SEAL BEACH : Surfside Gets Heavy Support for Seawall

What the city really needs is sand, but officials are settling for a layer of five-ton rocks to buttress the crumbling seawall in the Surfside community to protect homes from winter storms.

City officials have been battling for years to win funding for the replenishment of badly eroded beaches, but the perilous situation in the Surfside community has prompted emergency action.

“In the past two or three weeks, the sand has been eroding away from that area at an alarming rate,” Mayor Marilyn Bruce Hastings said. “The ocean is mighty powerful, and it has moved the two-ton rocks that are already there.”

Reinforcements to the 13-year-old seawall are expected to be in place within two weeks.

The seawall, called a revetment, was buried beneath the sand until just a few weeks ago, said Russell Boudreau, a coastal engineer with Moffatt & Nichol Engineers, a Long Beach firm hired by the city to study beach erosion.

In 1983, waves damaged 130 homes in the area during a storm so powerful that it tossed some of the huge stones from the seawall through windows. But residents say they have never seen the beach so badly eroded as it is now.

The Army Corps of Engineers routinely replenishes the beach every five years, but state contributions fell short this year, causing the federal government to delay the work for at least a year, Hastings said.

Seal Beach does not need approval from the California Coastal Commission to repair the seawall, a project estimated to cost $50,000 to $60,000. But city officials plan to seek Coastal Commission permission to extend and reinforce the wall to provide long-term protection to help cope with the uncertain status of federal sand replenishment projects.

The danger is most severe on the west end of the Surfside community, where less than 30 feet of eroding sand separates homes from the ocean. Hastings said the repaired sea wall should deflect waves. “It is our last line of defense,” she said. “We hope to have this repaired very, very soon.”