Imperfect Armor on the Coast

In Encinitas, two big houses that neighbors Stanley Cantor and Paul Denver built on a coastal cliff were in danger of toppling into the Pacific 80 feet below, so they built a sea wall to check erosion.

Near Pismo Beach, waves gnawing at a bluff posed a hazard to the Cliffs hotel, so the owner installed a 13-foot-high boulder revetment on the beach.

And in Carmel, big winter storms three years ago obliterated much of the slope beneath Carl and Jane Panattoni’s house, so they are building a 260-foot wooden barricade to hold back the waves.

So it goes, up and down the coast of California, in a pattern as predictable as the tides. People move to the rim of the Pacific, the ocean attacks, and bulwarks are thrown up to keep buildings from sliding into the surf.

Offshore drilling and beach closures receive more attention, but it is the quiet proliferation of sea walls that is dramatically altering the character of the California coast. Bit by bit, the sandy shores that inspired John Steinbeck and the Beach Boys are yielding to fortifications.

About one-quarter of the shoreline along a 535-mile stretch from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Mexico border is now fortified, according to the California Coastal Commission. And the pace of construction is accelerating. The agency estimates that about 10 miles of sea walls were added in the last decade alone.

“Sea walls are the single worst coastal crisis in California,” said Mark Massara, coastal program manager for the Sierra Club. “We are slowly but surely walling off the entire coast.”

Sea walls are considered a scourge for far more than their questionable aesthetics. The structures can destroy beaches and block coastal access. They cost a bundle to build and maintain, but inevitably succumb to the constant pounding of breakers. And they frequently benefit only a few wealthy coastal residents at the expense of the rest of the state’s beachgoers.

Some states have banned sea walls and others have imposed significant restrictions. But in California, where the coastal population is exploding, they are more popular than ever. State law requires that a sea wall be approved if any structure is threatened. The alternative is to watch million-dollar homes break up in the surf like driftwood, and so far the state hasn’t found the courage, or callousness, to do that.

“Armoring the coast presents a major current and future threat to public resources and it’s a difficult political issue,” said Peter M. Douglas, executive director of the state Coastal Commission.

A Vital Resource Under Immense Pressure

California’s beaches are one of the state’s most important assets. From a simply economic standpoint, they generate about $12 billion in annual revenue from recreation and tourism and provide more than 800,000 jobs, according to a study released in September by the Public Research Institute at San Francisco State University.

The popularity of the coast has caused a land rush. About 80% of California’s 33 million people live within 30 miles of the ocean. With more people living close to the coast, demand has grown for more seaside recreation opportunities, including campgrounds, bike paths and golf courses.

The seaside, too, is home to a host of essential public structures, including military bases, sewage treatment plants, power plants and railways. With all this development has come a need for fortifications to defend all the septic tanks, parking lots and patio decks.

Thus, sea walls. They come in many forms, from granite boulders to gunite-coated cliffs, from rows of wooden pylons to three-story-tall concrete walls. More of this armor is built in Ventura County than anywhere else in the state. With the addition of a dozen sea walls every year, 65% of its shore is now reinforced. From Carpinteria to Point Mugu, a seemingly endless string of boulder revetments and concrete walls protects Navy bases, U.S. 101, the Pacific Coast Highway, three harbors, campgrounds and a jogging and bicycle path near the Ventura River estuary.

“There used to be a beach 30 yards out, but it just vanished,” said Ventura Councilman Brian Brennan, peering at a stony shore fronting a sea wall near the county fairgrounds. “It acts like an auger and the churning water just strips away the beach.”

Sea walls cover 15 miles, or 45%, of the Malibu shoreline, and another five miles could be fortified once all the waterfront lots are built.

At current rates, the amount of shoreline given to sea walls in scenic Monterey Bay could triple to more than 27 miles in the near future, according to the commission.

Some states have armored more of their shores than California. About half of the Florida peninsula and a like amount of the New Jersey coast is walled. Sea walls cover all of the developed coast of Georgia and about one-quarter of North Carolina’s coast, said Orrin Pilkey, a coastal geologist and director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Duke University.

