Army Corps Taking Back the Beach

Thirty feet below, a metal spike chews across the ocean bottom.

As it moves, the sand it churns up is sent thousands of feet through a pipe to rebuild beaches in Oxnard and Port Hueneme.

The Army Corps of Engineers dredges the harbor every two years to keep the channel deep enough for ships and to replenish beach sand lost to erosion. The project, started last month, costs $4 million, paid for by the corps and the Navy.

At the head of the process is the H.R. Morris, a red vessel that controls the cutting head of the dredge and creates the suction to move the sand down the coastline. Its six powerful engines generate energy to rotate the ball-shaped head as it scrapes up sand deposited near the harbor by two years of ocean currents, said construction representative Rick Lainhart.

The agitated sand and water are vacuumed through an opening in the center of the spike-toothed cutter head and into a 26-inch-diameter pipeline, project engineer Jeffrey Cole said.

With the consistency of a milkshake, the sand-and-water slurry oozes through a pipe along the starboard side of the H.R. Morris and onto a series of pontoons. The pipes--some metal, some rubber--snake along the surface of the water before submerging at the entrance to the harbor.

The pipe reemerges at the other side of the harbor and stretches the length of Silver Strand Beach. Inside the half-buried black pipe, rocks and sand knock about in a nonstop crackling cacophony.

At the end of the pipeline, a fountain of black muck shoots into the air and settles into retention basins formed by bulldozers. The sand settles, the water drains, and a beach is reborn.

About 38 crew members operate the dredge 24 hours a day, moving a total of 1.5 million cubic yards of sand on a 15-minute journey from the ocean floor to Silver Strand and Hueneme beaches. The project already has added a Hueneme Beach shoreline that is 14 feet tall and hundreds of feet wide.

“This area basically gets starved of sediment,” said Cole, as he stood on a stretch of beach near the Hueneme Lighthouse that did not exist a month ago.

The engineers will let the Pacific Ocean do some of their work, as much of the sand near the lighthouse will be pushed southward to Point Mugu, said Arthur Shak, the Army Corps’ chief of coastal engineering.

The dredge should finish work on Silver Strand this week, after which it will move north to dig sand out from the ocean bottom around Ventura Harbor. There, the cutter will have to contend with tree stumps and tires deposited by the Ventura River, Lainhart said. The bounty of sand it sucks up there will be deposited at McGrath State Beach.

The operation disturbs very little on the water’s surface, although the engineers must be sensitive to area wildlife, Cole said.

“This doesn’t really disturb the birds very much,” he said. “They’ll come over and sit on the pipe. They don’t care.”

Humans also have become used to the biennial project, Cole said.

“I think they might be more shocked if they didn’t see a pipe out there,” he said. “It’s an inconvenience to some extent, but it’s a tolerable one when you get a beach out of it.”

Throughout the year, the dredge and its pipeline travel up and down the Pacific Coast, from Oceanside to Olympia.