While Machines Sweep Up Kelp, Residents Spit Out Complaints

Just before 5 a.m. they hit the shore: the City of San Diego’s fleet of lime-green beach cleaners. Large, powerful and noisy, they creep along the coastline, sucking rotting kelp and trash into their jaws and leaving a smooth, pancake-flat stretch of sand in their wake.

City officials point with pride to the product of their coastal labors. The $1-million-a-year maintenance program, they say, keeps the seashore from La Jolla to Ocean Beach free of smelly, fly-breeding seaweed and looking postcard-perfect for the enjoyment of locals and tourists alike.

But critics complain that the daily cleanup routine is robbing the shoreline of sand and exacerbating San Diego’s notorious beach erosion woes. They say that when the giant skiploaders comb the beach for kelp, they also remove a hefty load of sand, depleting the supply onshore and making the beach and cliffs more vulnerable to erosion.

Others, meanwhile, worry that the giant mechanical rakes that sweep the shore may disturb eggs laid by spawning grunion along the high-tide line. And beachfront residents gripe about the early-morning intrusion created by the roar of the engines powering the heavy equipment.

“If the city had (its) way, you wouldn’t find a footprint on the beach in the morning,” said Robert Hotten, a Mission Beach architect whose bedroom window overlooks the boardwalk. “This program is total overkill. It’s a waste of money, it’s environmentally unsound to groom a natural environment, and geologically it’s causing a loss of sand.”

For Hotten, who has lived at the beach off and on for 43 years, the fight against the kelp-removal program has become a personal crusade.

He rises early to stalk the city’s beach-cleaning army on its daily rounds. Armed with a camera, he trails the crews through the gray dawn as they rake and groom the sand and then follows the trucks that haul kelp and other spoils to Fiesta Island, where the material is dumped.

He has three albums of photographs--neatly labeled and dated--documenting the kelp-removal program over the past year and has even recorded the serial numbers of the municipal vehicles.

Finally, Hotten has collected samples of the Fiesta Island sand city workers have trucked back to the beach to compensate for the material they remove. He suspects it contains sewage sludge--which is dried in large, shallow beds on the island--and intends to have it analyzed by a soils expert.

“I guess I have made this kind of a mission,” acknowledges Hotten, who estimates that 200 cubic yards of sand are removed from Pacific and Mission beaches each week.

Not Alone in Battle

While he is the most zealous warrior in the battle over kelp removal, the 43-year-old bearded San Diego native is not alone. Support has emanated from the bluffs of La Jolla, where the laboratories of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Center for Coastal Studies sit.

Douglas Inman, perhaps the most knowledgeable researcher on beach erosion in the state, said the city’s beach-grooming methods have irked him for 20 years. In the 1960s and 1970s, Inman joined a band of La Jollans fighting to prevent the loss of sand from their neighborhood’s beaches.

“We made no headway at all,” Inman recalled. “We followed trucks and took measurements and made calculations, but our complaints had no impact at all on the City Council. . . . They just wanted the beach to look nice.”

Inman did not have figures for the volume of sand removed by the city, but he estimated that about half of each truckload of kelp hauled off consists of sand. While the amount may seem insignificant, any net loss of sand from local beaches is cause for concern, he said.

“When you take sand away you denude the beach and accelerate erosion and cliff erosion,” Inman said, noting that a wide, sandy beach is the best buffer against erosion. “It is particularly acute in the pocket beaches around La Jolla, which have a very limited supply of new sand. But all of our beaches in San Diego County experience erosion, particularly in winters with heavy wave action.”

Officials with the city’s Park and Recreation Department, however, defend the kelp-removal program and describe the amount of sand inadvertently removed in the process as inconsequential. They estimate that about 30% of every truckload of kelp lifted from the city’s 17 miles of beachfront consists of sand.

“We realize we take some sand, but this is the most economical way to get rid of kelp, which breeds flies and is unsightly and is a nuisance,” said Art Belenzon, a district manager in the department’s coastal division. “Mr. Hotten has a point, but the tide takes far more sand than we do . . . And the kelp keeps coming. So what can we do?”

Complaints About Smell

An aide to Councilman Mike Gotch, whose district includes Mission Beach, said that the public’s right to be free of the stench posed by rotting kelp should be factored into the debate as well.

“We get numerous complaints about the smell and the flies, and I guarantee the beach-going public wants that kelp removed,” said the aide, Mike Haas. “But without sitting there and shaking the sand off manually, I don’t know what you do to prevent the loss.”

Still, city officials remember well the sand-starved beaches of the winter of 1983-84 and are sympathetic to the erosion fear. So, in May they began to make up for the removal of sand by returning it to the beach. Belenzon said that once the kelp dries and disintegrates on Fiesta Island, the remaining sand and sand accumulated during previous years is scooped up and hauled back to the coast.

“The way I figure it, the beach is actually gaining sand because we’re hauling one truckload of pure sand back for every truckload of kelp we take away,” Belenzon said.

Inman scoffs at the suggestion that such a system benefits the beach: “I’m glad they’re bringing some back, but the wave action is very selective as to the size and type of sand. If you put any old sand on the beach, there’s no guarantee it will stay.”

‘Ongoing Maintenance’

Moreover, Hotten wonders why the removal of sand isn’t regulated by the state Coastal Commission, the guardian of California’s beaches. Ellen Lirley, a coastal planner for the commission in San Diego, said the agency views the operation as “ongoing maintenance,” meaning it does not require a permit under the state Coastal Act.

“If the city was removing sand for some specific purpose, and not inadvertently, then it would certainly require commission review,” Lirley said. “But we view this as routine maintenance.”

Meanwhile, concerns have been raised about the effect the giant beach mowers have on eggs deposited by grunion during the April-to-August spawning season. John Duffy, a marine biologist with the California Department of Fish and Game, said that state officials in the past have urged the city to avoid the narrow band of eggs, which run along the high-tide line.

‘A Right to Sleep’

“As far as I know, they’ve managed to avoid them, but if not, we’ll certainly investigate their practices and ask for modification,” Duffy said.

The noise impact of the kelp-removal process has come under attack as well.

“The beaches need to be cleaned, but people with umpteen-million-dollar homes along the boardwalk have a right to sleep in the morning,” said Ray Hamel, a member of the Mission Beach Town Council and co-owner of Hamel’s Sports Action Center. “And all that hauling back and forth of the sand with trucks. It just seems like a ridiculous system.”

If Inman and others had their way, the city would either leave the kelp on the beach to decompose naturally or devise some new system for ridding the shore of the soggy plants. In Santa Barbara, for example, a city with a comparable kelp problem, work crews simply rake the kelp into large piles every so often and bury it in three-foot-deep holes on the beach. Jeff Cope, the city’s parks maintenance superintendent, said the system “puts the kelp out of sight and allows it to decompose and dissolve within a few days.”

Hotten suggests that city crews use pitchforks to pile up the kelp, allow it to dry and then cart it away, but city officials say that system would overwhelm the 20-member beach maintenance crew.

“I just can’t believe there’s not a safer, simpler, less-expensive system,” Hotten said. “It’s only kelp.”