On the BEACH : Shifting Sands, Foul Water and Other Man-Made Follies Threaten Our Coast

LIFE WAS NOT A BEACH. No way : The beach was life, starting with that first glorious afternoon of the last day of school. When I was in high school, we headed for the beach every chance we could get the car; within a matter of weeks, the floorboards were half an inch deep with tracked-in sand. We got up early to catch the good waves at Clemente ( San Clemente was the correct name, we eventually found out). We gloried in wearing that most elegant of scents: Sea ‘n Ski mingled with drying, flaking, stinking saltwater.

There were the other sensations, too. The cold, chemical sting of the plastic snorkel and green-rubber fins. The ghastly tang of saltwater up the nose when a mask leaked--which was pretty often, now that I think of it. Fried fish and shrimp eaten from cardboard boxes on a pier, where the whole plankton-rich sea heightened the fishy aroma. The hospital odor of seaweed. The reek of dead jellyfish.

Hitting a particular beach now and then meant merely enjoying the sun and surf. But hanging out at a beach on a regular basis meant entering a whole new realm of social life. When I hung out at Victoria Cove in Laguna during the late ‘50s, I found that to fit in, I had to learn a card game called Robber Casino. I haven’t heard of the game since.

Whatever else might happen, there was always volleyball. One summer we learned that Ozzie and Harriet Nelson were staying at a private beach nearby. Ozzie was always eager to play with us. But the secret hope of every kid on the beach was that the heartthrob of the family, Ricky, might be with them and might come down for a game sometime. My sister, Mary, persevered for weeks, rallying with Ozzie and whoever else joined in, until it was obvious Ricky would never show.

It was a disappointment for her, but in the process she had discovered she really liked volleyball. In time, she captained a national champion women’s team and went to the Olympics twice. You never knew where the beach would lead you.

Aside from the obvious seaside activities of swimming and sunning, you could fly a kite, which was something grown-ups thought was far more fun than we did. You could also dive in terrifying kelp forests and toy with a dramatic death. But the only other really important sport besides volleyball was throwing things. We were lucky that the Frisbee had just been put on the market, under the name Pluto Platter. I don’t know what we would have hurled otherwise, but it probably would have been dangerous.

It was important for guys to throw things and play volleyball for blood because we were convinced that’s what girls admired. We were just guessing, of course, because the girls weren’t too forthright about what they thought. Negotiations between the sexes were ambiguous and uneasy, which seemed pretty unfair when everybody was running around half-naked all day.

For Southern California kids, spending summers at the beach was an essential rite of passage. We baked in the sun as we’ve never dared since to achieve a two-tone color scheme of mahogany skin and straw-white hair, like human saddle shoes. We got tar in our hair from offshore-oil leaks, stepped on broken glass in the sand and had the fine adventure of being chased off beaches by the locals.

Despite the chores of driving and parking, the beaches were cool when it was hot, clear when it was smoggy, full of recreational potential--and cheap. Because the beaches were always there, a lot of us teen-agers took them for granted. As adults, many of us still never give them a second thought.

But a closer look reveals that what we’ve taken for granted is more than a convenient place to hang out; it’s a vast, complex, ever-changing resource in need of more human nurturing than ever. In the past 40 years, overcrowding, pollution and erosion have upset the balance of Southern California’s coastal ecosystem. How we choose to deal with these problems will no doubt determine whether our beaches fade into nostalgic memories--or survive and thrive for generations.

THANKS to the explosive growth of Southern California, its nearly 100 beaches are visited by more than 90 million people a year. That’s more than triple the annual number only 20 years ago. Unfortunately, along with sunscreen and beach towels, the crowds have brought with them traffic snarls, garbage and crime.

Some of the beaches are plain overused, basically because other beaches are hard to get to. Three-mile-long Santa Monica City Beach, the state’s busiest, attracts as many as 300,000 visitors a day. This is not only because it’s right at the end of the Santa Monica Freeway but also because it’s one of the few beaches in Los Angeles County with plenty of parking.

Adding more parking spaces is always a problem. It means making difficult choices, such as whether to buy expensive real estate or use up valuable beach space. But as anybody who doesn’t live within a few blocks of a beach knows, the real reason for inadequate parking in many beach towns is that locals don’t want outsiders at “their” beach.

This is an old complaint. But at some beaches, it’s worse than ever. “More people have cars now,” observes longtime Balboa Peninsula resident Joseph Cleary. “But the parking space hasn’t increased. . . . It used to be common for six or eight people to come in a car; but now everybody has credit cards, everybody has a car. People don’t share rides anymore. People think it’s nerdy to share rides now.”

