The Shifting Sands of Newport Beach to Be Piped to Sea

Sometimes it pays to complain to City Hall. Just ask residents along Newport Beach’s oceanfront.

After they railed against an Army Corps of Engineers’ plan to move 400,000 cubic yards of sand scooped from the Santa Ana River onto the shoreline, city officials asked the corps to reconsider.

The corps did and, on Monday, workers will begin to move sand out to sea rather than spread it across the beach.

Using a dredge from Oregon, contractors working for the corps will pump river water sediment through a large plastic pipe to a dumping site 1,200 feet offshore. Working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, contractors expect the job will be finished by March.

“It’s going to be one dredge -- one machine with a cutterhead that floats around and eats up sand like Ms. Pacman,” said Alan Perkovich, project manager for CJW Construction Inc. of Santa Ana.

The sediment comes from the portion of the river that stretches from Adams Avenue to the beach. The debris, which has been carried downstream from as far north as canyons in Yorba Linda, has been building for several years and poses a flooding hazard.

The dredge will anchor itself while the small boat’s two engines suction sand from the riverbed through a 12-inch plastic pipe and power the cutterhead in front, which sweeps back and forth picking up sand.

A larger vessel attached to the pipe will hover offshore near the deposit zone, slowly moving to keep the sand from piling up on the ocean’s floor. Contractors need 8,000 feet of pipe to reach from the dredge to the river’s mouth, across the beach and into the water.

Perkovich said that the dredge would be able to float within 1,000 feet of Victoria Street in Costa Mesa. “That’s as far as high tide will allow us to travel,” he said.

A small portion of sand will still be upstream, but crews will probably use trucks to get it down to the dredge.

The $4.5-million operation is part of a $1.4-billion flood control project, begun in the early 1990s, that includes improvements to Prado Dam in Riverside County.

Orange County Flood Control, which will take over maintenance of the flood control channels from the corps after this project is completed, expects to dredge the river about every 18 years.

The original plan called for trucks and scrapers to carpet the beach with sand between 32nd and 56th streets, nearly doubling its width. But environmentalists and residents worried that dumping so much sand on a single beach would create a giant shore break and dramatically change wave patterns.

Resident James Brooks said he was pleased with the change of plans. “I think the [City Council’s] coming to agreement to not allow trucks to go down the beach was a great show of support for the citizens. We’re very pleased with that,” he said.

Without replenishment projects, Newport Beach erodes about 6 inches a year, according to a study by the corps. Sand dumped offshore will eventually be deposited on city beaches through natural wave action.

Although offshore disposal will probably cost about $1 million more than the onshore plan, the corps agreed to absorb most of the cost, with the county paying the remainder.