Beach Pollution Blamed on Error

Less than an hour after the rain stopped Tuesday, boogie-boarders, bikini-wearers and other spring break revelers poured onto a recently rebuilt section of Redondo Beach’s shoreline, determined to make up for the hours of fun lost to the storm. Many stopped short in horror.

Cutting through the beach like bomb craters were three dark swaths--8 feet deep, 25 feet wide and growing--lined with cigarette butts, plastic bags and greenish muck from overflowing storm drains. Orange traffic pylons and yellow police tape encircled the mini-riverbeds, which stretched from the Esplanade to the crashing waves, to keep anyone from falling in.

It seems that the engineers who spent $3.5 million to extend a badly eroded section of Redondo’s shore just south of the city pier figured it would not rain in Southern California in April. In what engineers now admit was a shortsighted plan, they failed to extend pipes from the storm drains. As a result, rainwater gushed out onto the newly spread beach, creating the gullies and pushing more than 1,500 cubic yards of sand out to sea.

But the good news, engineers said, is that most of the other 200,000 cubic yards stayed in place. So they consider the innovative project a success.

Night and day last month, a massive dredge pumped black sand from the ocean floor onto the beach. To everyone’s delight, all the sand, which previously had been dredged from Marina del Rey and delivered off Redondo’s shore, stayed in place at first.

Then the surprise storm swept through the area Monday and engineers realized it might have been wise to extend the storm drains when they rebuilt the beach instead of waiting until the fall as planned.

“I don’t know how professionals could forget something so important,” said Donna Kamiya, of Palos Verdes, who frequently walks along the beach.

Dean Smith, executive assistant for the county Department of Beaches and Harbors, acknowledged that planners gambled on the timing. “We thought we would be out of the storm season. We thought that sand would stay there for at least a year,” he said.

They thought wrong. Now, county and city officials must find a method and the money to scoop more sand back onto the beach, said Redondo Beach City Engineer Steve Huang.

City officials said they intend to stick to their original plan of extending the pipes in September.

Huang said the city still needs permits from a number of state and county agencies.

Redondo Beach City Councilman Gerard Bisignano, who spearheaded the campaign to get county and federal dollars to pay for the dredge named Morris and the all-night work crews who spread the sand on the beach, said he was not bothered by the damage caused by the recent storm.

“The erosion that prompted us to work on replenishing the beach took place over the course of decades,” he said. “There’s always going to be high tides and strong rains that will take our sand away.”