Corps of Engineers to Begin Repairing Beach at Surfside

Surfside residents who feared they’d have to wait until January for their badly eroded beach to be repaired have convinced the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to take more immediate action to protect their coastal homes.

The corps awarded a $7.7-million sand replenishment contract to a New Jersey dredging company in September to build up the rocky strip of beach before high tides and the winter storm season arrive and threaten the half-dozen homes at the northern tip of the Surfside colony.

At first, the dredging company, Weeks Marine Inc., planned to sail a dredger from the East Coast to California and begin dredging by late this month or early December, in time to build up the beach before the storm season.

To the dismay of increasingly anxious homeowners, the contractor changed plans by hiring a West Coast dredging company that wouldn’t begin work until January.

“If they’re going to wait that long, that would leave us up the creek without a paddle,” Surfside resident John Kriss said.

However, residents protested the delay to the Corps of Engineers, which decided to start trucking in sand to get the beach restoration project going until Weeks Marine arrives to continue the work.

Mona Goss, a corps spokeswoman in Los Angeles, said that within the next couple of weeks, heavy equipment including front loaders, trucks and bulldozers will start moving sand from a wide area of beach south of Surfside in the unincorporated Orange County community of Sunset Beach.

About 150,000 cubic yards of sand will be relocated to help build a platform for the dredging pipeline at Surfside and also to provide protection until the entire project is completed, Goss said.

The corps’ decision to start bringing in sand to replenish the barren beach has pleased Surfside’s worried residents.

“We’ve got a very serious beach erosion problem here,” said Surfside’s community president Roger Kuppinger. “We’re very happy it’s being done for protection from winter storms.”

Already, residents have been forced to remove playground equipment on the beach after large breakers threatened to wash it away.

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Weeks Marine has five months to dredge 1.6 million cubic yards of sand and pump it onto Surfside’s beach. The project also calls for the company to move 140,000 cubic yards of sand from the mouth of the Santa Ana River with earth movers and deposit it along the Newport Beach shoreline.

Two years ago, Seal Beach had to truck in 18,000 cubic yards of sand as part of a $220,000 operation to protect the beach and homes.

Last year, when beach sand was stripped away, the city fortified a sea wall with bulldozers, which cost another $50,000.

The colony’s sand woes began when a jetty at Anaheim Bay was built by the corps in the 1940s during construction of Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station. The jetty blocks natural sand movement, so sand that’s washed away from beaches is not replaced.

To build up beaches, the corps replenishes sand at Surfside every five to six years. Surfside is a “feeder” beach that helps distribute sand to southern beaches, replenishing Sunset Beach, Bolsa Chica State Beach, Huntington City Beach, Huntington State Beach, and the shores of Newport Beach.

The Surfside project already was delayed a year by the county’s bankruptcy, which made funding uncertain.

Although summer is best for dredging, federal environmental protection laws for the endangered California least tern, and concern for grunion, forced the corps to wait until fall to approve the contract.