Counties Scrambling to Save Their Strand of Sand

“The sands of the sea--who can number them?”

--Ecclesiastes Since before the abacus, philosophers have puzzled over how much sand is on the beach. Today, in attempts to halt beach erosion, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties are compiling at least a partial answer.

In September, officials launched a $400,000, state-funded study to tally the tonnage of sand piled up near harbors and offshore basins, measure its coarseness and figure how much is needed to replenish badly eroded beaches like Oxnard Shores and Faria.

It is not an idle quest. Capricious tides and shifting sands have caused millions of dollars in damage along Ventura’s coast over the years, sweeping away piers, homes and roads. And civic leaders aren’t anxious to watch history repeat itself.

Buried under the dunes along Pierpont Beach, for instance, is a 40-foot-wide road called Shore Drive that once stretched from San Pedro Street near San Buenaventura State Beach down to Ventura Harbor.

Shore Drive, as its name suggests, was once the promenade for a “resort-type area” along with some homes and the Pierpont Pier, says Barbara Kam, Ventura’s city clerk.

But that was before severe storms clobbered Ventura’s coast in the 1930s. They smashed the pier at the end of Seaward Avenue, destroyed the buildings and buried Shore Drive under tons of sand. Today, Pierpont’s alley-like streets come to an unexpected dead-end at the sand dunes.

Old-timers in Ventura say that in the 1930s, many Pierpont homeowners dealt with erosion by simply hauling their homes or rebuilding them further inland. But that luxury isn’t available today to residents of the Rincon, a handful of beach communities sandwiched along a crescent between the Pacific Ocean and Pacific Coast Highway just up the coast from Ventura.

“We have the highway behind us, and the ocean keeps taking land away in front of us,” complained Lee M. Griswold, spokesman for the Faria Beach homeowners association. The group is embroiled in a lawsuit with the California Coastal Commission because some of its members put up an unauthorized breakwater of big rocks about 50 feet offshore. But desperation is a strong motivation.

“Whether we keep that sand there by dredging offshore . . . or putting up artificial reefs, we need something,” Griswold said.

With shores from Point Conception to Point Mugu 100 miles down the coast eroding up to two feet each year, civic leaders agree. In 1985, they formed a joint city-county group called the Beach Erosion Authority for Control Operations and Nourishment, also called BEACON, to study “sand management” and come up with ways to replenish beaches.

BEACON includes representatives from Santa Barbara and Ventura counties and from the coastal cities of Santa Barbara, Carpinteria, Ventura, Oxnard and Port Hueneme. Members say the cooperative agreement is necessary because building seawalls and jetties in Santa Barbara affects the flow of sand as far down the coast as Point Mugu.

In addition, “we felt if we banded together, we’d be a much stronger lobbying force,” said Gerry Nowak, deputy public works director for Ventura County. The 18-month study is their first attempt at doing just that.

Elusive as the concept of sand management might seem, coastal engineers regularly discuss it in accounting jargon, using terms like “sand budget” and “beach inventory.” In efforts to relate the concept of erosion in visceral terms, engineers also reach for food imagery. Beaches are sand-starved. Shores require “beach nourishment.”

A grain-by-grain inventory is not on BEACON’s menu. But members say the sand-management study is a critical first step in developing a comprehensive plan to beef up beaches and slow erosion.

“Sand has become a scarce resource. . . . Over time, most of the homes along the coastline will be threatened,” said James A. Bailard, an engineer who serves as BEACON’s technical consultant.

Coastal geologists say the two counties have their hands full. In a preliminary BEACON report unveiled last week in Carpinteria, Bailard assessed the beach erosion as “quite serious” and said it would cost millions of dollars to correct.

Assessing Blame

The culprits: river dams that block the flow of sediment into the ocean, three man-made harbors that trap hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of sand each year while impeding its natural flow, and jetties that collect sand up the coast while starving beaches down the coast.

Gary Griggs, a professor of earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, traces erosion to two sources: rising sea levels worldwide due to melting polar ice caps and, until recently, an ignorance about the effect of man-made harbors and dams. Contraptions that jut into the ocean aren’t the only causes of sand erosion, however. Inland river dams--meant to protect irrigation for farmers--also block sediment from flowing in a natural path to the sea.

The Freeman Diversion, for instance, an $18-million dam project planned for the Santa Clara River between Saticoy and Santa Paula, would trap sediment around its base for up to 20 years or until unusually severe storms built deposits high enough to overflow into the sea.

As an alternative, BEACON is looking at whether it would be feasible to truck in sediment from an old riverbed to prefill the dam. But importing such material is costly--$5 to $10 per cubic yard--and officials estimate that such a procedure might cost $1 million.

“There are all types of trade-offs and concerns,” said Rex Laird, executive director of the Ventura County Farm Bureau. However, the Freeman Diversion is also “an extra important project, not only for agriculture but for water preservation in general,” he added.

Meanwhile, the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers already spends about $5 million every two years to dredge 2 million cubic feet--the equivalent of one dump truck every two minutes--from the sand traps up the coast from Channel Islands Harbor, officials say.

Ventura Harbor, which is smaller, usually dredges about 500,000 cubic yards of sand each year, said Richard Parsons, port district general manager. But severe winter storms like those of 1983 can quickly double that amount.