Evidence of the growing throngs is everywhere--in the form of garbage. Last September, the California Coastal Commission held a one-day volunteer beach cleanup that netted 10 tons of trash and 52,000 cigarette butts, mostly in Southern California. During the first weekend in May, regular cleanup crews collected 50 tons of debris between Cabrillo Beach and Nicholas Canyon Beach alone.

“Trash has always been a problem; people have always left it,” says Wayne Schumaker, chief of the Safety and Sanitation Division of the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches. “But because so many people are coming to the beaches now, we have a (bigger) problem.”

L.A. County provides 3,000 trash cans and employs 75 people year-round to maintain its beaches. In the summer, 50 more people are hired. Additional manpower comes from hundreds of inmates and first-time offenders ordered to collect garbage as a community service.

And some beaches have graffiti. Favorite targets include portable toilets, lifeguard towers, bike paths, retaining walls and safety signs. L.A. County employs three full-time painters in its beach graffiti-removal program.

No doubt more threatening are the other criminal acts committed at beaches--the kind that make people wary of going at all. Just last month, to cite a particularly alarming case, a woman was raped in broad daylight on an open stretch of sand at Santa Monica Beach. To be fair, the most common beach crimes are petty thefts involving boogie boards and the like. Still, violent disturbances no longer come as a surprise.

“We have a ton of crime: gangs that come down with guns, people who want to rob each other with knives, kidnapings, felony drug arrests,” says Ron Hoffman, a lifeguard at Bolsa Chica, a state beach where lifeguards have been authorized to carry firearms for the past 15 years. “People think they’ll come to the beach to forget their problems, (but) they bring them along. There are lots of domestic disputes here. They drink alcohol, and that exaggerates the problems. . . . It sounds funny, but I wouldn’t want to do law enforcement without a gun.”

IF OVERCROWDING and its consequences have transformed the beach experience into a weekend version of the rat race, then the health hazards posed by pollution have altered it to an even greater degree. Today, the old lyric “don’t go near the water” has a sinister new meaning.

The most notorious pollution is in Santa Monica Bay, into which sewage has been poured since the 1890s. In those days, the sewage was raw, but the amounts discharged into the bay were relatively small. Today, sewage--though treated--is dumped into the water in much greater volume. Some people who swam in the ocean 20 or 30 years ago no longer set foot in it for fear of coming into contact with sewage. Warnings that eating white croaker and other bottom-dwelling fish can be dangerous to one’s health and regular overflows at the Hyperion sewage-treatment intensify the fears.

Surprisingly, though, things are actually getting better for some forms of marine life. As L.A. County continues to upgrade its sewage treatment, for example, jellyfish have begun to reappear, according to Mark Gold, staff scientist for the environmental organization Heal the Bay. And “from the standpoint of human health, things have definitely improved over the last couple of years,” says Gold. “Hyperion sewage is now the best that’s ever come out of the plant. It’s treated to much higher standards and in some ways is better than what was coming out in 1910.” Five years ago, scientists measured 150 parts per million of sewage solids in the bay; this year the level of pollution has dropped to 30 p.p.m.

The treated sewage is dumped five miles off shore, and studies have shown that microbes in the sewage don’t make it back to the beaches. Says Gold: “There’s probably more health impact from people shedding skin viruses when they swim than from Hyperion.”

The main enemy of the ocean now, according to most environmentalists, is storm drains. For years they were unregulated, but starting next month the state will establish regulations for monitoring and managing urban run-off. “Sixty-eight storm drains empty directly into Santa Monica Bay, carrying everything from spilled motor oil to garbage to animal wastes to pesticides,” Gold says. “It goes directly onto the beach without treatment.”

After swimming near drains, beachgoers report skin rashes and eye and ear infections, he says. Heal the Bay’s rule of thumb: Don’t swim within 100 yards of a flowing storm drain, or anywhere within 48 hours after a storm. Unfortunately, only three of the 68 storm drains have signs indicating their presence, and about 10 flow year-round.

Farther south, Huntington Beach’s oil spill also has raised anxieties about the state of the shore. In Orange County’s worst environmental disaster, 390,000 gallons of Alaskan crude leaked from an offshore tanker, fouling more than 20 miles of coastline, in February. It took five weeks and millions of dollars in cleanup before the area was declared safe enough to be reopened. Moreover, a state report last month estimated that British Petroleum recovered barely a fifth of the crude.

But health and regulatory agencies concur that by far the worst pollution in California is at Imperial Beach in San Diego County. Every day, 13 million gallons of waste water flow down the Tijuana River from Tijuana. Since 1980, the mouth of the river, at Imperial Beach, has been quarantined, limiting beach activity to sunbathing.

