Surfside Sand Delivery Can’t Wait

This is the season when residents of beachfront communities start worrying about the weather. Even if the rainy season does not cause leaks in the roof, there is always the chance a storm will sweep the beach out to sea and present a different kind of threat to a house.

In the Seal Beach section known as Surfside, the nervousness understandably has increased. A project to add more than a million cubic yards of sand to the beach was postponed last year and is late starting this year. The federal government needs to act more quickly.

The Army Corps of Engineers has awarded a contract for the $9.4-million project and will pay most of the bills. But the New Jersey company that is to provide a 300-foot dredging vessel has not started the vessel on its journey from the Atlantic through the Panama Canal and on to Surfside. The work was supposed to begin Oct. 1; now it appears it may not start until late November or early December.

The Orange County Board of Supervisors rightly has recognized the severity of the threat to Surfside and to beaches lying south of the community along the coast. Last summer the supervisors approved spending nearly half a million dollars for the anti-erosion project.

Surfside is a “feeder” beach. Some of the sand deposited by the dredger at Surfside will move south to replenish Sunset Beach and other beaches down to the edge of Newport Beach. Surfside would not need the special attention had the federal government not built a jetty near the beach a half century ago to protect the Navy’s weapons station at Seal Beach. The jetty stopped the natural sweep of the sand onto Surfside Beach.

Seal Beach has done what it could in past years to replenish sand, but it is so expensive that the city cannot be expected to go it alone. That is especially true considering that the problem is not of the city’s making and that erosion has consequences along a large stretch of Orange County, not just within city borders. The Corps of Engineers needs to press the company that won the contract to move into high gear, get the equipment on site quickly and begin dredging and replenishing before the rain season begins in earnest.