With Nature, Not Against

Every schoolkid learns about the water cycle: Rain falls from the clouds, then trickles down stream and roars downriver until it reaches the sea, where it evaporates into the atmosphere to fall again. Along the way it brings life-sustaining moisture to people, plants and animals.

Less well known is the sand cycle. But it too accomplishes miracles when left to run its natural course--and can wreak great harm when interrupted.

A project now underway at Surfers Point demonstrates the kind of thinking and cooperation that eventually could help solve the problem of coastal erosion by working with, not against, nature.

Since Aug. 11, a parade of dump trucks has delivered 8,000 cubic yards of sand and cobblestones to this critically eroded stretch of beach behind the fairgrounds at Seaside Park. The material, much of it basketball-size rocks, has been spread into a gently sloped buffer between the nonstop churning of the Pacific and the crumbling remains of the Surfers Point bike path.

The project is the first stroke of what could become a remarkable team effort to restore the natural process of beach building that was interrupted by such man-made structures as the bike path and Matilija Dam.

Before the 190-foot Matilija Dam was built in 1947, Surfers Point and beaches to the south stretched three times as far from the shore as they do today. For the half-century since then, the swift currents that pound the point have continued to carry away sand as they always did but the sediment that should have been flowing down the Ventura River to replace it was bottled up behind the dam.

With the sand cycle interrupted, erosion has taken a dramatic toll. The bike path has lost large chunks of pavement to the waves. A stretch of the path and portions of an adjacent parking lot have been unusable for several years.

Clearly, a bold solution was needed. But amid a Jacob’s ladder of intertwining government jurisdictions, there has been disagreement about what should be done, who should do it and who should pay. Largely through the persistence of the nonprofit Surfrider Foundation, that impasse has been cracked with this demonstration project.

In this first step, the Ventura County Flood Control Department essentially stepped in to give that sand and rock a lift to where it was headed on its own--eventually. The material had washed into the Ventura River upstream of the Santa Ana Road bridge in Oak View and needed to be removed to create a deeper channel for flood control.

Rather than haul it away for construction projects, removing it from the beach-sustaining sand cycle, the county offered to spread it on the beach. The $250,000 project was made possible by a grant from the California Coastal Conservancy, with cooperation among state, county and city agencies. The new beach is 50 to 70 feet wide and four to eight feet thick, and will be monitored for 18 months. Eventually, when the agencies can raise $6 million, a fresh layer of rocks will cover all of Surfers Point. Then the damaged bike path and parking lot will be torn up and rebuilt 100 feet farther inland.

Where two weeks ago waves could crash against the four-foot bluff and undermine the bike path, breakers now disperse harmlessly across the field of cobble. The fierce storms of winter will provide far a more rigorous test, but in any case this sand and rock is now back in the cycle--positioned to replenish beaches farther down the coast.

This project is not designed to cure the erosion problem but to serve as a demonstration of interagency cooperation and the future Surfers Point restoration. Even more cooperation--and significantly more money--will be required for the next step: beginning to remove Matilija Dam.

We salute the hard work of the coalition known as the Surfers Point Working Group, which has finally turned years of good intentions into action--if only a first step. In the long run, we believe it would be wiser and more cost-effective to work with nature than to wage an eternal battle to keep sand and water from going where their respective cycles would take them.