Firm Fired From Oceanside Sand-Bypass Effort : Project to Shift Silt to the City’s Barren Beaches Has Been Plagued by Delays

Irked by the 18-month delay of an experimental system designed to put sand back on Oceanside’s eroding beachfront, federal officials have fired the firm that built the system.

Maecon Inc. of Irvine has been booted off the $5.5-million project by the Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency that designed the sand-bypass system.

The removal of Maecon from the project comes after the firm failed in three tests since November to get the bypass system running correctly. In each of the cases, mechanical glitches helped cut the tests short.

Designed to suck up sand from the municipal harbor’s silt-choked entrance channel and dump it on the denuded beaches to the south, the bypass has been bedeviled since construction began.

Maecon President Ray Lull could not be reached for comment Thursday, and other company officials would not comment, but in the past the company has complained that delays were largely caused by the Corps of Engineers.

Originally scheduled for completion in late 1986, work was delayed much of that year because of logistical constraints. Repairs being made on the harbor’s rock jetty and the semiannual dredging in the harbor entrance channel limited Maecon’s deployment of workers.

Oceanside’s beaches have been eroding since a massive rock breakwater was built during World War II to protect the Camp Pendleton boat basin. When the breakwater was lengthened in the early 1960s to shield the newly created Oceanside harbor from the surf, the erosion worsened.

Instead of landing on the beaches, sand accumulates in the harbor mouth, creating reefs and shoals that pose a danger for the pleasure boaters who use the entrance channel.

The sand bypass was designed to change all that. Oceanside officials hope the bypass will pump up to 400,000 cubic yards of sand each year onto the beach. The system’s ability to provide a day-by-day influx of sand on area beaches should also prove more effective than efforts to dump millions of cubic yards at one time, they say.

If it were deemed a fiscally equitable approach to keeping the harbor mouth clean, the sand-bypass principle could be employed at other ports along the coast.