Oil Company and Surfers Debate the Value of a Wave : Environment: Foundation wants Chevron to correct changes in ocean patterns since the construction of jetty off El Segundo. Coastal Commission is pressing for action.

Wave patterns are as important to surfers as currents are to sailors. Mess with the waves and the thrill is threatened, the surf spoiled, the endless summer eclipsed.

So what is a lost wave worth?

That is the issue for Chevron Oil Corp. and the Surfrider Foundation, an 8-year-old surfer activist group dedicated to protecting the surf.

Chevron changed the wave patterns along a stretch of Southland shore in 1985 when it built a rock groin, a jetty-like projection, 150 yards out into the Santa Monica Bay off El Segundo. The groin was constructed to help protect underground pipes that connect the El Segundo refinery to offshore terminals.

Chevron officials acknowledge that they are responsible for the wave changes in the area just south of Dockweiler State Beach, and have promised to do something about it. But the California Coastal Commission, impatient with Chevron’s inaction, has told the company to accept one of three Surfrider suggestions to compensate for the lost waves or come up with some ideas by the end of the month.

Surfrider suggested that Chevron consider building an artificial sandbar out of sandbags, reconstruct the beach profile from time to time to allow the ocean currents to form real sand bars or contribute about $250,000 to a foundation for research into the development of artificial reefs.

“What we want is them to replace the surfing breaks that were lost,” said Scott Jenkins, the environmental director for Surfrider and a lecturer and researcher at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla.

Chevron has offered to build a freshwater shower on the beach, but the offer did not impress the Surfrider Foundation, which has 15,000 members nationwide and recently won a $5.8-million lawsuit against two Northern California pulp mills that were polluting the Pacific.

Chevron is trying to “trivialize” the loss of the surf breaks, Jenkins said.

Ron Spackman, Chevron’s director of public affairs, said the company will do what is “practical or reasonable” in terms of cost to benefit surfers. However, he said that building sandbars, real or artificial, is too expensive and subject to the whims of Mother Nature, who could easily wipe them out.

Surfrider and Chevron representatives met Wednesday in what is expected to be a series of sessions aimed at devising a solution agreeable to the Coastal Commission.

Before the rock groin was built, surfers said, they had the kind of waves they love--the wide tubes that wall up in deep water to let a surfer ride parallel into poster-perfect ecstasy.

The groin changed the currents, wiping out the sandbars that used to lie just off shore and were responsible for those huge rolling waves surfers love to ride.

Now, surfers say, only the lowly, beach-crashing variety of wave is left. Shallow but strong, those waves can break up a surfboard when the waves crash into the beach, surfers say.

“They call them 911 waves,” said Reeve Woolpert, a member of the Huntington Beach-based Surfrider board of directors. “It’s the kind of wave that . . . makes you feel afterward you want to go home in an ambulance.”

According to a Coastal Commission letter to Chevron last month, surfing quality has diminished at the El Segundo beach. Before the construction of the rock groin, “there were approximately 60 surfers during good surf conditions, there now are only a ‘couple’ of surfers,” the letter said.

The groin was part of a $5.5-million restoration project Chevron launched after the storms of 1982-83 ravaged the California coast, destroying much of the El Segundo beach, Spackman said.

Without the groin, Spackman said, subsequent storms would carry off the tons of sand Chevron hauled in to rebuild the beach and protect the pipelines that carry crude oil from offshore terminals to the refinery.

Chevron has already built a bike path along the beach and pays for lifeguards there, Spackman said.

But at the behest of surfers the Coastal Commission, which granted Chevron the 1983 permit to restore the beach and build the groin, said that as a condition of the permit the company would have to hire a consultant to monitor changes in the wave patterns affecting surfing. The commission also required Chevron to work with the surfers to mitigate or make up for any changes.

After watching the waves for five years, the consultant determined that surfing had been adversely affected. So far, though, Chevron and the surfers do not agree on what constitutes mitigation.

“How do you value surfing?” Woolpert asked. “How (do you) put a monetary value on that?”

If Chevron won’t build an artificial sandbar, Surfrider wants the company to contribute about $250,000 to a foundation for research into the development of artificial reefs.

The $250,000 figure is based on a formula Woolpert devised that tried to put a monetary value on four years of lost surfing. Woolpert said Chevron officials were shocked at the amount.

Spackman stressed that the issue is not about compensation for a loss wrongly inflicted. Chevron did nothing wrong, he said, and is willing to work with Surfrider but wants any mitigation measures, such as showers, to benefit local beach-goers.