As the harbors pile up with sand, beaches directly down the coast--like Oxnard Shores and Silver Strand--fail to get their deposits from the “river of sand” that flows naturally down the coast of Santa Barbara and Ventura counties and then drops off into a submarine shelf off Point Mugu.

Dredging corrects the imbalance, but sand experts say it is a stopgap measure that must be repeated every few years to keep down-coast beaches pristine and inviting.

A beachfront area on Ormond Beach, just south of Port Hueneme, illustrates the effects of this phenomenon. The paper subdivision there, so-called because no homes or roads were ever built on it, suffered severe erosion in the late 1930s when construction of Port Hueneme up the coast trapped the sand flow.

Tom Laubacher, whose family owned several oceanfront lots there, recalls that as the beach eroded steadily, a large part of the more than 200 lots were swallowed up by the ocean.

“At one time, our lot was about 300 feet offshore,” Laubacher recalled. “We always used to kid ourselves about swimming out to our beachfront property.”

Salvation came in the early 1960s, when Ventura County built the Channel Islands Harbor and brought in the Corps of Engineers to dredge the new harbor and pump about 2 million cubic tons of sand south every two years.

Today, the land has been reclaimed from the sea, and a resort development is planned for the site.

Paper Homes

The saga of the paper subdivision isn’t unique. Sand Point, in Carpinteria, has eroded 250 feet since 1900, Bailard says. Winter storms erode Faria Beach about nine feet each year, although some of that deficit builds back up each summer.

In 1983, after severe storms caused extensive damage to some Faria homes, about a dozen residents grew so concerned that they petitioned the Coastal Commission for emergency permits to put up a ridge of rocks that would act as an artificial reef.

When the Coastal Commission refused the permit, homeowners dumped a low ridge of rocks about 50 yards offshore anyway--at a cost of $5,000.

The Coastal Commission then sued the homeowners to force them to remove the rocks.

Lindsay F. Nielson, an attorney for the homeowners, said the group is trying to get a Coastal Commission permit to move the rocks to an existing seawall that blocks the surf from their homes.

BEACON engineers say the solution to coastal erosion may lie in pumping sand from as far as five miles offshore onto the hardest-hit beaches.

“A major source of sand is offshore deposits. The question is how do you get it onto the beach,” Bailard said.

Floating Dredge

Several preliminary solutions were presented at last week’s meeting. The top contender is a dredging boat that sucks up sand from the ocean floor as much as 90 feet below, stores it in a hull and disgorges its load within 10 feet of shore. The boat, called a split-hull hopper dredge, has never been used off the West Coast, Bailard said.

A second idea would be to use a floating hydraulic dredge like those the Corps of Engineers uses to dredge local harbors. But the machines are difficult to operate in choppy seas and would require running a pipeline five miles to the shore--which Bailard called an inefficient process.

But BEACON officials and engineers stress that the project is only in gestation at this point and that they need to continue collecting data before proposing a comprehensive plan.

They still need to take core samples from offshore sand basins to see whether the sand is compatible with that on county beaches. If the sand is too fine, it might blow away or be swept away quickly with the tides, Bailard said.

The study must also determine rates of erosion at 25 key spots along the Santa Barbara and Ventura coastlines, complete aerial surveys, calculate how much sand is available for shifting around and pinpoint which beaches will receive priority once sand management begins in earnest.

And civic leaders have yet to compile costs or line up funding sources, although they plan to approach the Corps of Engineers and other federal and state funding sources.

But for Griswold, the Faria Beach homeowner, and numerous others along the Santa Barbara and Ventura coasts, the project anchors their hopes against the relentless pounding of the ocean that, wave by wave, sweeps away the security of their homes.

“When the sand goes out, it goes out fast, in vast quantities,” Griswold said. “We have a terrible problem.”

BEACH EROSION TROUBLE SPOTS

1. Road and stairway to Rincon Beach park were destroyed in winter storms of 1983. The stairway has been repaired, but the road has not.

2. Mussel Shoals, Faria and Solimar Beach areas are greatly diminished. County and state parks of Faria, Hobson and Emma Wood have suffered heavy storm damage. Entrance to Emma Wood Park has been closed since winter storms of 1983.

3. Beach erosion in front of Ventura County fairgrounds forced construction of protective riprap.

4. Beach in front of Pierpont Keys and the Promenade erodes to cobble in winter.

5. Portion of Marina Park between Ventura Harbor and the ocean nearly was breached during winter storms of 1983.

6. Entrance to Ventura Harbor must be dredged at least once every two years.

7. Blowing beach sand between Ventura Harbor and Santa Clara River causes road maintenance problems.

8. Beach at Oxnard Shores is very unstable. Storms have destroyed homes built on conventional foundations, left others built on pilings standing in the surf.

9. Blowing sand in Oxnard Shores area has created extensive dunes, representing a loss of sand from the beach.

10. Erosion of Hollywood Beach may eventually force addition of more sand.

11. Channel Islands Harbor sandtrap must be dredged every two years, bypassing sand to Hueneme Beach to prevent downcoast erosion.

12. Erosion at Silver Strand sometimes requires placement of sand dredged from Channel Islands Harbor.

13. Beach at Port Hueneme must receive 1.75 million cubic yards of sand every two years to prevent progressive erosion.

14. Erosion at Point Mugu forced construction of sea walls to protect critical structures.