Loss of Our Beaches Will Cost Us Dearly

Nothing is less permanent than a rope made of sand. This picturesque phrase serves as shorthand for a worthless contract. But Ventura County residents know that our fragile ribbon of beaches is slipping away at a staggering rate. Without aggressive intervention, our seashore could vanish as quickly as salty spindrift.

Should sand be considered one of our nation’s most important resources? Although the 44-mile-long Ventura County coastline may glitter with tiny grains of garnet, feldspar and quartz, when you cost out the total tab of disappearing beaches, sand may be worth its weight in gold.

Tourism is a million-dollar industry here in Ventura County. Sand not only serves up natural habitat for grunion, least terns, snowy plovers, sand crabs and Pismo clams but also provides the primary buffer shielding residences, roads and recreational areas from shattering storms.

Wide beaches made their initial appearance here a mere 3,000 years ago, courtesy of Ventura County rivers as well as the crumbling bluffs soaring over what is now the Ventura Freeway. The Santa Clara River still holds the distinction of transporting the most sand to the West Coast. The era of broad beaches, however, concluded with human intervention in the early part of this century.

Dams such as the Matilija above Ojai, sand and gravel quarries on the Santa Clara River, diversion for underground water storage in the Los Posas basin and coastal highways hinder nourishing sediment from making its way down to our starving shores. Add the occasional monster squall to the equation and the sum is evident in the extreme erosion at Surfers Point, San Buenaventura State Beach and Pierpont Beach.

Furthermore, each year the jetties at the entrance to the Port of Hueneme send 1.25 million cubic yards of sand churning down submarine canyons. It’s a one-way trip.

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We haven’t been able to get much help from the feds. Despite the fact that 85% of California’s shoreline has morphed from bountiful beaches to stony slivers, the Golden State has only received $10 million in federal shoreline protection funds since 1995 while Florida, New York and New Jersey have piled up more than 10 times that amount. Last year, California received a mere slap-in-the-face 50 grand out of the total $85 million allocated by Congress.

Each of the big winners in the government sweepstakes was savvy enough to dedicate funding at the state level to leverage federal financing to reconstruct beaches ravaged by nature and / or man-made interference with natural sediment transport. Assembly Bill 64 would have allotted $3.5 million to augment the California coastline but Gov. Gray Davis chopped all but $500,000 out of it.

One way to deliver up to 30% more sand would be to restore the Ventura River watershed by pulling down 198-foot-high Matilija Dam. An alliance of environmentalists, surfers, anglers and politicians champions the gradual removal of the deteriorating concrete edifice. The reservoir, which hoarded water and checked floods for more than 50 years, is 90% choked with ooze. Late last month, Congress earmarked $100,000 for a feasibility study. Supervisors John Flynn and Kathy Long are lobbying Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt to surf this project on the fastest wave.

The 18th century satirist Samuel Butler lamented that he could only bequeath empty promises and broken oaths--”a vast cargo of ropes made of sand”--to his unsuspecting offspring. Let’s not forge a worthless contract with the next generation of Ventura County residents. It’s simply the difference between life’s a beach and saving the beach’s life.