Private Interest Versus a Public Resource

But, increasingly, sea walls are not only separating the land from the water, they are splitting citizens along political and class lines: property rights defenders versus beach access advocates; residents perched atop precipices above the Pacific versus the masses in inland valleys; the rich against most everyone else.

Surfers, environmentalists and many scientists and engineers argue that beaches are public resources and sea walls damage them. Boulder revetments, for example, bury vast tracts of sand. Sea walls also prevent beaches from retreating ahead of advancing waves, so they get engulfed as water claws its way inland.

And studies show that sea walls act like mirrors, reflecting wave energy and churning up the water so severely that sand is often washed away, leaving behind scoured cobble.

“If we continue, we will have an armored coastline without beaches,” said Douglas L. Inman, professor of oceanography and founding director of the Center for Coastal Studies at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. “If you like beaches, you can’t be a fan of armoring the coast.”

There are other concerns, too. By displacing beaches, sea walls contribute to the elimination of nature’s perfect shock absorber for angry seas: sand. With less of it to slow onrushing surf, coastal buildings and cliffs suffer heavier wave damage. And because sea walls lock up earth behind them, less material gets sloughed into the breakers and pulverized into new sand to replace lost beaches.

Yet for coastal property owners, the walls may be the only thing separating them from disaster.

David Oakley of Encinitas joined 12 neighbors and built a 740-foot sea wall after powerful storms battered the coastal bluff supporting his house five years ago. Far from wanting to slow down sea wall construction, he thinks it should be made easier to build them.

“Without that wall, the bluff would have collapsed and my house would have been sticking out and hanging over the bluff. Are we going to let houses just collapse and fall onto the beach?” Oakley said. “We should have the right to fix these bluffs so they don’t collapse and kill people.”

A woman was killed at nearby Moonlight Beach in January when an eroding cliff fell on her.

On the other hand, most of the coastal bluffs and beaches where sea walls are built are public property. The structures block beach access and create impediments that can turn a stroll by the sea into an obstacle course, said Richard Nichols of Sebastopol, who has walked the entire California coast over the past 18 years and serves as executive director of Coastwalk.

Some say it’s simply a case of the haves calling the shots at the expense of the have-nots.

“There’s a small bunch of highly influential, wealthy and selfish individuals who made an arrogant decision to build right next to the ocean and now they want to sacrifice beaches used by millions of people,” Pilkey said. “Our policies should be to preserve the coast for the next generation and not choose buildings over beaches.”

In Malibu, controversy has ensued over a request by multimedia mogul David L. Geffen, a co-founder of DreamWorks SKG, to build two sea walls at Carbon Beach. After engineers at the state Coastal Commission recommended against approval, an unprecedented lobbying effort was unleashed to persuade commissioners to override their staff’s recommendation and approve the project.

Calls on behalf of Geffen, a prolific fund-raiser for Democratic Party candidates, have been made to commissioners from the governor’s office and legislative leaders, said Douglas. “There has been considerable interest expressed from Sacramento in this permit, more than for any other sea wall that has ever come before us,” Douglas said.

The matter will be considered today when the commission meets in Santa Rosa for its monthly meeting. Geffen did not return phone calls to discuss the issue.

Magnifying Shoreline Erosion

Sea walls, like rabbits, are prolific multipliers. Build one and more will follow. That’s because a sea wall, particularly a long one, diverts wave energy to its flanks, magnifying erosive power at the edges. An unprotected length of adjoining shore can be gouged to a distance of 150 yards, studies show.

“The longer the wall, the greater the increase in erosion on the edges. If you are the neighbor without a sea wall, it’s a big problem,” said Spencer M. Rogers, an erosion specialist with the Center for Marine Science at North Carolina State University.

Other forces promote the spread of sea walls.

Dams in the mountains choke off sediment that rivers and streams once carried to beaches. So do rail lines, highways, culverts and roads. Since nature, with considerable help from human changes across the landscape, delivers less sand, sea walls have grown in appeal as the best defense along the beaches.

“This is not a natural shoreline anymore,” said David Skelly, owner of a San Diego County coastal engineering firm. “It took us 200 years to develop our shoreline. We cannot change that overnight. Sea walls have a bad reputation, but they are an important tool.”