This water is a nuisance not just to beachgoers. “Part of Imperial Beach is a federal estuary that is home to several endangered species of birds,” says Peter Silva, assistant deputy director of San Diego’s Clean Water Program. “It’s one of the few salt marshes left on the West Coast. Any water, even if pure,” threatens to alter the dynamics of the birds’ ecosystem, he says.

The problem goes back to the ‘30s, when Tijuana and San Diego shared a common sewage outfall pipe. The sewage that Tijuana sent to sea was not adequately treated, and from time to time in the ‘40s, beaches as far north as Coronado were quarantined.

Tijuana has improved its sewage treatment since then, but its population has mushroomed. Silva says that the American and Mexican governments are soon expected to sign an agreement to treat Tijuana’s sewage on the California side of the border and reroute the waste water. Most of the money would come from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

There may be hope, then, for beachgoers and for the least tern and least Bell’s vireo (the endangered birds) as well.

SO, IF WE CAN’T TRUST the civility of the crowds or the purity of the water, at least we can be sure there will always be a nice stretch of sandy beach to plop down on, right? Wrong.

As is the natural order of things, beaches up and down the coast are constantly changing size and shape, some vanishing and others expanding. Sand hugs the shore strictly on a temporary basis: All of it is destined sooner or later to move into deep water. In the meantime, the action of the waves is relentlessly urging the sand southward.

Our “improvements” have altered nature’s course along the coast. Early this century, at Newport Beach, the Santa Ana River was diverted out of upper Newport Bay and the mud flats of the bay were dredged to give the Balboa Peninsula its beautiful straight beach (the peninsula itself dates only from 1862, when it was created by a single storm) and to create Lido Isle. These are not the only artificial beaches: Mission Bay in San Diego is man-made. In fact, says George Armstrong, manager of the California Beach Erosion Control Program, “almost all the beaches from Santa Barbara south are man-maintained.” If they weren’t, some of the most popular beach spots would change shape--and maybe disappear.

One of the classic worst cases of meddling with nature on the California coast occurred in Oceanside, in San Diego County. During World War II, the Navy built a harbor for Camp Pendleton; almost immediately the down-coast beaches of Carlsbad and Solana Beach began to shrink. Dredging sand at Oceanside has been necessary ever since. But dump trucks deposit the sand on the beach in single loads, unlike the natural way rivers deliver it. “It’s out of equilibrium” says Dana Whitson, principal assistant to the city manager of Oceanside. “The waves remove the bulge at an accelerated rate.”

For the last year, Oceanside has been trying a new approach. The federally funded sand bypass system pipes the sand a mile down the coast around a breakwater that otherwise interrupts the flow of sand. The system can move 1,200 cubic yards of sand a day--when it’s running. Once the pipe has sucked up enough sand to create a crater in the harbor, the process is stalled until more sand flows into the crater. In the next phase, perforated pipes will be used in the harbor bottom to keep sand circulating.

To appreciate how difficult it is to tame Southern California’s beaches, one must consider the powerful forces at play. North of Santa Barbara County, there are scarcely any wide, sandy beaches like those in Santa Monica and Manhattan Beach. Beyond Point Conception, the coast is rocky, and tiny pocket beaches that tend to lose their sand in winter storms are the rule. In Southern California, though, the bluffs are mostly soft shale and sandstone, and 85% are said to be actively eroding. Horrifying as that must be to cliff dwellers, those smooth, eroding bluffs help create Southern California’s long, photogenic beaches.

The mildness of our waves is due to the uniqueness of our geography. At Point Conception, the coast turns almost 90 degrees east for 60 miles, paralleling the mountains of the Transverse Range, which continue out at sea as the Channel Islands. Point Conception and the islands take the brunt of the waves’ force that would otherwise strip the beaches of sand.

However, this leaves the waves nothing to do but move sand down the coast. In a single day, on average, 770 cubic yards of sand--about 100 dump-truck loads--pass a given point. The absence of natural barriers in our coastline allows sand to move quite a distance: Grains of sand at Hermosa Beach may have originated near Point Dume.

Before humans started interfering, our rivers brought new sand to the beaches. Some was freshly eroded rock material from the mountains, but most was old sediment making up the plains. (Much of the Southern California coast is old sea bottom; the Los Angeles Basin is a mile deep with sediment.) But due to the climate, our rivers don’t flow regularly. They alternate between droughts lasting sometimes years and occasional but devastating floods, brought on by violent winter storms.

