeowner groups along the Solana Beach bluffs allowing them to fill wave-made sea caves directly under their bluff-top condominium projects.

Damm explained that the coastal commissioners were convinced that the cementing of the caves was necessary to prevent bluff collapses. But bluff collapses are one natural method of providing beaches with sand, he acknowledged.

Seawalls also can wreak havoc with the natural sand replenishment cycle, if they are built too far out from the property being protected, and act to trap sand that should be allowed to migrate southward unimpeded, he said.

Coastal commissioners rarely turn down a property owner’s request for a seawall, he conceded. But, to create the least impact on coast the agency requires that close-in vertical seawalls be built to protect steep ocean bluffs and rock revetments be placed on lower portions of more gently sloping bluffs. By aping nature, protective devices do minimal harm, he explained.

Coastal commissioners have allowed installation of ribbing along the face of one unstable Solana Beach bluff that has a condominium project atop it and have approved placement of room-sized rocks along the ocean side of Cardiff’s Restaurant Row. Only time and tide will tell whether these man-made remedies will stand up to nature’s forces.

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A county park planner, Joe McGuire, sees another danger brought by urbanization which, he believes, is hastening the collapse of the coastal bluffs despite efforts of the property owners atop them. The villain is water runoff.

The county official enforces county requirements for drought-resistant planting with a vengeance. He knows what excess water draining westward to the bluffs can do. It can weaken the bluff face as it drains westward toward the ocean. It can saturate the sandy soils, and it can lubricate the clay materials it encounters on its way to sea level.

A walk along the ocean beach by the bluffs in San Dieguito on a mid-summer day shows water trickling, and sometimes pouring, out of the face of the bluff.

“We’ve got to get people to turn off their damned sprinklers or we aren’t going to have our bluffs much longer,” McGuire said. “You should see the damage that’s been done in my (San Diego County’s) beach parks.”

Damm agrees with McGuire that runoff from coastal yards and gardens is endangering the sensitive bluffs, but Damm believes that “it is probably impossible to regulate the amount of water people use.” He said that the Coastal Commission seeks voluntary compliance by home builders to plant drought-resistant landscaping to cut down on the drainage from the coastal hillsides.

“It’s as if the coast had been turned into a tropical rain forest,” Damm explained. “Instead of the average of 10 to 12 inches of rainfall this area normally has, development has boosted that to the equivalent of 80 inches of runoff because of people watering lawn and irrigation. I can’t vouch for the numbers, but the principle is correct.” Urbanization has brought another man-made headache for the coastal bluff, because runoff can cause slippage, landslides and blockfalls--collapse of large blocks of solid rock--from the bluffs.

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At the Self-Realization Fellowship bluff-top religious retreat in Encinitas, memory of the 1941 loss of a lotus-domed temple in a bluff collapse spurred leaders to install a sophisticated underground drainage system to siphon off the ground water before it can harm bluff stability. The system, installed a few years ago, has yet to be pronounced effective, but other bluff-top dwellers from Del Mar to Oceanside are eyeing it as a possible answer to their own problems.

State Park and Recreation Department officials, however, have conceded defeat in their efforts to provide an access to the northern end of Leucadia State Beach park after state geologist Syd Willard pronounced the bluffs where the access stairway descended “unstable.”

State parks district manager Bill Fait said that the stairs had been badly damaged in storms during the winter of 1982. The rebuilt stairway at Grandview Street was demolished in April, 1983, when a portion of the steep bluff collapsed for no apparent reason, taking the lower stairway with it.

Fait also said that the state would spend future park development money on sea-level recreational areas locally, including improvements at popular Moonlight State Beach in Encinitas and creation of a beach park near the Carlsbad-Leucadia border with a 400-space parking lot.

State geologist Willard made Carlsbad residents’ tempers flare a year ago when she suggested that the city should do little or nothing to its eroding bluffs. She pointed out that the natural erosion of the ocean bluffs was a factor in restoring sandy beaches to the tourist-oriented community.

Carlsbad, which has tried such exotic remedies as the Longard tube and offshore artificial seaweed to protect the sand on its beaches, now is fighting to protect its coastal route, Carlsbad Boulevard, from the ocean. The highway, formerly U.S. 101, floods during stormy high tide periods, and beach erosion has brought the surf to within a few feet of the roadbed in places.

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In Oceanside, the beach that once was 300 feet wide has been replenished to a fraction of that width every few years by the U.S. Corps of Engineers, which dredges out the entrances to the Oceanside Small Craft Harbor and the Del Mar boat basin on Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base. Those two harbors form a dam that prevents migrating sand from spreading southward.

Oceanside city officials are trying to make the sand replenishment a permanent process by construction of an experimental sand-bypass system which would transfer the sand trapped in the entrance to the two harbors south to the Oceanside beaches.

Damm said that the Coastal Commission approved the project, convinced that it will be one of the few efforts that could have a positive regional impact on the county’s denuded beaches.

As the $4.5-million sand-bypass tunnel nears its first tests, two groups are eyeing it as a focal point for regional efforts in beach restoration.

A San Diego Assn. of Governments shoreline erosion committee has named Oceanside Mayor Larry Bagley as its leader and has reactivated efforts to obtain completion of the local portion of a federally funded coastal tidal study that may provide some answers to the county’s knotty beach erosion problems.

And a newly formed Beach Erosion Action Committee composed of local governmental officials from Orange and San Diego counties plans to create a joint-powers agency which can attack the beach erosion problem from a regional perspective, seeking state, federal and regional funds for long-term solutions. City and county officials from Dana Point south to San Diego will be invited to join the group.

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Damm said the regional approach was the most logical but, he warned, the cities may find that their interests are not compatible.

“What one group in Oceanside does may well have a negative impact on Carlsbad beaches, and, in time, on San Dieguito and Del Mar beaches,” Damm explained, citing a now-abandoned plan to build jetties to trap sand on Oceanside’s beaches.

Interruption of the natural southward flow of beach sand by jetties could have deprived Carlsbad’s beaches of sand deposits that usually build up in the late spring and early summer. The process would eventually extend down the coastline, shrinking the already sand-poor beaches in unincorporated San Dieguito and in Del Mar and La Jolla.

Damm said he doubted his state coastal agency would ever approve a beach enhancement project that would benefit one community at the expense of others.

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