Ecological Rebirth or Noise? : Newport Bay Dredge Draws Mixed Reviews

To some Newport Beach residents, the current 24-hour-a-day dredging operation along the narrow ocean waterways leading to Upper Newport Bay is the fulfillment of a long-held ecological hope.

To others, it’s just a lot of noise.

The dredging operation, which began in February, is designed to scrape 25 years’ worth of silt and mud from the bottom of the bay.

With the sediment removed, the state Fish and Game Department, manager of the ecological reserve that covers much of the area, hopes Upper Newport Bay will be restored to the state it was in “before human habitation” 40 to 50 years ago, said John Wolter, a Newport Beach city engineer and the project’s coordinator.

“I can’t believe anyone speaking out against it,” said Galaxy Drive resident Robit Koehler, whose home is now nearest to the dredging. “We’re tickled to death to have it. We’ve been waiting for it for years.”

But some residents along Galaxy Drive have blamed the grating and thumping noises and the continuous churning of machinery on the barge-like dredge for sleepless nights and frayed nerves.

For a two-week period, as the dredge moved past Beverly Thompson Coil’s home on Galaxy Drive, the drone of the machinery was so bothersome, “it became comical,” she said. “Even the dog was having a nervous breakdown; his hair was falling out in clumps.”

One night, Coil said, her lawyer husband gave up trying to sleep and headed for a San Bernardino courtroom at 4:30 a.m. while floodlights from the dredge filtered through their home’s picture windows to give the living room a “sci-fi aura.”

Coil acknowledged, however, that the noise has subsided in the past few days, now that the dredge is farther north along the ocean channel, on its route to the upper bay from its starting point near Newport Dunes Aquatic Park.

Wolter said some residents have been waiting for the operation to begin since 1973, when it was first noticed that heavy rainfall washed an excessive amount of silt and mud into the bay from the fresh-water San Diego Creek Channel.

The channel was extended to the bay in the early 1960s, a period of extensive construction in Orange County, to handle rainfall that could not adequately be absorbed by other rivers, Wolter said.

“Unfortunately, it just opened a chute of sediment to come into the bay,” he said.

The city has received four official complaints about noise from the dredging since the nine-month, $4.7-million operation started, Wolter said.

Wolter also said the company hired to do the dredging, Dutra Dredging Inc., received two complaints, but the complaining residents were two of the four who called the city.

Douglas Comstock, Dutra’s general manager, said that keeping the operation going 24 hours a day will save the city and other agencies that are funding the project about $1 million and that noise measured from the dredge has not exceeded government standards.