SEAL BEACH : City Examines Options to Replenish Beaches

The city’s effort to bring new sand to badly eroded beaches continues, despite the loss of state funding and the high cost of trucking sand from a Santa Ana River flood-control project.

State funding for a sand replenishment grant was cut from the California budget by Gov. Pete Wilson earlier this month. Seal Beach Mayor Marilyn Bruce Hastings said federal funding for an Army Corps of Engineers project to replenish sand in the private Surfside community is also in jeopardy.

“The loss of sand in Surfside is very critical,” Hastings said. “I don’t think they’ll hold out for another year. The houses will flood, and the streets will flood.”

Erosion studies estimate that between 4,200 cubic yards and 7,800 cubic yards of sand are lost from local beaches each year, causing the shore to recede as much as three feet a year in some places.

City officials are renewing plans to truck sand from the Santa Ana River flood-control project near Anaheim Stadium as a last resort. In November, the city brought in 18,000 cubic yards of sand from the project at a cost of $12.25 a cubic yard, or about $220,000.

A decade-old engineering study concluded that the city’s beaches need more than 13 times that much, or 240,000 cubic yards of sand.

“This is not our first choice because it’s the most expensive,” said Lee Whittenberg, city director of development services.

Other potential sources of sand include a planned Army Corps of Engineers dredging project in Long Beach Harbor. The city could make use of equipment already in place in order to avoid significant set-up costs, Whittenberg said.

By “piggy-backing” onto Army dredging projects in the area, the city would pay only $6 a cubic yard for the sand, Whittenberg said.