Surfside Lays Rocky Beachhead Against High Tides : Rescue: Seal Beach trucks in enough boulders to build a 250-foot-long sea wall. But officials say it may not prevent flooding.

Early Friday the trucks rumbled in like the cavalry to try to save the tiny oceanfront community of Surfside.

Resident Roger Ross, 26, was jolted awake.

“The rocks are here!” he told his wife before dashing outside to watch the last-minute rescue effort: front loaders hauling five-ton boulders atop the thinning line of precious sand that stands between Surfside homes and the ocean.

Crews will work through the weekend to complete the protective rock wall before Thursday’s anticipated 7-foot high tide, which residents fear will eat away at the few remaining feet of sand and flood their homes. The rescue effort was organized after a scheduled sand replenishment program fell through, a victim of federal budget cuts.

“The whole idea of this is to keep the waves from knocking down the houses,” said Steve Badum, Seal Beach’s public works director, who engineered the emergency effort. “But if Mother Nature throws a big one at us, we’ll just have to hold on and see what happens.”

Tuesday’s storm-whipped waves crashed against a row of 5,500 sandbags that kept the surf away from homes. But the sandbags won’t hold back a huge tide or major storm waves from crashing into the boxy periwinkle blue-and-mocha homes, some worth around $700,000, officials said.

The 250-foot-long rock wall is a temporary measure--principally aimed at preventing the waves from toppling homes--but will not stop the surf from flooding ground floors, officials said. This week, residents boarded windows with plywood and cleared furniture and other belongings that may be damaged in a flood.

There is no time or money for any other protective measures, according to city officials, who spent the last few weeks obtaining emergency permits necessary to build the protective wall from the state Coastal Commission and other agencies. (The city and Surfside’s 700 residents will split the $62,000 cost.)

Yet, there is little sense of panic among residents, two-thirds of whom lived in Surfside during the winter of 1983. That year, storm waves damaged 130 homes--half the dwellings--and left the community with no electricity or gas for four days.

“The phrase, ‘Been there, done that,’ probably applies,” said Gino Salegui, 60, a 26-year resident. “You might say we accept the kismet, accept the fate. You’re out of ammunition.

“There’ll be sandbagging, trying to seal off garages, move cars . . . after that, there’s not much else you can do except watch for nature.”

Surfside residents tend to be a mellow lot, the type who barbecue on the beach, who know when the high tide rolls in and that the sun will set between the second and third buoy on Dec. 21. There are retired ship captains and teachers, surfers and young families.

And they accept a certain amount of flooding; they know that’s the price they pay for beach living.

“We’re anxious, but nobody’s going to die, and no houses are going to go in the water . . . especially with the rock wall going in,” said Steve Rowe, 51, a resident for 45 years. “The water will come over it, and that’ll be it--a little flooding--but most of the people have gone through the 1983 flood.”

Others fear the wall won’t be enough.

Dave Paris, 30, said he remembers the winter of ‘83, when he watched waves rip huge boulders from rock jetties in Redondo Beach and toss them through windows.

“What [storms] do is turn the rocks into missiles when you have no sand to put the rocks on,” he said. “We need sand. Where’s the sand?”

But city officials said the boulders will be positioned to lock together like a jigsaw puzzle and withstand the onslaught of crashing waves. The boulders will rest on other rocks buried beneath the sand in 1983.

Friday morning, Ross walked to the shore to watch the wall go up.

“The last line of defense,” he sighed. “We get big tides, and all these sandbags are going to crumble and fall in.”

City officials jumped in to help after the Army Corps of Engineers canceled a crucial sand replenishment program last summer. The program has rebuilt the beach every five years so that it extends several hundred feet away from shore.

This year’s replenishment program was canceled for lack for funding for the first time since it began in the 1940s, after the construction of a jetty for the neighboring Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station.

The jetty blocks the natural flow of sand that otherwise would replenish the Surfside shoreline. Also, ocean swells bump off the jetty, producing a type of sand-eating wave that chews away at the northwest part of Surfside’s beach.

Although rocks are expected to hold the beach down through next week’s high tide, residents are braced for other nail-biters.

“It’s a long winter yet,” resident Dick Maul, 72, said, “so you don’t know what’s going to happen.”