And changes in the marine environment have punished the California coast without mercy. El Nino, the phenomenon of warm ocean currents that has hit the state in wintertime with heavy rains and high surf, has been a frequent visitor in the last 20 years. About two miles of new sea walls have been installed and 10 miles of the structures repaired since the destructive El Nino-driven storms of 1997-98, said Lesley Ewing, senior coastal engineer for the Coastal Commission.

But they are expensive to install. A single homeowner can spend $150,000 for a sea wall. A mile-long wall can cost $15 million. Repairs cost nearly as much as the walls or revetments themselves. And taxpayers often pay for them through government disaster aid and local public works programs, said Gary Griggs, director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz.

In the end, relentless waves undercut sea walls or outflank them and attack their vulnerable backsides. Said Inman: “It may take 10 years or 30 or 50, but eventually they all fail. They have to, and they do.”

Consequently, some states have banned new sea walls, including Oregon, North Carolina, Maine, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Texas. Other states have imposed significant restrictions and are opting for other strategies, such as hauling sand in from the desert.

Other strategies fall into two main categories: Run away or kiss it goodbye.

Twenty coastal states have adopted setbacks to put more land between buildings and surf, according to the National Sea Grant Program. Some states allow buildings to tumble into the sea; others relocate them before the ocean can claim them. The strategy is called “managed retreat” and its most visible beneficiary is the 128-year-old Cape Hatteras lighthouse, rescued from an eroding sand spit on North Carolina’s Outer Banks last year. Movers spent $10 million to push the 4,800-ton structure more than half a mile inland from the encroaching Atlantic.

In Oceanside, Ore., dozens of luxury townhouses were less fortunate. Given the choice of protecting homes or the beach, Gov. John Kitzhaber forbade the construction of a revetment during the winter of 1998. If one big sea wall were approved, he reasoned, more would surely follow. Today, many of the dwellings are condemned.

But it is a different story along most of the California coast. Dozens of permits to build sea walls come before the Coastal Commission each year and, though the agency discourages them, most win approval. The agency has little choice. The 1976 California Coastal Act requires the commission to approve sea walls if an owner can demonstrate an existing structure is imperiled by erosion. In an emergency, property owners can build them without permits.

State Looks to Alternatives

Despite all this, headway is being made against sea walls in California. The state Department of Parks and Recreation has begun relocating vital structures at 104 coastal parks when the ocean threatens. So far, palm trees, parking lots and bike paths have retreated at Gaviota, El Capitan and Refugio state beaches in Santa Barbara County.

In San Diego County, the Coastal Commission, working with the San Diego Assn. of Governments, collects fees on new coastal development to buy sand to spread at the base of crumbling coastal bluffs to help control erosion. In October, the Legislature approved the Public Beach Restoration Program to buy sand for California beaches, although Gov. Gray Davis excluded funds for it in the current budget.

Under a recently adopted Coastal Commission policy, developers must agree to deed restrictions prohibiting any future sea walls before they can get building approval from the commission. It is unclear, however, if the policy will stand up to opposition in the political arena or to a court challenge. Will commissioners, for example, hold their ground even if a building does not, and starts sliding into the Pacific? Will lawmakers in Sacramento stand idly by as TV crews broadcast a homeowner fighting to save a house?

Some officials advocate a comprehensive review of sea wall use along the coast with the aim of keeping fortifications that protect essential structures and removing the ones that do not.

“We can’t build sea walls everywhere. We’re losing beaches, it’s making access more difficult and we’re subsidizing it,” said Griggs at UC Santa Cruz. “We should look very carefully at any future plans to armor sections of the California coast. We need to look long and hard at who’s paying for these, the impacts on beaches, and what’s being protected.”

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Armoring the Coast

Stormy winters have pounded coastal real estate in recent years, prompting property owners to seek protection behind sea walls. About one-quarter of California’s central and southern coastline is now fortified with various types of sea walls. Seaside residents demand them and state law requires them if erosion threatens structures. But many states have banned sea walls because the structures are unsightly, devour beaches, increase erosion on adjoining properties and eventually succumb to pounding surf.

Sources: California Coastal Commission, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Skelly Engineering Inc.