Seal Beach to Shore Up Coastline With Trainloads of Sand

Playing Mother Nature is complicated business.

In the case of Seal Beach, it will take nearly three months, 50 trips by 20 railroad cars and 3,350 deliveries by earthmovers to bring 115,000 tons of sand to a coastline that nature keeps trying to reclaim.

By the end of this week, the first load of heavy-duty sand from Holiday Rock Quarry near Palmdale is expected to be spread on the beachfront, city officials said Monday. Trains loaded with tons of sand will roll onto the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station, where crews will bestanding by to truck it onto the city’s shrinking beach.

“This has been rather complicated,” said Steve Badum, the city’s director of public works. “We’ve had to deal with the Navy, Union Pacific, our contractors, the Coastal Commission and the Army Corps of Engineers.”

City officials pressed for approval of their sand transportation plan late last month after high tides and heavy rains flooded several beachfront homes. The California Coastal Commission, spurred by the emergency, gave approval to the project late last month.

Badum said the $1.1-million project is the first in which sand is being brought from a quarry to shore up a Southern California beach, officials said.

In years past, the city has fortified the shore by dredging sand from the ocean floor. But the fine grains have been washed away at a rate of about 7,500 tons a year by winter rains and high tides.

Chris Webb, a coastal scientist with city consultant Moffatt & Nichol Engineers of Long Beach, said the heavier-grain sand from the quarry is expected to stay on the beach longer.

In preparation for the first shipment, crews went to work repairing a little-used strip of railroad tracks on the base, south of Pacific Coast Highway. Meanwhile, city officials completed negotiations with the sand supplier and work crews.

The full rail cars are expected to be unloaded from the bottom onto a conveyor belt that will dump the sand into waiting earthmovers. The earthmovers will carry sand to the beach, where city crews will oversee its distribution.

Badum said the first loads will go to where sand is needed most: to bolster the 8-foot berm hastily built during last month’s rains, and to build up the beach at its narrowest point near 11th Street.

Officials anticipate that the project will be complete by mid-January, ahead of the heaviest rains expected from El Nino.

“We’re emulating Mother Nature,” Badum said. “We’re taking sand from inland and taking it out to the ocean where it belongs.”