Years ago, flooding took place with a vengeance in the Los Angeles Basin, which is so wide and flat that no natural river channels exist. The Los Angeles, San Gabriel and Santa Ana rivers were wild in the most dangerous sense. Not only would we never know when there would be water in them or how much there’d be, after a flood, we could never tell what course the water would take. Until the flood of 1824, for instance, the Los Angeles River emptied into the sea near Marina del Rey by way of Ballona Creek. Before 1867, the San Gabriel River joined the Los Angeles River at Dominguez Gap in Long Beach.

Beginning in the ‘30s, vast flood-control projects were built. Rivers were dammed. Permanent channels were chosen and lined with concrete so that we would never again be at the mercy of the rivers. This may have made the population explosion of Southern California possible, but floodwaters could no longer bring sand to the beach. “The rule of thumb that everybody quotes,” says Reinhart Flick of the California Department of Boating and Waterways, “is that roughly half the natural sand supply has been cut off.”

That sand can longer reach the beach has created yet another complication: It is estimated that an average of 800,000 cubic yards of sediment have entered San Gabriel Dam every year for the past half-century. When a dam fills up, it can no longer function.

Couldn’t we just take the sand from behind the dams and send it to the sea? Not practical, says David Potter of the Hydraulic Division of the L.A. County Department of Public Works. Forcing sediment through the sluice gates would require a tremendous amount of water--essentially, a flood. Potter has also looked into the possibility of building slurry pipelines: The price came to $5 million a mile just for the pipe. To move sand to the beach from the San Gabriel Dam, which is just one of five dams on the San Gabriel River, would mean a 40-mile pipeline. Trucking also is too expensive, except for dams closer to the coast.

But the problem of the dams’ filling up may solve itself. Ancient deposits of sand and gravel being mined in Irwindale will eventually run out, perhaps in the next decade, and cleaning out dams may go from being an expense to being a money-maker. Already, one dam in Pasadena sells sand and gravel.

Fortunately, there is plenty of sand very near the beaches--under water. “Offshore sources are astronomical,” says Dick McCarthy, staff geologist of the Coastal Commission. “They represent millions of years of deposit. We won’t have to worry about depleting them for quite a while. However, there are conflicts to consider. Dredging can conflict with fishing, for instance. And you have to make sure that when you dredge some sand and take it up on shore, it doesn’t flow back into the hole you just dug.” In addition, sand can’t be dumped on certain beaches in summer because it interferes with grunion mating.

So the people who manage the coast must continue to find the right balance between playing with natural forces and knowing when to leave well enough alone.

And beach users, surfers to be specific, have their own ideas about how to tinker with the beaches. Robert “Bird Legs” Caughlan, director of the Surfrider Foundation, an environmental group that lobbies for better surfing conditions up and down the coast, recounts one recent victory: stopping the Army Corps of Engineers from building a 1,000-foot breakwater north of Bolsa Chica Beach that would have degraded the waves at the popular Orange County surfing site. Caughlan says Surfrider isn’t against development per se. “We realize that some of the best waves were made by mistake, not design, when a breakwater was built.” The Wedge, the famous surfing spot in Newport Beach, exists because of a breakwater.

Improve Mother Nature? Caughlan and his colleagues think it’s possible. They’re currently cooperating with the Corps to manufacture better surf off Newport Beach. The plan is to use tons of sand that will be dredged when the Corps cleans and realigns the mouth of the Santa Ana River next spring. “They have to put the sand somewhere,” says foundation associate director Dave Skelly. “We’re looking at them putting it offshore to create a sand reef instead of just dumping it on the beach. We want to make little sand jetties that can do two things, prevent erosion and create good waves. If it’s put off shore the right way, it can create longer waves, more peaks.”

As with most everything else in Southern California, when it comes to waves and sand, few are ever satisfied with the status quo. So while we’re well aware that human interference can be detrimental to our beaches, we’re also probably destined to repeat our mistakes.

SOBERING thought. But here’s one that’s even more sobering. I spent all those summers at the beach, barbecuing myself brown in the sun, dodging flying surfboards in the purl and all that, and the only thing I ever imagined could bring it to an end was school.

Finally, though, I graduated from school. I went to work. I became a grown-up who could make all his own decisions and presumably spend every spare moment self-barbecuing and surfboard-dodging from then on out.

And so? So I can’t remember the last time I tap-danced barefoot across a blazing parking lot with a towel in my hand. I’ve scarcely been to the beach since--well, since Sea ‘n Ski was the only totally cool suntan lotion. Without noticing it, I turned into a back-yard partier just like my folks.

I refuse to see this as a sign of middle age, though. I choose to see it as my own contribution to the beach: one less clown angling for a parking spot. Don’t bother to thank me.