Sand Boxcar Pulls Into Seal Beach for Project

The first of nearly 100,000 tons of desert sand was shipped into Seal Beach by train this week, and officials expect to begin spreading it across the city’s shrinking coastline within the next day or so.

On Thursday, Union Pacific freight cars filled with sand were parked in a row on railroad tracks inside the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station. In a process that will continue through February, the city plans to begin unloading the sand Saturday and dumping it on the beach.

“We’re very close to getting this thing going,” said Steve Badum, the city’s public works director. “We should have it on the beach by this weekend.”

The $1.1-million sand-replenishment project comes after years of planning and several false starts. The city’s coastline has severely eroded in recent years, increasing the risk of flooding and storm damage to beachfront homes.

Officials blame the erosion on harbor jetties in nearby Long Beach and San Pedro, which prevent more sand from migrating down the coast.

The city is using a complex system to get the sand from the trains to the beach, which is about a mile away. The sand will be dumped out of the cars and onto a conveyor belt, which will deposit the sand into dump trucks that will transport it to the beach.

Badum said the sand will be off-loaded whenever the Navy is not using the area for loading or unloading weapons from ships.

“The base’s primary mission is to defend the country, so we work around the Navy’s schedule,” he said.