Beach-Building Effort Doesn’t Cut It : Santa Monica: Sand filled with broken glass is dumped on the beach near the pier. An alert resident warns the city, which admits it goofed.

Wasn’t it odd, thought Peter Sorensen, that Santa Monica city trucks were scooping up loads of sand chock-full of broken glass and dumping them onto the beach a stone’s throw away from the Pacific Ocean?

And so soon after the much celebrated Earth Day, no less?

Yes, it was odd, Santa Monica officials sheepishly admitted this week. In fact, it was a mistake, and a fairly big one at that, according to John Lynd, Santa Monica park superintendent.

“First time I know of,” Lynd said. “There is too much glass out there in the sand, yes. . . . It’s not a good situation.”

And so it was that an angry call from Sorensen to park officials Wednesday resulted in the emergency dispatching of a glass clean-up crew to the sandy area just north of the Santa Monica Pier--the site of Sunday’s Earth Day bash.

At least two tractors with sand-combing devices, two special sand-sifters and a dump truck spent a few hours crisscrossing a patch of sand larger than a football field, looking for the innumerable shards of glass that had collected there.

As they did so, Sorensen, his long blond hair billowing in the breeze, ran nimbly among them, holding aloft handfuls of shards and pointing to patches of tainted sand he thought the workers had missed.

“This is tremendously dangerous,” Sorensen said. “I live here and go to the beach barefoot every day.”

The affair started Tuesday afternoon when Sorensen, a writer whose apartment overlooks the beach, gazed out his window. He noticed a front-end loader scooping up trash-flecked sand from a 40-foot swath of beach that was separated from the main beach by a bike path. Next to the tainted sand was a crowded parking lot.

Once the truck was filled, it would proceed to the beach area, and dump.

“I saw this happen about twice (Tuesday) and was writing a letter about it to the mayor,” Sorensen said Wednesday. “Today they were continuing to do more, so I got on the phone.”

“I suspect this was the last stage of the Earth Day cleanup,” Sorensen said. “I find it ironic that their last gesture was to dump this stuff.”

Actually, according to Lynd and beach maintenance supervisor Glen Rogers, the tainted sand was being removed because the city plans to pave that portion of the beach to enlarge a parking lot. In their effort to conserve the precious sand, the workers dumped it without noticing the glass and garbage that had accumulated over time.

“We didn’t see the glass,” Rogers said. The reason the sand had so much trash and broken glass in it, he said, was that the beach-cleaning machines rarely venture onto the sand on the land side of the bike path.

Rogers said crews go out daily to clean the sand on most of the beach, and that they would have soon removed the glass anyway.

As he watched the sifters sift, Sorensen said he was happy the city had worked so quickly and thoroughly to correct its mistake. “I was angry,” he said, “but now I’m just glad. I guess it’s my contribution to Earth Day.”