Surfers Hoping Artificial Break Will Restore a Real Ride

With wave-riders around the world watching, the Surfrider Foundation on Wednesday began building the first artificial surf break in North America.

The El Segundo project is meant to resurrect waves that were lost in 1984 when Chevron built a large jetty that destroyed popular breaks north of El Porto.

State coastal authorities subsequently ruled that surf is a natural resource, and Chevron signed a mitigation agreement to pay $300,000 for the construction of what will now be known as Pratte’s Reef.

After years of bureaucratic wrangling, a barge arrived from Terminal Island on Wednesday morning and began lowering 14-ton bags of sand into the surf zone. About 120 of the bags will be used to form the break. The project is scheduled to be completed next week, and surfers should see the first waves this fall, when more northerly swells roll in.

“This is an experiment here,” said Christopher Evans, executive director of the San Clemente-based Surfrider Foundation. “Everyone’s holding their breath.”

To the uninitiated, all waves may look the same. But to surfers, there is a basic question that can be answered only in months to come: Will this thing have any juice?

Surfrider officials say they have no way of knowing whether Pratte’s Reef will offer weak crumbling waves or nice hollow peaks, making a surfing session in the notoriously polluted waters off Dockweiler Beach worth the risk.

Reef-building is a nascent science, with mixed results at the only two artificial spots now in existence, both in Australia.

One reef, made of boulders, never quite picked up any swells; the other seems to be successful and is drawing crowds, Surfrider officials say.

Reefs don’t generate waves. But by raising the ocean bottom in the right contour, they can lift up whatever swell is rolling onto the coast, causing it to break, preferably in a ridable form.

The El Segundo reef will be V-shaped, about nine feet below the surface, with 120-foot legs stretching toward the shore.

Its proponents are hoping that a new engineering approach--1,500 tons of sand in bags woven of synthetic fibers--will finally show whether man can indeed reconstruct such a shifting natural phenomenon as a surf break.

The Surfrider Foundation plans to monitor the impact of the reef and can remove it if it damages marine habitats or puts a damper on other surfing spots.

“There’s a lot of people against these things, and there’s a lot of people who just want to plop them down all over the place,” said Evans.

“Everyone should just wait and see how this works.”

The debate has created a rift within the Surfrider Foundation, the leading voice for an estimated 2 million active surfers nationwide.

Some question whether the environmental group should be tampering with nature and not solely focusing its efforts on saving surf spots that already exist.

Others see the artificial reefs as environmental restoration on a coastline where classic breaks--like “Killer Dana” in Dana Point--were destroyed by man-made intrusions.

“I don’t think anyone is going to dispute the idea that trying to create a wave where there was no wave before is a good idea,” said Larry Barnard, 37, who has been surfing the area for 17 years. “You just got to think of where it [the artificial reef] goes.”

Barnard and other locals came to the spot Wednesday to complain to Surfrider’s representatives, saying there were other spots nearby that would produce better waves.

The idea of putting an artificial reef off El Segundo arose almost two decades ago after Chevron built a rock jetty to protect the pipeline connecting its refinery to oil tankers offshore.

Surfers and conservationists said the jetty ruined some decent breaks just north of Manhattan Beach, and they launched a legal battle and negotiations that lasted almost a decade.

Finally, the California Coastal Commission decided in 1994 that a natural resource--waves--had been destroyed and Chevron was ordered to pay $300,000 to fix it.

A year later the money was released.

“The real victory,” said Evans, “is that, for the first time ever in any country, there was an official acknowledgment that a wave has value.”

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Making New Waves

The Surfrider Foundation has begun construction of a 1,500-ton artificial surf reef off El Segundo. The project is the result of a successful lawsuit against Chevron, which had built a rock jetty that destroyed the waves at some local surf spots.

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Sources: Surfrider Foundation; David Skelly Engineering