Seaside Sentry : Woman’s Job Is to Keep Beach-Goers From Slipping Into Hole

It is perhaps the strangest baby-sitting job in America. Two days a week, eight hours a day, Linda Brower sits on the beach in this northern San Diego County community and watches the hole, the swirling, sinister hole.

Though Brower often drops her eyes to scan passages from her usual fare of science fiction or real estate books, she remains ever vigilant, mindful of her sole duty as sentry to this 20-foot wide, six-foot-deep hole at the seashore. Her mission is to keep swimmers from venturing into the potentially dangerous cavity.

The hole is caused by Oceanside’s novel sand bypass project, which restores eroded beaches by sucking up sand from the city marina and distributing it southward along the coast via a lengthy pipeline.

On the two days a week when the pumps are fired up, sand and water are forced out at places along the pipeline. But at the point where the pipeline narrows south of the Oceanside Pier, the pressure is more ferocious, creating a powerful jet of water that bores a hole in the sand. It’s like squirting a garden hose into soft dirt.

This turgid, roiling creation needed an alert, stolid master to warn the innocent to beware, reasoned officials with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which manages the project. To meet that need, Brower was hired early last October for $8.50 an hour.

Brower finds her job at times unbearingly boring, at other times spiritually exhilarating and occasionally perilous.

“Sometimes it gets real tense. You get 40, 50 kids who want to get in that thing at one time,” said Brower, who usually manages to ward off the unduly inquisitive before it’s too late.

Still, the hole beckons, and children have sometimes wandered in and vanished into the dark water just feet from where Brower stations her low beach chair. Each time, Brower has plunged in and plucked them out.

Brower, 41, moved to San Diego County from Kansas City with her husband in the late 1980s, shortly after she lost the job she had held for 15 years--hand-cutting stencils for lettering on bowling shirts. “A computer came in and did a better job than I could, so that was the end of my career,” she said.

Her new job, Brower admitted, “is a little strange. I never would have thought of this back in Missouri.”